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It's not just selfishness, I think we've run into something fundamentally unintuitive for people's lower brain. For much of human history, shutting out cheats &
by ip26 6y ago
It's not just selfishness, I think we've run into something fundamentally unintuitive for people's lower brain. For much of human history, shutting out cheats & freeloaders was an important part of making good use of a resource. These days, we have hit a point where the bureaucratic overhead of shutting them out can become more expensive than just letting them in. That's not intuitive for people.
- ironmagma 6y agoThe problem with this take is that it’s more useful than just to preserve a resource. By allowing people to get away with fraud you are encouraging people to do it again, including ways that transcend whatever system that fraud was originally within. I don’t actually know that chasing pranksters has ever been an efficient use of time, but someone should chase them if we expect the boundaries of normal operation to be known as a society.
- ip26 6y agoRight, the $36B lost to unemployment fraud (10% of payments) in the past 12 months definitely illustrates that some amount of guardrails are still appropriate. There is an optimum level somewhere in between where the sum total of losses & overhead together are minimized.
- ryandrake 6y agoThat $36B is a drop in the bucket on the scale of a country. It's 25% of Jeff Bezos's net worth. How many $B spent on enforcement is it worth to reduce that to, say, $30B?
- ip26 6y agoIf you read the news about it, the scams were depressingly basic & the screening failures were rudimentary. It will not cost billions of dollars to rein that number in dramatically.