I want to challenge this a bit. With common crimes, its obvious you're committing a crime. Breaking into someone's home, mugging, etc are clearly victimization.
Now compare that to a technical crime that may or may not be a crime depending on which judge you get or how a jury decides to interpret a regulatory bill that's hundreds of pages long and can only be understood by a team of experts who most likely don't agree with each other. Or the creation of a new kind of investment vehicle no one has seen before. Or starting a new industry that no one understands. It becomes very difficult to equate these with street criminals who go into something knowingly they're breaking the law and acting unethically compared to a technical violation of something incredibly complex. More often than not, these kinds of things only become illegal well after their creation. So we're talking more about doing novel things and the lag between doing and regulation. That's not really crime.
For example for a tech industry perspective, how many patent laws has even your most hobbyist of coders violated? The Linux kernel was analyzed a few years back and found to be potentially infringing on over 200 patents, for example. So anytime we monetize linux we're potentially 'white collar criminals.'
The extra leverage (and thus reward) that comes from bending the design of social constructions and the ease in dissembling is exactly why I think it should be more harshly punished, rather than less.
Consider two scenarios. My finance firm creates a new security that in the long run hurts people. A criminal breaks into a home and rapes a woman. I get the death penalty and he a lighter sentence for... reasons. I think you're just engaging in classism here. If anything, violence should have more serious punishments as its never justifiable outside of self-defense and can be expected to continue unless the state steps in.
Also, the finance people are the bad guys right now but when society sees what automation is truly doing to their jobs, they'll come after us. So all of us who are automators are now going to jail. Beware witchhunts, because there's nothing that keeps you from becoming a witch. Law, morals, and intent won't matter once we're designated, as a class, as 'white collar' criminals like you are doing to finance people currently.
Instead we should lean on the rule of law and not make special exemptions or special witch-hunts for any group. Write good law and policy. Don't engage in classist rhetoric that makes no sense outside of feel good and frankly, hysterical, ranting about "jailing the bankers!"
It's easy to point at the rapist; it's much harder to point at the chap who got away with his bonus while the government propped up his bank. But how many people died because of redirected funds, reduction in spending on healthcare, or even something as mundane as road upkeep, increasing vehicle accidents? White collar criminals indirectly kill people. They are scum, parasites on our social constructs.
It's not feel-good ranting, BTW. It makes me extremely angry that people try to push hot buttons like rape and murder that would anger animals, to distract from greater crimes perpetrated in more abstract ways. It's a cheap but effective trick; and I'm sick of it.
These included minor offenses such as trespassing and copyright violations, but also serious crimes such as arson, fraud, and kidnapping.
Only one crime mentioned qualifies as "white collar".
I'm not saying arson is a white collar crime just that if you're desperate for money for whatever reason, and you're generally pretty smart, you may be inclined to try to get away with something like that. The same with kidnapping, although that seems much more violent and likely to end badly for everyone involved than arson.
> minor offenses such as trespassing and copyright violations
Without knowing more the best we could say is that high-IQ people are more aware of their crimes or maybe more willing to admit to them. For example, a property lawyer might be more likely to admit to trespassing than the average person just because he's more aware of how often he commits it. At the same time, his awareness of and persistence in such unlawful behavior doesn't mean he's flouting the law more than anyone else except in the most pedantic, literal sense.
The whole study sounds dubious. Relying on self-reporting is excused as necessary. That there are no practical alternatives doesn't make the method magically sound or even remotely accurate. That in the aggregate self-reporting roughly corresponds with crime statistics says absolutely nothing about the accuracy of self-reporting for niche subgroups.
It's this kind of pseudo-science that gives science in any field a bad name. I can appreciate that it might be especially difficult to find funding for a study that, first, establishes a strong correlation between self-reporting and IQ. But until there's significant push back from the community for studies premised on barely-tenable assumptions that funding will never be forthcoming.
