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Matt Levine is Thought Provoking
I am so happy to have Levine’s column back and to think about things he sees. His perspective is always valuable and, more importantly to me personally, absolutely hysterically funny. Humor is an odd thing; YMMV.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-is-no-fun-without-friends
Possibly behind a paywall; sorry!
Here, Levine revisits something he talked about early in the pandemic before his parental leave; now there is some data to back it up. Basically, people are turning each other in at work. Which is hard not to love, however, he points out:
“This story is a sort of leading indicator of a breakdown in morale and group cohesion generally as so much work is done from home. That is probably bad for a lot of projects; it’s just that one of the projects it’s bad for is fraud.”
I am less certain about this than he is. There is at least a fraction of the population which has thrived socially during this pandemic, because the demands of work and school socializing are high, and in person socializing in particular is difficult for us. Also, while my daughter, for example, really loathes school group work whether in-person or at-home / via zoom, (can’t blame her; I did too at that age, and honestly, my affection for group work is pretty limited even now), there are aspects to group work which have been highlighted during the pandemic. Specifically, more than one person has observed to me that there is a lot of clarity now about which team members are not contributing, and it has become a lot easier in some employment contexts to get rid of them.
The cliche of the con artist, fraudster, scammer is that they have above-average schmoozing skills. If schmoozing becomes more difficult, and that makes it a lot easier to detect and punish those behaviors which rely upon exploiting schmoozing to accomplish things which no one would otherwise go along with, well, think of it as social “tuning”. We wouldn’t want to overshoot too far in the other direction, of course.
OTOH, we also know that unsupervised homogenous groups can go off on a crazy tangent at times, and diversity in groups can really help avoid dangerous group think and mass hysteria and so forth. There are clearly some very real problems associated with all the sensible people being sensible and staying away from other people, thus allowing the less sensible people to find each other in the suddenly much less crowded environment, and then go behave in profoundly reprehensible ways.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-is-no-fun-without-friends
Possibly behind a paywall; sorry!
Here, Levine revisits something he talked about early in the pandemic before his parental leave; now there is some data to back it up. Basically, people are turning each other in at work. Which is hard not to love, however, he points out:
“This story is a sort of leading indicator of a breakdown in morale and group cohesion generally as so much work is done from home. That is probably bad for a lot of projects; it’s just that one of the projects it’s bad for is fraud.”
I am less certain about this than he is. There is at least a fraction of the population which has thrived socially during this pandemic, because the demands of work and school socializing are high, and in person socializing in particular is difficult for us. Also, while my daughter, for example, really loathes school group work whether in-person or at-home / via zoom, (can’t blame her; I did too at that age, and honestly, my affection for group work is pretty limited even now), there are aspects to group work which have been highlighted during the pandemic. Specifically, more than one person has observed to me that there is a lot of clarity now about which team members are not contributing, and it has become a lot easier in some employment contexts to get rid of them.
The cliche of the con artist, fraudster, scammer is that they have above-average schmoozing skills. If schmoozing becomes more difficult, and that makes it a lot easier to detect and punish those behaviors which rely upon exploiting schmoozing to accomplish things which no one would otherwise go along with, well, think of it as social “tuning”. We wouldn’t want to overshoot too far in the other direction, of course.
OTOH, we also know that unsupervised homogenous groups can go off on a crazy tangent at times, and diversity in groups can really help avoid dangerous group think and mass hysteria and so forth. There are clearly some very real problems associated with all the sensible people being sensible and staying away from other people, thus allowing the less sensible people to find each other in the suddenly much less crowded environment, and then go behave in profoundly reprehensible ways.