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When a statistic isn't just a statistic
Like many, I was saddened by the news of the Texas flooding and the girls who were in the path of the engorged river. Natural disasters happen, but they don't always victimize school aged girls at a summer retreat. Yet I mentally filed the disaster in the way I do most disasters: the optimal quantity of flooding deaths is not zero, the odds of something bad happening to somebody somewhere is quite high, children need to do things in the outdoors even if there is some risk. And this framing, while dispassionate, isn't incorrect.
Yesterday, one of the bodies was discovered and identified. She wasn't some no-name in a far-flung state. Her family lives three streets over from mine. Her brother and my oldest daughter were in the same class last year. These are neighbors, and in our close-knit community, something akin to extended family. Suddenly, this feels personal.
A number of years ago, I was teaching my oldest to ride a bike. She was a natural, balancing and peddling within minutes of first riding. Within an hour she was shifting gears, accelerating and decelerating, making turns with adroitness. After several hours of practice in a parking lot I decided she was ready for the hilly streets near our house. Unfortunately, there was one thing I had forgotten to teach her in the flat safety of the parking lot: how to brake. She went down the hill outside our house, increasing in speed and with no ability to stop herself. Finally, she hit the curb and somersaulted into the grass of a yard. Despite the relatively soft landing she was scraped and bleeding over most of her body.
So many things could have gone wrong. She could have hit a car. She could have landed in the street and been flayed by the asphalt.
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
"Lying For Money" is a good book, but this turn of phrase is bad. The optimal quantity of [bad thing] is 0; the question is what trade-offs are optimal, given the available options for reducing bad things.
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
The ideal or perfect amount of [bad thing] is zero. But we don't live in a perfect world, and it's pointless wasting our time on pie-in-the-sky fantasies of what it would be like if we did. As long as there is division of labour in a scarcity economy, people will need to trust each other to get anything done, and where there is trust there are opportunities for fraud.
Not having read the book, explain this to me? A world with no fraud would have to be a high-trust society, would it not? People are honest, keep their word, and don't exploit loopholes or take unfair advantage of the vulnerable and uninformed. Aren't low-trust societies the ones riddled with fraud and corruption? I'm taking from how you put this that a world without fraud would be a low-trust society, or one so heavily monitored by Big Brother that other freedoms would all be lost.
At a guess: A high-trust world would be singularly susceptible to fraud, since people needn't be on their guard at all. Turning a high-trust world into a zero-fraud world requires extremely invasive surveillance. So zero-fraud implies extreme totalitarianism.
Yes, but then we have to explain how a high-trust world has that many fraudsters. Maybe they don't, maybe it just takes one. But in our conditions, you get a high-trust society by cracking down on fraud, teaching kids that fraud and stealing is bad and that honesty is the best policy (yes, all the old saws), punishing fraudsters when you catch them, instructing people to be vigilant about scams, and the likes.
You don't get a high-trust society by shrugging off "well some people are gonna steal, that's just how it goes". Even less with an attitude that "we need some people to be scammers, else we don't get vigorous economic development!" That's simply asking for systemic African nation levels of corruption, bribery, and stealing from the public purse when you're in power. After all, if I, General Warlord Tsombé, don't rob the treasury blind, then my people will not be reduced to abject enough levels of poverty to trigger Western aid, and that means in turns the NGOs and USAID-type bodies can't employ all the college-degree activists to deliver said aid!
In the book, Dan Davies cites numerous examples in which fraud became common in a particular community (whether that's a religious affinity group or a website for trading drugs), the community dutifully responded by implementing anti-fraud protections, but because these protections imposed some kind of cost (typically monetary, but potentially also an opportunity cost in terms of time and effort), some of the people in the community elected not to use the anti-fraud protections and instead take their chances without - and because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time. There comes at a point at which the cost of protecting oneself against being defrauded exceeds the expected return.
Consider how much documentation you have to provide when applying for a mortgage. Now imagine if you had to go through that process every time you were buying or selling something through a webshop (e.g. eBay). With such a policy in place, it would be nearly impossible to defraud someone (or be defrauded) via this webshop: but because the process is so onerous, no one would use this website and it would go out of business, departing for competitors with less rigorous protections against fraud - which, inevitably, unavoidably means that some of the people who use the competitors' websites will get ripped off.
That's the point I'm trying to make. If you tolerate fraud, or even promulgate "well the chance of fraud is better than a world with no fraud" (which is different from "there will always be a risk of fraud"), then what is tolerated becomes commonplace. Once the water changes, the fish change too. Once the bedrock assumptions of "be honest not criminal" are weakened by lack of social reinforcement and no longer passed down, you'll get more and more people willing to be scammers, which in turns mean fewer people opting to put their trust in others, and the costs of protecting yourself against fraud rise because now you have to either spend time and effort on not being scammed, or risk being scammed and losing very badly what you can't afford to lose.
"There's always going to be fraud out there, just be careful and be aware" is not the same as "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise it's the Panopticon and economic stagnation". That second message is an encouragement to be fraudulent - after all, everyone else would do it too if they could, and you are just filling your role in the ecosystem!
I think you really aren't understanding the argument I'm making. I'm not saying "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise there would be economic stagnation"; I'm saying "a certain amount of fraud is unavoidable, and the price we pay for a functioning economy". Claiming that the latter is equivalent to the former, or that the latter is an encouragement to defraud people, seems to me tantamount to saying "a small number of car accidents every year is an unavoidable byproduct of widespread car ownership" or "carbon emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of an electrified society". No one would say that by acknowledging that you can't create electricity without producing carbon dioxide, you are therefore encouraging the production of additional carbon dioxide - likewise with the argument I'm making.
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