The way you put ityou are likely to get even anti-IP people, like myself, on the other side because we don't want to be associated with you.
Switching back to copyright, I think that saying "copyright is not a monopoly" it is not as cut and dry as the linked site would indicate. I think one's ability to hire lawyers matters here.
Consider Disney, they will have a much easier time defending themselves, where a smaller author might not be able too. Disney will also have a much easier defeating a legitimate defense of another real author than a lone author might be able to. It is not hard to imagine a hypothetical Disney of yesteryear suing people to keep other space operas down with their Star Wars IP. It is harder to imagine a small defendant succeeding in that defense even if it is legitimate. I think this is largely a non-issue, because Disney of today is less of jerk.
Of all the kinds of Intellectual Property I think Copyright is most fair, the kind of legal abuse I described is much more common with Trademarks and Patents. I think the recent "flow" trademark issue or anything King software (the candy crush guys) does with game names so how asymmetric IP laws can be in general.
I don't think that is true. Neither does everybody know that a monopoly is bad, nor, and more importantly, is a monopoly inherently bad. Take for example the monopoly on violence. And even if you want to restrict the meaning to monopolies in the economic sense, even then is a monopoly not inherently bad. It only becomes so if its powers are abused. Sometimes having competition will increase the total costs, think for example of having five competing power distribution networks. In such cases it may be a better choice to have a monopoly and regulated it to prevent its abuse instead of having competition.
A natural monopoly would be associated with a public utility; probably the various libraries. An electronic library might become a public utility, but so far Spotify, Netflix, etc. have had incomplete catalogs and there's not much support for the compulsory licensing scheme they'd need to make it work (which would be its own public service...)
It's almost like drugs are a business and businesses take intelligence to run.
I'm sure there are organizations that would easily make it to the Fortune 100 if they could be listed as such. They're also smart enough to let disposable thugs break the street level laws. Real drug kingpins never physically handle product.
Case in point, a report from a couple of years ago claimed that the Calabria-based 'Ndrangheta had a turnover of 53 billion euros, approximately 3.5% if Italy's GDP. This is one of the articles discussing it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/26/ndrangheta-maf...
If you're smart enough, you get someone else to break the laws with the highest chance of arrest.
I'm actually currently reading a good book on that topic, "Narconomics: How to run a drug cartel"[1]. One chapter is about "the people problems of a cartel", because they have huge HR issues. The problem is that you can't officially hire good people, like regular business can do. So they have to refrain to personal connections. Training is another problem. The main training facility are prisons.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Wainwright-Narconomics-Cartel-Har...
I mean, who here doesn't know at least one intelligent person, who because of issues with upbringing, socioeconomic status, mental health, etc earns considerably less than their peers of similar ability (because they couldnt go to or dropped out of college, because they didn't have the network to get a job after, etc)?
My experience is that it's often those people who make the transition from street and neighborhood level dealing to managing portions of the supply chain, because their cousin's uncle's friend said they knew a way to make a lot more than their dealing small-scale to pay bills or whatever dead-end job they're at. Then once you're in the network, it's entirely a business of managing op-sec, negotiating deals, and efficient operations -- all of which require traditional intelligence, the same as actual businesses.
Literally the same way anyone I know goes from small time employment to a serious position.
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the overall amount of crime in this range is still “much, much lower” than among people with very low IQ scores.
In fact what I would expect you find is that these groups of people break different laws, not fewer.
The "low IQ" group likely have less capability of breaking say, regulatory laws, by virtue of standing or access. They are more likely to break laws like B&E, drug dealing, petty larceny, etc... that are more harshly and more frequently prosecuted.
The laws that high performing, and High IQ people would be breaking, securities, privacy, regulatory etc... might not be prosecuted at all, or at most would lead to civil fines.
I think the bottom line is that "high IQ" people will tend to have more capability to break white collar crimes, and will do so with better cover (lawyers, special accounting etc...).