[IIAOPSW]

Something I've learned is that in a certain social strata when people do audaciously stupid, its rarely because they lack the common sense to have covered their tracks. Its because they've learned they don't have to. No one is working hard to try and catch them, and even if by some miracle someone does (and people believe them), no government or regulatory body is really interested in punishing them anyway.

This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.

[nearbuy]

In my experience, people of every social strata sometimes do audaciously stupid things, and it's not because they get special treatment. It's often the people who have gotten in trouble the most that do audaciously stupid things the most frequently, despite experiencing past punishment.

Your observation matches what we would see if those people you speak of were just stupid for no reason and committed crimes that aren't caught as often. If a crime is only caught 10% of the time, they probably won't get caught the first few times. You can interpret that as them learning they can get away with it, but the person who just does stupid stuff for no reason will do the same thing, it isn't evidence one way or the other.

And they'd still be stupid the first time they committed the crime, before they've learned they can get away with it. And if they get convicted eventually, it was still stupid in the end. And if they don't get caught, we usually don't know about it, which makes it hard to argue that it's actually worth it for them to do these seemingly stupid crimes; we know of their failures but not their successes.

[IIAOPSW]

Well rather than our respective anecdotes, I cite page 252-253 of the Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption in New York (1972).

>It is clear that the risks of severe punishment for corrupt behavior are slight. A dishonest policeman knows that, even if he is caught and convicted, he will probably receive a court reprimand or, at most, a fairly short jail sentence. Considering the vast sums to be made in some plainclothes squads or in narcotics enforcement, the gains from corruption seem far to outweigh the risks. Both William Phillips and Edward Droge said that they assessed the risk of meaningful punishment and determined that they had little to fear.

I've read enough reports of this nature and experienced enough regulators to be really convinced that where you see apparent stupidity you are also likely to see a table like the one on page 250 showing virtually no prosecutions prior to the Commission.

Neither Drodge nor Phillips were wrong in their calculation. I hate to say, your estimate of a 10% chance of getting caught was way too optimistic. Going by the data, it was much much lower than that.

(My axe to grind is not with the police in particular, reports on police corruption just happen to be the most available and easily understandable).

[ozim]

Conversely I didn’t understand incentives for junkies to steal bikes to sell those only for 10 or 20 bucks.

My incentive structure is nowhere near to theirs. It took a lot of mental effort and empathy for me to grasp what kind of environment they navigate in life to steal my bike I bought for $200.

So I also lack understanding of being a millionaire or a billionaire but I definitely lack empathy for those people.