For the past fifteen years I've been fascinated by how the information technologies of the late 20th century supercharged old frauds. I suspect that our current depression, and the Depression of the 1930s, have enabling technologies as one common cause.
It takes time for law and custom to adapt to new technologies and complexities, and until they do frauds as old as the human mind take on new forms and power.
For almost ten of those fifteen years I've been publishing notes here. In honor of a post I'm working on now I've assembled an annotated biography. There's a sort of grouping order to the list, it's not chronological ...
- Causes of the crash of '08 - how much fraud? (Feb 2009).
- Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III (April 2008) - The rising wealth of China and India is the best news of the past century. Information technologies, like agriculture, writing, and the printing press, enable both the good and the bad in humanity - including new innovations in fraud. Together they have turned our world upside down.
- Lewis and Einhorn - repairing the financial world (Jan 2009). We didn't do the repairs.
- Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God (Dec 2008). When we could still be shocked.
- Global finance and parasites (Sept 2009)
- The subprime mortgage story: a problem of the weak (Nov 2007) We are all marks, but some suffer more than others.
- Memphis mortgages, complexity attacks and long term consequences (May 2010) - Information asymmetry is at the heart of IT enabled complexity attacks.
- Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams (Nov 2009) IT enables complexity, complexity, entropy and emergence yield happy accidents.
- Malice, incompetence, and happy accidents (May 2011) I love this Dilbert cartoon on emergent fraud through IT enabled complexity attacks
- Complexity attack – the illustrated version (Dec 2009) Dilbert again. Scott Adams at his best.
- Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials (Oct 2010) - a handy example of a complexity attack
- The Health Savings Account preventive visit scam (Nov 2010) - Complexity attacks are ubiquitous
- When the market is your deity, there is no such thing as corruption (July 2009) Marketarianism defined
- Brad DeLong: Principles for enlightenment 2.0 (March 2008) - One of my earliest Marketarian posts, before I started using that term.
- Scylla and Charybdis: Corruption, health care reform and climate change. (Dec 2009) - Alas, we lost.
- Campaign Finance Reform - The Publicly Owned Politician (Oct 2008) - Treat politicians as publicly traded corporations
- The Empire Strikes Back: complexity, mobile phone plans, and Apple defeated (June 2008) - few remember that Apple lost its war on the phone companies. I think if Jobs health had been better he'd have made another go at this.
- Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams (Nov 2009) - The list of mobile phone related scams is amazing. Perhaps everything we need to know about the past twenty years could be understood from this list.
- InfoUSA and Wachovia Bank sell out the vulnerable elderly (May 2007)
- Marked! Where did all our investments go? (Nov 2008) - we'd already had a lost decade
- Melamine sickened infants: 53,000 and counting (Sept 2008) - Not just an American problem, but the GOP removed much of our ability to respond
- Toxic heparin: fraud is looking likely (Mar 2008). I'm still amazed so little came of this.
- Pet food poison and pithed America (Mar 2008). When I realized Americans were overwhelmed.
- Fraud and Globalization: Toy Story III (June 2007) Do you think this has stopped?
- Poisoned Toothpaste from China: this would be a good time to start freaking out (May 2007). We never did.
- 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind (June 2007). Deception and response made the human mind. So what will our time make?
- Credit card scammers: the story continues (Jan 2007). Yawn.
- Stop net fraud - make the banks pay for the externalities (Oct 2005). Easy to fix.
- Security costs money, it's cheaper for banks to pay the crooks. (May 2005)
- We've come a long way -- fraud 2008 (May 2008) - Yep, we knew.
- The Land of Rand (April 2005) Before the crash.
- Mob scams 200 million in small charges, shades of Netfill (Feb 2004) Yawn.
- Credit Card Fraud explodes -- Yawn. (Sept 2003). We had lots of warning of what was coming.