A Theory of Grift
thediff.co
thediff.co
Thus if you are a rich person trying to donate a lot of money to a truly good cause the charity will sometimes be forced to refuse your money despite needing it - just to keep the IRS away. To get around this they will match, thus ensuring that plenty of little donors to keep the IRS away from the charity while allowing them to make the large donation they were planning on making. These are always structured with the hope to give the full amount, so if you are planning on a small donation it is to your advantage to donate during a match since otherwise your charity might not get as much from the rich person.
Note that none of the above applies to politics where there are laws in place limiting total donations per person that a match cannot get around.
(My opinion is that it's nearly all bullshit - A ton of what the foundation does is provide incentives for both government and NGO aid-services to stay locked into Microsoft products, but I don't think it's at the level of charity fraud)
Wait, is that documented? The foundation will only give you money if you use Microsoft products? Or they won't officially do that, but potential grant receivers have had foundation representatives strongly hint it would be better for everyone if they kept using Microsoft products?
Because that's a pretty big claim to make otherwise.
I would be very surprised if this is true for most legit charities. I am pretty involved with a couple of 501c3s and I do not think any of them would turn away a valid donation from a reputable individual out of fear of the IRS.
This seems completely wrong to me. If you look at who is the top 0.1% it's either inherited wealth, a few professionals (lawyers, certain medical specialties, etc.) who own their own practices, or people who've managed large groups of people (i.e. business executives). The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always personable too.
I am not trying to nitpick, and this is totally offtopic from the rest of the thread, but suggesting that huge group of people is more "successful" due to being evil, narcissistic, deceiving, [insert any other trait] seems to be a major bias in itself. Especially if the root cause is having strong emotions due to that group's role in modern society.
OP even jumps from averages and statistics down to making personalised conclusions ("who wants to have a beer with their CEO?"), which is textbook confirmation bias[0].
Unfortunately, I see this kind of argument often here on hacker news.
That doesn't sound true to me at all, though. How are you defining these terms that there's no overlap between the first set and the second?
> And are we saying that definitive driver of execs success is due to having all these traits?
Mmm no, that's not what I'm asserting. I can't speak for the other poster.
Politics, law, finance, the arts, advertising, religion, and the media all rely on persuasion. And because narcissists and sociopaths are so much more credible and charming than introverts and tech nerds, these professions are full of people who make a living selling stories - about themselves, others, and related brands and products.
This is why we have such problems with the constraints of physical or social reality. These people believe their stories. They experience any suggestion they're objectively wrong as an unreasonable threat to their status and self-image.
They feel the same way about any suggestion that other people's stories matter. To them, they don't. If they did matter they'd show some hesitation and nuance, and the persuasion magic would evaporate.
A big part of this comes down to practice. Anyone who practices chitchat (or "persuasion") all day gets pretty good at it, at least in a narrow niche. Those "tech nerds" who spend a lot of time going to parties can also get good at it; however, many of the introverted tech nerds would rather be writing code or reading a book or whatever, and end up not practicing these skills starting from a young age, and by the time they reach adulthood are far behind. (In just the same way that someone who never spends time exercising ends up far behind in playing sports, or someone who never spends time solving technical problems ends up far behind in technical skill/expertise, etc.)
Beyond that, if the main goal incentivized is just to "make the sale", the methods used aren't going to necessarily ethical. There's a reason that pick-up artists, used car salesmen, carnival barkers, and social-climber middle managers use deception and burn people in the process of getting ahead: it works. If you have a system that selects for "what works" and doesn't negatively select away "causes collateral damage", then you end up (a) making ethical people play with a huge handicap, and (b) chasing them out of the field.
In a thread about people being rich or not, yes, of course he meant that. There isn't any alternative way to define this.
For the banks and credit unions where customer service is a key advantage, operations people with good people skills are super important. But because of industry culture, these people are pretty much sh1t upon. It shows in their pay, and in the rapidity with which they are laid off.
I bet there's tons of places where this happens.
All of my fifty closest underlings laugh at my jokes. What more social proof do I need?
> Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people [...]
The top 5% does not predominately consist of "very rich people". The 95th percentile is "upper middle class", people like relatively ordinary white-collar professionals and successful small-business owners including tradespeople who run their own shops, etc. We're talking about "own a nice house, take vacations, and can afford to retire comfortably" money, not "fleet of servants" money.
5%: $336k
1%: $819k
0.1%: $3.3m
The income curve is a hockey stick that goes vertical at the far right side and it keeps getting steeper over time. https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
I stumbled over that sentence. I genuinely don’t understand what this means in context. Can someone explain the metaphor and/or the point that’s being made here?
