So, what is the ideal crime?  Which activity is difficult to detect, involves many people, has plausible deniability, can be supported by an ideology and affects many people just a bit?  Yes, I think you know the answer, and it does involve banks…

Dan Ariely is one of the star figures of a field called behavioural economics. Back in 2008 he published Predictably Irrational which points out that, though economics is based on an idea called Homo economicus which assumes that humans always make perfectly rational economic decisions, reason plays a much smaller part in our decision-making than we’d like to think. You can get a taste of Ariely from his two TED talks here and here.

I was intrigued by a recent blog post of his (quoted above) where he tries to delicately allude to the idea that a portion of what bankers do (how big a portion, he doesn’t say) could be considered criminal. Ariely doesn’t usually tread on controversial territory so, I’m assuming, if he says something like that, he has some decent numbers and logic to back it up. It goes without saying that there is some overlap between bankers and criminals (here is  a particularly gruesome example in the most recent issue of Maissoneuve magazine), but Ariely’s post suggest that if you were a truly rational criminal (irony?), you would join the banking world. He’s definitely not saying that all bankers are crooks. Just that it’s a good place for some people to make less-than-honest money. I’m trying not to stir up the pot too much here…

Ariely also has a new book out called The Upside of Irrationality. Here’s a review of it at the NY Times.

And here’s a sweet video from The Black Keys.