Patrick McKenzie: evaluation

Transcript context

…Or a CD. Anything one might do with the bank. To ask you the Willie Sutton question, why do people try to rob banks? It seems like a low-return activity, the form of crime where you’re most likely to be caught. It largely is a low-return activity. The FBI publishes stats on this. The median haul that a bank robber gets is about $8,000. It is the worst possible way to earn $8,000 because a career bank thief — the other word for that is long-term guest of the United States government. It is impossible to get away with over an extended period of time. Not to give people advice on becoming criminals, but if one wanted to describe a criminal that was using their faculties to the best of their abilities, credit card fraud is so amazingly more lucrative than robbing banks. You can do it without ever threatening anyone. You can do it with only about as much sophistication about how the system works as the typical bank thief has. Indeed, you do see casual fraud by unsophisticated, let’s say, non-professional criminals, high school students, et cetera, who earn or gain access to value through that casual fraud much more than they would if they stuck up a bank. And therefore, the people that actually do stick up banks are overwhelmingly drug addicted. They’re disproportionately struggling with a mental illness, et cetera, et cetera. It is not that big a risk. That, by the way, is part of a few reasons why banks are not optimized to defeat people doing bank robbery, which is surprising to many nonspecialists. If you join a bank, one of the first things that they say is, “In the event of a bank robbery, don’t be a hero. This does not matter to us at all. Comply with all demands. Get them out of the bank as quickly as possible. Do not fight, do not chase,” et cetera, et cetera. Partly that is due to the liability risk. The way the US system views these things, the net present value of a young bank employee is worth a lot more than $8,000. If they get shot on their way out the door, the bank might be liable for millions of dollars of a settlement to that individual. Whereas if the person walks away with $8,000, well, yay. But the other part of it is that the banks truly aren’t at material risk from losing cash in robberies. How old were you when you moved to Japan? And why did you do it?…

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