Bad Faith Actors
Saw Kyle's post about the feeling that there's some kind of cheat code people must be using to be effortlessly successful under capitalism.
In the spirit of that post this is a pretty short one (for me that's 500 words???), but reflected something I've been thinking about lately - how much our lives and systems are dominated by bad-faith actors.
An example I've probably mentioned before - when I was a kid, there was a boy who realised that he could go to the shop before school, buy soft drinks and sweets, then sell them at a significant mark-up during breaks (when we weren't allowed to leave the school grounds), because people came to school with lunch money.
That boy thought he was a genius, but any reasonable person would recognise that he's kind of an asshole.
To give a non-financial example, in the last decade of Formula 1 there has been a significant shift in how the racing itself is performed and regulated, with there being a pretty strong consensus that it's all become a bit rules-lawyery. The case I'd make here is that there was a generally accepted set of norms that, even if they were technically legal, people wouldn't fully exploit at every opportunity because it's generally viewed as "bad racing." Perhaps you'd occasionally find yourself moving a biiiit too much while defending and get the benefit - someone would have a word with you and it'd be dealt with.
Then along comes a driver like Max Verstappen, an incredible talent who knows the rulebook perfectly and will perform extreme acts of risk-reward that don't fall foul of regulations, any time the opportunity presents itself - moving a lot while defending or braking, extremely late lunges into disappearing gaps, that sort of thing. The rules don't explicitly forbid this stuff, but now it's deciding nearly every race.
It leaves the system with a choice - regulate every single thing that might be done and give up on expecting "norms" to keep people right, or let this subversive actor run rampant and risk every other driver following suit.
It seems obvious that you'd want to stop "bad behaviour" but F1 kind of shows why you might hesitate to just regulate your way out of it - they did eventually start changing and refining the rules to stop what Max was doing, and everyone kind of hates it. Arguing over millimeters about whether a pass was illegal just isn't what racing is about. The obvious solution has made things quite sterile.
I think this same idea is pretty generalisable - in the financial sector you are monstrously rewarded for exploiting loopholes good-faith actors wouldn't consider, and in business things have become so abstracted that norms basically can't apply. Looking at systems I consider broken and identifying how bad faith actors might be responsible is something of a habit now.
Meanwhile normal people like us follow the rules as they understand them, engaging with the system in good faith. Saving money in bank accounts, minimising debts, living within our means.
I guess that makes us rubes, but if I did the sorts of things rich people do with their money I'd be an asshole.