We keep hearing that. (Because it sounds good).
It should be true because it's not all that hard to keep wealth increasing at least modestly - and let time do the work. But take heart! "The Missing Billionaires" argues that in practice inherited wealth is reliably lost over shockingly few generations.
Funny you should mention Block Trading... this Matt Levine just dropped...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-16/morgan...
Isn't this 'Vote with your wallet'? I know I vote with my wallet. Everything I buy is a vote for how I want the world to be, and what products I want to see flourish and prosper. I also evangelize these products to others so they get on board too, because I alone will not make much of a dent, unless I recruit others to purchase it too.
* No amount of personal spending decisions can advance systemic changes like better public transport or more careful military funding. These require governmental action.
* With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.
* Voting with our wallet requires immunity against professional PR campaigns, time (for researching on what to buy), money (to afford options which are better according to personal views but more expensive), friends who appreciate instead of belittle our purchasing decisions, ...
In the end, I believe the story "vote with your wallet" internalizes a form of victim blaming: The consumers are blamed for their irresponsible purchasing decisions, but the responsibility really is with the companies and governments.
Of course, not spending consciously is also not a solution. But we obtain greater leverage by using our influence on society. Only few of us are editor-in-chiefs of important newspapers or important politicians, but most of us can engage in visually powerful protests which are also able to generate political wind.
One weird thing markets do is make unusual alternatives far more expensive than the difference in cost of manufacture between them and more-common options. The market “chooses” the $80 option because the one that costs $5 more to make but is way better retails for $200.
You also see whole markets (effectively) collude to make cheap upgrades expensive to buy. There are several very-cheap upgrades that make a refrigerator much nicer, but are only available on expensive refrigerators. Think, things like making the drawers open and close much more smoothly. There is no low-end-except-for-$30-in-upgrades option. The car market does some similar things.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/industrial-organiza...
What is necessary is to stay in regular communication with whoever you hired. If they never hear from you, they can't represent you, which questions why bother to hire an employee to represent you in the first place if you are not going to use their services?
In the same vein, I can't stop at voting with my wallet; as you say, I'm choosing between the options given to me and their artificial costs. If I care about a particular outcome, I have to give extra effort beyond my purchasing decisions. There's no amount of inconvenient train rides I can take in my city that will convince it build new train lines; I have to go around the city and tell people that trains and density are more effective for the outcomes we want.
While there are some dictatorships out there, in the democratic world the people voting with their wallets and the people in charge of government are the exact same people. Which means that any governmental change comes by what is ultimately the same mechanism.
> we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered.
Only in the short-term, though. The wallet can also communicate what one wants in the future, and that is only limited by what is fundamentally possible. Of course, often people don't actually want anything better, even if they say they do. Talk is cheap. The neat thing about the wallet is that it proves what people actually want.
They do, indeed. While not all mechanisms are the same, the particular mechanism we are talking about is ultimately the same.
Personally I gave up trying to improve politics where I lived, and instead moved to a country with better polices. This feels kind of like cheating, or shirking my responsibilities, but it was vastly more effective at getting me the life I want.
You choosing to buy from Apple instead of Samsung will sure have an impact on the world, but probably not how you think it will, not what will be marketed, and more in the line of which lobby Apple chooses to pay with your money down the line.
If anything has changed much recently, it's that grifters have taken control of the entire system of government and economic activity - they're no longer just a pack of con artists preying on riverboat travellers, but have infiltrated all the branches of government and business and academia in the USA.
Today's most successful grifters are not isolated criminals like SBF, but rather the leading politicians and media talking heads and government bureaucrats and corporate executives who sit at the top of the American Empire - it's a nice example of the systemic institutional corruption seen at the ends of previous Empires, from the Roman to the Byzantine to the French, British and Soviet collapses, and appears to be heading towards the same conclusion.
"grifters have taken control of the entire system of government and economic activity.. Today's most successful grifters are not isolated criminals like SBF, but rather the leading politicians and media talking heads and government bureaucrats and corporate executives who sit at the top of the American Empire"
Yawn. Cynicism masquerading as insight; all claims and no evidence. An adequate rebuttal to something with so little of a foundation might be "nuh uh"
>it's a nice example of the systemic institutional corruption seen at the ends of previous Empires, from the Roman to the Byzantine to the French
oh my gawd the Roman Empire took 1000 years to fall from the death of Caesar and had been around for 500 years when he was assassinated. If you want to demonstrate complete historical ignorance, definitely reach for the "Fall of the Roman Empire" as part of your fear campaign when describing the world today. There is very little that the US has in common to the singular Classical civilization that your high school history class covered.
The level of grift seen in American society today is not normal.
