Comment by filleokus
3 years ago
Great explanation. But I'm not so sure about "The optimal amount of fraud in society is 0".
Especially if we broaden fraud to include other crimes. There are costs to prevent other badness in society as well. Firstly it's the cost in taxes/allocating resources to its prevention: Do we really want to allocate a really large chunk of our shared human capital to police marginal criminal activity? How much more polices, judges, attorneys, lock makers, etc would we need to stop the last bike theft?
Secondly and arguably more importantly is the cost of freedom. A lot of the digital surveillance initiatives that are discussed and dismissed here on HN are enforced in the name of zero tolerance against (really bad) badness in society.
I think its hard, or impossible, to create a somewhat large society with zero crime rate. At least if we still want even just a sliver of the freedoms we are accustomed to in liberal democracies.
I think the point is that in a theoretical society in whcih there are no bad actors, and there is no cost to prevent fraud, the optimal amount of fraud is zero. That is, there isn't a reason you would want to encourage fraud, because a little bit of fraud is good. But when you also consider the cost of reducing fraud the optimal state for the system as a whole will have a non-zero amount of fraud. And of course, bad actors do exist, so in a real system you want to accept some amount of fraud.
The difference is significant, because if you discover a way to significantly reduce fraud for a low cost (including cost of freedoms and similar), it will be worth implementating. And there isn't some point where you say "we are already down to x% fraud, we don't want to go any lower than that, even if it doesn't cost us anything".
If you want something to be legal, make it legal.
Don't make it illegal-but-not-enforced. Because then, whoever is in power can selectively enforce the law against any group they choose.
Hmm. I think my mental model is more that it should be "randomly" enforced. The probability of getting caught is higher than some certain threshold, but that it's not necessarily bad if that threshold is lower than 100%.
I can't think of any resonable society that have taken actions to show that they want the probability to be 100%. I would even argue that the most harsh dictatorships probably have the highest enforcement, but that laws were/are very selectively enforced in the favor of e.g regime officials.
Okay, I see your point, I think we were talking about different things.
There will always be people in society that think it is their job to drive us to zero risk, even if they have nothing to offer other than a downvote.