A Theory of Grift

https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-theory-of-grift/

by mooreds • 3 years ago

111 110 3 years ago

Analemma_• 3 years ago

Very interesting theory. Here's the key point:

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.

netbioserror• 3 years ago

IMO widespread grift seems to directly correlate with money printing and suppressed interest rates, which create a financialized economy that lives and breathes based on monthly Fed minutes. If you can make lots of money doing nothing, you can swindle lots of money doing nothing.

from-nibly• 3 years ago

This right here. Here's hoping for an economic crash that corrects this kind of stuff.

AlotOfReading• 3 years ago

It's not exactly the kind of grift the article is talking about, but grift is very common in the poorest countries where "free" money and low interest rates were never a thing because there's few other opportunities. Far from removing grift, I'd expect an economic crash to dramatically increase the amount of grift as everyone tries to extract whatever dollars they can.

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.

JacobThreeThree• 3 years ago

an economic crash that corrects this kind of stuff

This is exactly how Bernie Madoff was caught.

redavni• 3 years ago

The real estate and banking industry with a host of grifters caused 2007-2008 crash....then we elected a direct representative of this group as president 10 years later. The problem is deeper than poor economic policy.

WallyFunk• 3 years ago

Buy The Change You Wish to See in the World

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.

IngoBlechschmid• 3 years ago

I disagree strongly with this position:

* 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.

wharvle2• 3 years ago

With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.

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.

dr_kiszonka• 3 years ago

From a voter's perspective, voting with a wallet seems not too dissimilar from voting in elections. Both are necessary, but insufficient to "advance systemic changes."

digging3• 3 years ago

I "vote with my wallet" as a form feel-goodism. It has almost no impact, but it helps me feel satisfied with myself. This is similar to donating a small amount to a charity that works on issues I personally feel connected to, even if they're relatively low-impact. While the majority of my donations go to charities that I understand (to the best of my ability) to have the greatest impact on human flourishing.

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.

randomdata3• 3 years ago

These require governmental action.

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.

User23• 3 years ago

Reading this, one concept just keeps ringing in my ears: learned helplessness[1]. As it happens you really do have a fair bit of control over your life. How you choose to live it, what you buy and what you don't, and whether you submit to the persuasion trickery that calls itself news and entertainment—that's all up to you. Your choices really do matter. I can't promise you that they'll drive the kind of macro change you might like to see, but I can assure you beyond all doubt that waiting for companies, governments, and established propagandists to do it for you certainly won't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

avgcorrection12• 3 years ago

Is this your unironic stance?

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

"Vote with your wallet" should only ever mean paying a lobby and an election campaign to influence your elected politicians.

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.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Grift is nothing new, it's existed throughout human history. See for example Herman Melville, "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" (1857), which is a catalogue of various kinds of grift common in that era.

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.

soco• 3 years ago

Ironically this is what conspiracists call "global government" - in reality a network of mafia-like operations kept together by the same interests, spread internationally because the world became so small.

dingnuts• 3 years ago

I don't know how you can start out a comment by saying, essentially, that there's nothing new under the sun and then immediately contradict it by saying

"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.

vpribish• 3 years ago

it is so obvious that it is a globe-spanning conspiracy by all the leaders, educators, and heads that talk!! you have cracked the case wide open for anyone to see!! how could we have been so blind? do you think also that the sports-celebrities are in on it?

anjel• 3 years ago

Grift is as old as prostitution, but this makes me wonder how long the history of disruptive forces being brought to bear on Moral hazard is as well.

mandmandam4• 3 years ago

People seem to be missing a hugely important fact here:

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.

slily2• 3 years ago

I doubt you've lived in other countries long enough to compare those systems based on what you're saying about banking, there's virtually no difference anywhere I've been and I still have a number of foreign bank accounts. Every time I see someone criticize US banking it's based on the assumption that poor people are too stupid to understand that interest is charged on loans or that withdrawing money you don't have incurs a fee. I agree with college and health care being ridiculous in the US and arguably mainstream news too (no wonder they're losing influence to podcasts). Everything else is either nowhere near unique to the US or exaggerated to the level of caricature.

bigger_cheese• 3 years ago

I'm not from the US so I am admitting to being somewhat ignorant here but my understanding is that Banking Consumer Protection laws (and attitudes) are very different in the US at least when compared to where I live (Australia).

