Activity - @Crell@phpc.social @danluu@mastodon.social has written an interesting comment on...

ollibaba, 1 month ago

@Crell @danluu has written an interesting comment on this topic at https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/#fn:S .

(I found the comment interesting, but haven't checked whether it's factually correct. The mentioned "Becker-ian policy" appears to refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker#Crime_and_punishment).

$Screenshot of a website footnote: "As with the Apple, Google, Adobe, etc., wage-fixing agreement, legal systems are sending the clear message that businesses should engage in illegal and unethical behavior since they'll end up getting fined a small fraction of what they gain. This is the opposite of the Becker-ian policy that's applied to individuals, where sentences have gotten jacked up on the theory that, since many criminals aren't caught, the criminals that are caught should have severe punishments applied as a deterrence mechanism. The theory is that the criminals will rationally calculate the expected sentence from a crime, and weigh that against the expected value of a crime. If, for example, the odds of being caught are 1% and we increase the expected sentence from 6 months to 50 years, criminals will calculate that the expected sentence has changed from 2 days to 6 months, thereby reducing the effective value of the crime and causing a reduction in crime. We now have decades of evidence that the theory that long sentences will deter crime is either empirically false or that the effect is very small; turns out that people who impulse commit crimes don't deeply study sentencing guidelines before they commit crimes. Ironically, for white-collar corporate crimes where Becker's theory might more plausibly hold, Becker's theory isn't applied."$

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Crell 1 month ago