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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.
In the sense of people voluntarily parting with their money or goods in the expectation of being paid back at a later date, no, I think this is a common misconception. You can't defraud someone without an expectation of trust, which means that fraud only happens in societies in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which means that bad actors in low-trust societies are forced to resort to cruder methods (theft, armed robbery etc.) to extract money from their victims.
My view was that con artists prey on greed and stupidity, and in a low-trust society there's plenty of people who are greedy and willing to bend the rules, so a shady proposition isn't an immediate turn-off so long as you set it up right: let's you and me profit off this dumb government initiative to give free money to people with curly hair; here's a secret deal that only a few insiders know which will make them hugely rich and you can get in on the ground floor; shoplifting isn't theft, insurance covers it, the big stores expect it and price it in, and besides we're striking back against the big fatcats of capitalism. It's a lot easier to sell "I got this hot tip from my inside contact in the government department" when everyone knows bribery and corruption are what makes the world go round and it's expected that you have to grease palms and give presents to the right people to get anything done.
Then the sucker ends up losing the shirt on his back, because he might have been venal enough to be willing to do something dishonest but he wasn't smart enough to work out some things are too good to be true.
By definition, shoplifting isn't fraud, and hence isn't relevant to this debate.
Part of the entire mindset, though; doing this thing isn't really a crime, it's... [fill in the blanks] and only the sheeple keep the dumb rules.
You seem hellbent on attacking an argument I've never made and a worldview I've never endorsed.
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