Everything is a cost/benefit tradeoff. We devote more resources to securing your bank account against fraud because we (as a society) think that it’s worth spen

Everything is a cost/benefit tradeoff. We devote more resources to securing your bank account against fraud because we (as a society) think that it’s worth spending the money — on the theory that recovering your money after it’s stolen is very hard and because we think it’s acceptable to cause legitimate transactions to undergo some inconvenience. We devote fewer resources to verifying every social sciences experiment because society doesn’t want to spend the money to reduce a presumably already-low fraud rate and because the worst case outcome is usually articles like this one. And yet despite these decisions, white collar financial fraud occurs all the time and plenty of lawyers stretch their profession to (or beyond) the ethical breaking point — with devastating impacts on real people.