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.

lmm2• 3 years ago

Every time I see someone criticize US banking it's based on the assumption that poor people are too stupid to understand that interest is charged on loans or that withdrawing money you don't have incurs a fee.

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.

js8• 3 years ago

I am Czech, but was about to say something similar. Our country looks up to US a lot, and the rightwing here promotes neoliberal policies since the 90s.

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.

wharvle2• 3 years ago

For all the treatment of markets as "natural" I've noticed the particular kind of ethics you mention are very much not natural.

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.

ericmcer• 3 years ago

I don't think this is due to anti-socialist propaganda, if anything progressive social policies are more popular than ever before.

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.

boeingUH603• 3 years ago

We're the number one threat to peace and stability since 2003, and only getting worse.

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.

avgcorrection12• 3 years ago

Think of it more in terms of military power + trigger happiness and less in terms of ideology (good guys and bad guys). Then it might become clearer to you.

l0b02• 3 years ago

Which one of those has killed the most civilians since 2003?

avgcorrection12• 3 years ago

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.

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.

mandmandam4• 3 years ago

Okay maybe calm down with the Saint/Devil complex.

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.

pohl5• 3 years ago

Presidents are grifters

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.

avgcorrection12• 3 years ago

In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.

https://solidarity-us.org/pdfs/cadreschool/reed3.pdf

mandmandam4• 3 years ago

It's been grifters non stop since Reagan, whether you paid attention or not.

Trump was just more open about it.

jeffreyrogers3• 3 years ago

There's an ongoing debate over whether or not people skills are undervalued, and perhaps for many people they are, but it's hard to deny that there are many, many more ways for someone who doesn't like social interaction much to get rich. If ads and sales are on the same continuum, then the world's best salespeople are engineers, data scientists, and product managers.

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.

neutralino1• 3 years ago

I wouldn't go as far as to say business executives have good social skills. They are often ruthless, cunning, and deceiving, which makes them successful. If by good social skills you mean the ability to convince (read deceive) a lot of people, then sure they have good social skills. But who wants to have a beer with their CEO, VP of Sales, or other top exec? They are often depicted as wolves or sharks for a reason. It is true that they are good at networking with other people like them, but not really good at empathizing, helping, or caring for others.

smugglerFlynn3• 3 years ago

Is there some research that would suggest % of ruthless, cunning, and deceiving people among execs is statistically different from any other professions?

polygamous_bat• 3 years ago

I assume OP means social skill in the sense of “skill with society as the instrument/playground” rather than “skills that benefit social bond”. Same way as a 10x dev at a nonprofit and a Russian hacker can both have “computer skills” while doing vastly different things with their skills.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

They're persuasive, which is probably the most important social skill. Having a beer may be a means to that end, but it usually isn't.

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.

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

If by good social skills you mean the ability to convince (read deceive) a lot of people

In a thread about people being rich or not, yes, of course he meant that. There isn't any alternative way to define this.

smugglerFlynn3• 3 years ago

Not to mention that pretty much all ad sales are managed not by engineers, but by that third business exec group.

stcredzero• 3 years ago

There's an ongoing debate over whether or not people skills are undervalued

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.

crowcroft• 3 years ago

Being born into the first two groups gives you a lot more opportunity to learn the social skills that might also land you in that third group. Especially in societies that have some kind of class system (even if that system is 'informal').

avgcorrection12• 3 years ago

The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always personable too.

All of my fifty closest underlings laugh at my jokes. What more social proof do I need?

bluGill5• 3 years ago

Don't look at the top .1%. Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people who are "self made". They didn't inherit. Even in the top .1% you find the likes of Bill Gates who started out pretty average (there is a lot of luck in his story or course)

jacobolus2• 3 years ago

Bill Gates' grandpa was a national bank president, and his father was a wealthy lawyer, president of the state bar association. As a child Gates was deliberately trained by his parents to make everything into a contest. He went to the best private prep school in Washington State, and among high school students worldwide, he ended up with something like top 0.01% access to computers at the time. There's nothing "pretty average" about his story; he was part of the top <1% by wealth, prestige, and support right from the get-go. [Which is not to say that Gates didn't work like hell, including making heaps of unethical choices, to end up as a billionaire.]

