Thus, the global optima is one where there is no fraud and everybody cooperates, but it's not a stable optima and we slide to the real world where there are tradeoffs for preventing fraud, and there reaches a point where rational actors deem the tradeoff unacceptable and thus accept some level of fraud.
With disease, the optimal amount is likely still zero. The immune system we have is not great, its only selection criteria is to keep people alive long enough to have children and keep them alive long enough so they can. We're beginning to understand, like with HPV, that anything from a life threatening case to an asymptomatic one can cause lifelong changes in the immune system and either cause or increase lifelong risk of non-infectious diseases.
And that's setting aside that we can, for example, just eradicate certain diseases if we set ourselves to it. Polio, smallpox, and hopefully malaria.
If we could eliminate certain kinds of fraud - through education, through making it impractical - that seems good, yeah?
And my gut reaction to the title of the article is that we really need less fraud and that we're very, very far from optimal right now. Although I'm not very concerned at all about fraud against government programs to help the disenfranchised. I'm more concerned about the endless e-mail, phone scams, door to door scams and all the stuff that prey on the elderly and vulnerable.
Similarly with the immune system it would be interesting to consider wiping out Epstein Barr and maybe eliminate Multiple Sclerosis, along with exterminating the mosquitoes that bite humans and cause disease.
But zero is likely not achievable or a stable optimum, and we're probably not going to cure the common cold or wipe out influenza and we may not want to (at least not without quite a bit of science fiction, global access to medicine and nearly 100% acceptance of vaccination in the population).
The person I replied to seemed to think that exposure to disease helps in youth? Certainly seems like a widespread idea, but I don't know how true it is.
If you had zero fraud in society then nobody would build in any defenses against fraud at all.
You'd have a society of completely naive and trusting souls, which sounds blissful until someone wakes up one day and realizes that they can commit as much fraud as they like since society has no defenses against it.
It is like saying that the optimal amount of disease is zero, but if you have never had your immune system challenged by any kind of disease, then the first virus you come across will probably kill you.
Your suffering from childhood colds and getting burned by something like the car-out-of-gas scam help build defenses.