It's worse than what I've seen in other Western countries by a lot.
Do I have hard data to support this? No. But anecdotally, everyone - everyone - I know who visits America has noticed this.
"The people over there are like wolves". "They're shameless". "They're all so focused on money". "That whole culture is just scams on scams on scams". "Christ, they're all so fake!" - All actual quotes, with emphatic expletives removed.
I know it's not a common topic of conversation for Americans, but the world hates us now. We're the number one threat to peace and stability since 2003, and only getting worse. Yes, I am ashamed of us. We had so much potential.
Presidents are grifters now. The military industrial complex is a grift. College is a grift. Healthcare is a grift - to an absurd and horrifying level. Banking is a grift that hurts the poorest the most, far worse than in other countries. The news is a grift. The legal system is stuffed to the brim with grift right up to the Supreme Court and right down to the police on the street.
It's been normalized to an extreme degree, at every level of American society. "I'm a hustler". "Don't hate the player". "Looking out for number one", etc. These are not normal phrases in other countries! This is seen as the sign of a very sick culture, one where to survive you need to fuck over other people; one where fucking people over to "get your bag" is seen as a necessity rather than as an abhorrence.
Again - this isn't normal in other countries. We've always had caveat emptor, but the idea that it's fine and normal to get 8 spam phone calls a day would be absurd in any other wealthy country.
This is, imo, fallout from the relentless attacks on anything that could be construed as socialist or taking care of people - itself a massive grift.
The war on terror was a grift - one that has resulted in trillions of wasted dollars - and it resulted in absolutely no consequences for anyone except the whistleblowers who exposed atrocities, war crimes, and global surveillance.
Here there is a huge amount of public pressure to regulate behavior of banking sector targeting things like deceptive practices, predatory lending etc. See for example the 2017 Royal Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_Miscondu...). The conservative government fought tooth and nail against and were heavily pressured into it due to massive public support for it.
I am unsure what the US equivalent of a Royal Commission is (it is essentially a Public Enquiry with the power to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath and investigative powers to gather evidence etc.) I don't think the same kind of attitude exists for a targeted investigation into the US banking sector, at least the messaging we get over here is US is very against stricter regulations.
Not stupid, just busy and desperate. And, sure, perhaps less intelligent than the people who are paid vast amounts of money to come up with marketing that's optimized to deceive them, while remaining just "technically honest" enough to avoid catching out too many members of the PMC who might kick up a fuss.
Do US banks still process each day's transactions in largest-first order, so that they get to charge as many insufficient funds fees as possible? (While mouthing the excuse that it's for the customer's benefit, so that their more important transactions like rent are more likely to clear, and in any case it was disclosed in the small print so there's no grounds to complain). That's the kind of thing that's illegal in any other industrialised country, and IMO reasonable to call a grift.
And we also suffer from lots of grift, which became normalized in the 90s. I think it comes from certain hardcore libertarian interpretation (which became popular with the rise of neoliberalism), according to which, making money at someone's expense is perfectly acceptable.
So for example, if someone sells some BS to a 70 year old grandma with shady practices, it is considered her problem, and government can't (and shouldn't) do anything about it. At best, it can "educate".
From what I hear, other Eastern-European countries suffer from this malaise as well.
Two places this is evident:
1) It is very, very common for small business owners to be "under-pricing". They price what seems fair & just for what they're doing, which has a tendency to be (sometimes far) under the greed-is-good price that the market could bear. They're often resistant to raising prices on ethical grounds.
2) Children quite consistently have notions about fair pricing that are directly in-line with #1, starting just about as soon as they learn about commerce and tending to persist until someone "corrects" them.
This "natural" feature of capitalism that "can't" be got rid of because it's in our "nature" generally has to be taught.
Also, from what I remember of microeconomics, the free market model assumes a number of things that are not always true in reality, at least not all at the same time: robust competition among suppliers, perfect knowledge among consumers, rational decision-making behavior. Like any model, the more reality differs from the assumptions, the worse the model is at prediction, but the basic laws of supply and demand, where the price of a good is where the supply and demand curves meet, still hold.
If anything this is due to social media amplifying and glamorizing people that loudly demonstrate how fit, rich, happy or whatever they are so they can sell their method of getting fit, rich, happy, etc.
The USA has always been an individualistic society compared to most, the entire point of capitalism is to leverage individuals greed. That spurs them to create more value for society than leveraging their sense of duty.
The problem we have right now is that the governmental agencies that are supposed to curb bad actors are not performing well. The FCC should have ended robo spam calls years ago.
As a non-American, I can't believe someone is so self-loathing to think this...yeah sure, America is the biggest threat to peace and stability, not Russia, not Iran, not Hamas...it's definitely America.