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.

jeffreyrogers3• 3 years ago

Even in the top 0.1% many are self made. My comment wasn't about whether they are self-made or not (and many people who got a head start in life have done very impressive things, one of the surgeons who pioneered transplant surgery was from a very wealthy midwestern family who made their money from the railroad industry). My comment was about Byrne's assertion that there are more ways to become rich that don't require social skills than ones that do. That doesn't seem true to me.

codeflo• 3 years ago

If ads and sales are on the same continuum, then the world's best salespeople are engineers, data scientists, and product managers.

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?

jeffreyrogers3• 3 years ago

I think he is saying that since digital advertising generates so much revenue the best sales and marketing professionals (by revenue generated) are the engineers, data scientists, and PMs who develop the ad-tech that enables those things. I don't agree with him, but I think that's his argument.

creer• 3 years ago

inherited wealth

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.

latchkey2• 3 years ago

Block Trading—Block trades create a massive temptation to leak information, and once this becomes a habit, it's a very bad look.

Funny you should mention Block Trading... this Matt Levine just dropped...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-16/morgan...

mitchbob• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/NzwBk

latchkey2• 3 years ago

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

hristov• 3 years ago

I am going to say something that will earn me a lot of downgrades, but it needs to be said because it is the truth and it is important. Grifting in our society went sky high when Trump started doing it and he was not punished for it but rewarded.

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.

pphysch3• 3 years ago

The Art of the Deal was published in 1987, before Bill Clinton was even president. Trump has been grifting for a long time at a fairly steady pace.

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.

shermantanktop2• 3 years ago

Let me guess, Rachel Maddow is grifting by...promoting her books?

That's a far cry from shilling colloidal silver and gold bars to elderly shutins.

metabagel• 3 years ago

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.

Citation needed

Galacta7• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's a pretty bold claim. I almost stopped reading their otherwise valid post when I saw that.

talldatethrow• 3 years ago

Which part? That she was a liar and a grifter? Or that she got punished and humiliated for it?

avgcorrection12• 3 years ago

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.

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.

joe_the_user2• 3 years ago

> 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.
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.

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

It worse than that, because a lot of people react to the unfairness of society rewarding dishonesty by becoming dishonest as a revenge.

Those people weren't thinking into doing bad things before. But now they are.

llm_nerd• 3 years ago

The word grift has been diminished to polarized meaninglessness. The linked piece defines it as-

"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.

jprete• 3 years ago

Not all transactions are grifts, because frequently something for sale will have different values to the buyer and seller. Things aren't strictly worth what you can sell them for, unless the only thing you want to do with the thing is to sell it.

bluGill5• 3 years ago

The reason for matching gifts is because charities run into problems if they only have a few donors - the IRS starts to assume they are not a real charity instead they are a tax dodge for the rich. It is easy to setup a charity that really exists to put a tiny amount of money into some cause while spending most of the money on things that help donors. One sign the IRS looks for (because this is easy to look for) is total number of donors. While you can fool a few people, they assume if there are a lot of small donors most of them are not fool - instead they believe in the mission of the charity.

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.

GauntletWizard• 3 years ago

This is why Bill Gates spends so much time fundraising for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation - He's providing the social proof to the IRS that it's not simply his pet projects or marketing arm. He provides much if not most funding, but he gets assent and agreement from other wealthy donors.

(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)

pi-e-sigma• 3 years ago

I think it's just elaborated PR. Bill is getting old and thinks more and more about his 'legacy' and how he will be remembered.

PoignardAzur• 3 years ago

A ton of what the foundation does is provide incentives for both government and NGO aid-services to stay locked into Microsoft products

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.

takinola• 3 years ago

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.

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.

bluGill5• 3 years ago

Not all charities have the problem. Size compared to donation size matters. Charities that don't do things for donars probably don't have a problem.

lulznews• 3 years ago

Noted for future tax dodging.

bloudermilk• 3 years ago

Why would a charity that is legitimately serving a mission and operating above-board be afraid of the IRS taking a closer look?

A Theory of Grift

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