Excluding ideological motivators, if you are technically competent to pull off a cybercrime and escape unseen, you are technically competent enough to work at a tech company making 300k+ a year while only doing about 10 hours of actual work per week.

Treating this just like investments, over your lifetime, its a no brainer on which is the better path to take.

And a smart enough person would also know that there's a long chain of caveats to this specious claim, significant enough that being a criminal and getting away with it is much more compelling.

None of the caveats include hypothetically being thrown in prison though. Being a criminal and getting away with it is significantly harder than phoning in your job as part of a capitalist machine

You're on a forum that's thematically dedicated to the idea of being a "hacker" in spirit; to a lot of people, the easy boring path isn't attractive.

"Why do this risky exciting dangerous thing over there when you could come over here and be a flacid lifeless drone with me at Bezos' personal blowjob-drone company. Marry the first person you meet, have some kids, yay stability!"

I think most criminals are dumb. Quick google search shows average IQ of a criminal is 85.

Average IQ of all criminals, or criminals that got caught?

It must just be the ones who got caught. If they weren't caught how can anyone be sure they were a criminal?

Honestly though they might as well just use the average IQ for the population. There's not a person alive who hasn't violated some law at some point. We're all criminals.

Probably not directly related, but mainly due to fewer opportunities. This is one of the reasons I strongly agree with universal basic income. The capitalistic game is harder than many people are capable of playing. They shouldn't have to suffer enormously because of that, and neither should society. Otherwise, should we assert that ethics are inherently easier for some people, yet penalize all people the same regardless of their capacities?