"I know we've killed millions with torture, cruel sanctions, and pollution - but we had to! Because if we hadn't, where would we all be?!"
A stable middle east, climate change accords, fewer refugees and less pollution. 8 trillion extra dollars to spend on becoming 100% renewable while literally ending homelessness and world hunger. The humanity!
... It's like that scene where Lionel Hutz imagines a world without lawyers. Funny, but sad.
Okay maybe calm down with the Saint/Devil complex. (I’m not an American.) The way a European might have perceived America in the 90’s would have been through Hollywood. And the same person in 2005– would have perceived America through fast and ubiquitous Internet. (Thanks American State Research?)
The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered, sensationalized reality. So even if America itself hadn’t changed in that time (but I guess it did) the outsider perception of it would still have changed.
No. If you don't want people pointing out devilish deeds, don't do the deeds.
Global opinion on this isn't due to a "complex", but a very natural reaction to the events of the last couple decades. I know it's hard to accept. Most Americans I mention this fact to literally can't accept it as true. They get quite upset if they ask for evidence, and then receive exactly that. There's loads of evidence. All the polls broadly agree, and people state the reasons why - in a nutshell, psychotic foreign policy, an easily led populace, and greed.
> The way a European might have perceived America in the 90’s would have been through Hollywood
Opinion didn't change because 'Friends' ran its course. It changed because in 2003 America's leaders chose to lie to America and the world, condemning millions to death for the sake of cheaper resources (yet again).
> The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered, sensationalized reality.
This is how you disregard the opinion of 8 billion people? Memes?
Hollywood and the Internet have roles in all this, sure, but don't get it twisted. It was the war crimes. The murders, bombings and assassinations. The systematic torture of people who never had a trial. The displacement of tens of millions, the support of genocidal regimes, the murderous sanctions.
Flippantly dismissing all this is the American Way. Sure, it feels good to be blissfully ignorant of how detested we've become, and how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world. How unfathomably low the floor has become. But from the outside, it's clearly just sticking your head in the sand. The gleeful and flagrant disregard of the rest of the world's opinion is really old at this point.
> So even if America itself hadn’t changed in that time (but I guess it did)
America and the world has changed, and so have perceptions. But the perception that America is an existential threat to peace and stability hasn't. It rocketed in Iraq, and has continued ever since.
It probably dipped a bit when the US helped defend Ukraine, but the Gaza thing has quite reversed that.
I think it's important that we talk about these very real problems. But it's so much easier to con people, than show them they've been conned.
What I was trying to point out is that it’s not about you. No reasonable person is either going to (1) thank you personally for landing on the Moon or (2) blame you for killing half a million Iraqis.
Most bad things the US does is done by the government. And the US is not terribly democratic anyway.
So you can chill out.
> This is how you disregard the opinion of 8 billion people? Memes? […] Flippantly dismissing all this is the American Way.
I keep becoming an Honorary American.
> Sure, it feels good to be blissfully ignorant of how detested we've become, and how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world.
“Fallen”.
It seems you interpreted my whole comment as an excuse for what America does. When what I said was:
- Europeans seemed to love the US when their interpretation of “the US” was by way of the US (Hollywood)
- Europeans seemed to start disliking the US when they saw what America is like by way of the Internet
I can’t fathom how that is a compliment.
Your pre-2003 amnesia is interesting but oh well; it seems that it can go in either direction.
This really doesn't need to be expressed in plural. We have one notable example of someone who entered the race as a grift and was arguably surprised to have won. We've had plenty of candidates in it for the grift before, but only one such victor. Maybe it was only a matter of time, though.
My intent seems straightforward to me, whether you agree with it or not. You do know that there has only been one black president? Moreover.
> > the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices;
Maybe I’m misremembering here, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen comments adjacent to this by the same author (Reed) which commented on how Obama was claiming that he was from the grassroots. Then either Reed himself or other people from the local grassroots would ask, who is this? Hence: foundation-hatched black communitarian voice; an astroturf.
Perhaps that wasn’t what Obama did. (Again: I might be misremembering and this quote is from 1996 so there are a lot of [dead] links around.) Assertive people just showing up and claiming to be the voice of X without having done any work is certainly a kind of grift.
But it’s not like any of this would make a difference to you anyway. Because when you indirectly make claims like “Trump is the first grifter president” then what a “grift” is to one person apparently is just “savvy and politically astute” to the people you find respectable. (I’m alluding here to the viewpoint that politician is the most dishonorable kind of profession that wears a suite.)
> but it seems ahistorical
Again, a quote from 1996. It was printed and all that so apparently the historicity seems fine enough (that it happened).
Trump was just more open about it.
"So the heart of a grift is that you get something that, in a technical sense, is what you paid for, but that is also not worth what you paid for it."
This arguably makes literally every transaction a grift through some lens.
And none of this is new.
> Meanwhile, the growth of software corresponds to a drop in the number of required human touchpoints for a given transaction. When travel was booked by phone or in person, there was a direct financial reward to being a good conversationalist in the travel business; rhapsodizing about the beauty of a beach was a good way to upsell customers on a nicer hotel a bit closer to it, and sussing out whether someone was more interested in beaches, landmarks, or bars meant figuring out exactly what to pitch them. All this work is now silently and efficiently happening on the backend of the big online travel agencies, with no human interaction required.The pre-Internet white collar economy was basically a universal job guarantee for personable people. That's increasingly going away, to be replaced with a more neoliberal attention economy with a more extreme distribution of outcomes.
My usual theory for the increasing around of grift, particularly in politics, is that various disintermediation efforts which were in theory supposed to make government more democratic actually mean there is less incentive than ever for working hard to fix anything, but big rewards for torching the commons for your own gain.
I don't think this runs contrary to the article's thesis but actually works hand-in-hand together with it to explain why so much public life-- politics, obviously, but also academia and public intellectualism-- consists mostly of charismatic psychopaths insisting we have to "burn it all down and click here to donate to my campaign or subscribe to my Substack)" instead of offering any useful advice.
To be fair, Hillary Clinton was also a liar and a grifter but she did kind of get punished and publicly humiliated for many of her lies.
Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing. Some people are moral by nature and will behave morally even if evil and amorality is all around them. Those are the heroes and saints. The people that will help slaves escape in slave societies the ones that will help safe victim populations when their own government is openly encouraging genocide. These people are great, but very few.
There are also the almost criminals, people that are always thinking in the backs of their minds of doing something awful, and it is only the possibility of punishment that is keeping them. Well when someone engages in bad behavior openly and publicly, and is not punished, even rewarded, those people will rush into bad behavior themselves.
So there you have it.
P.S.: To be fair Elon Musk deserves honorable mention for openly and publicly engaging in amoral behavior and getting away with it.
The reason "grifting went sky high" is because of the profit model of Internet media. Engagements = ad revenue. This strongly incentivizes grifter behavior, from Trump and Alex Jones to Oprah and Rachel Maddow. Also, grifting became a lot more accessible with social media. Anyone can grift, you don't need radio or television deals.
That's a far cry from shilling colloidal silver and gold bars to elderly shutins.
On "poisoning," there's a long and rich tradition of comparing an entire nation to a human body, and labeling enemies or ideas as "poison," "cancer," "disease," or some other infectious or damaging agent. It's not a great analogy, even setting aside who else has used that rhetoric against whom.
Citation needed
Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”. Yet you are worrying about relatively harmless average Joes and Janes looking up to these people? Very weird priorities considering that people like Trump just have very few or no built-in stops. Unlike most people. A normal person can’t just live like a sociopath and also be able to sleep at night.
You see these people ruining everything and you think to yourself: you know the problem here is that hypothetically someone might be inspired to steal my television if I leave the door unlocked.
> Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”.
Wait, you can both be right!
The main thing is there's always a ruthless fight to get to the very top of (civilized/hierarchical/capitalist/whatever) society. But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.
Yeah! Like when pre-Trump the norm was that all powerful and well-known people were magnanimous, self-sacrificing, and good people that the “mid-level” and below looked up to. But after Trump (grunts) that just changed on a dime.
Except the opposite of that.
I mean, the bodies that piled up around Clinton were being noticed at the time. That you had a potential presidential sequence of Bush, Clinton and Bush and Clinton had a pretty 3rd world kind of feeling. Trump ran as "the corrupt guy who take on corruption 'cause he's honest". Still, contrary to your claim, Trump launched the career of a whole new horde of grifters, with the Qanon types as just the most visible examples.
Those people weren't thinking into doing bad things before. But now they are.
That also points to the uniting factor between the grift the article talks about and the traditional definition of the word: grifts are the strategies you use when other avenues of making money are difficult, say because your investors are demanding increasing returns from a saturated market.
As for making money becoming difficult, without monetary and interest rate manipulations it would be rare for capital to exist while the opportunities to employ profitably are reduced. Capital is supposed to be created trough the act of saving, and income is normally saved with the idea of funding larger consumption in the future (or maintaining the same consumption with less labor).
That plan for future consumption is, in and of itself, an opportunity for profit to those that can satisfy it.
This is exactly how Bernie Madoff was caught.