Reluctantly concluding that entire SW US (SoCal, Nevada, AZ... western US sunbelt) has more than its share of grifters. Perhaps the mix of good weather, old vulnerable people to exploit, and the presence of theater-centric industries (movies, gambling) makes it extra grifty

SoCal is merely grifty. Nevada is both grifty and incompetent (I've lived in Vegas and LA both for about the same duration now... 18 months... though my Vegas stint was 8 years ago). Everybody is nice to your face, tries to cheat you, and turns 100% asshole in conflict.

I have a feeling in the next decade, there is going to be so much grift in the general economy due to extreme stress in the constant-hustle service sector, anti-grift defenses will be the better part of being a consumer. I might want to move to a low-grift region.

A general effect of war is that in its aftermath there is a period of endemic grift that is hard to root out until you restart broad-based wealth building somehow. We've been in an invisible war for several years based on the rising grift levels.

(this happens because it becomes harder and harder to make a decent living honestly, and as more institutions break down, you kinda lose the muscle memory of honest economics... if everything is bribery and black markets, nobody knows how to deal clean)

Free-market ideologues studiously undertheorize the transaction costs of high-grift environments. They act like lemon markets are a rare special phenomenon under asymmetric info/principal-agent-problem conditions and cannot be a general characteristic of the entire economy.

The amount of wealth it takes to simply be above the grifty layers of the economy is quite high now. But if you make it there, you'll probably adopt some pious beliefs about how the poors should just live humbly and honestly and forgo the things that are grift-ridden.

Societal inequality is one of those things that looks like it should have no consequences when you look at first order effects. "The economy is fair rewards for talent and efforts. Nobly accept a lifestyle that you can honorably afford. If you don't, you're the problem."

Except it isn't even close to that, and people react to the perception of unfairness by trying to get by grift what they cannot get by the narrow possibilities of honesty.

And there is also the stress. It's not necessarily a result of being at the bottom, but in the layers (mostly towards the bottom) where grifting is the cost of doing business. I suspect grifting when you're not temperamentally suited to it is more stressful than actual poverty.

Middle class isn't too grifty itself, but is often forced to navigate pervasive grift to sustain its lifestyle. Buying cars, dental services, home contracting... everything is exhausting grift-detection/mitigation. And that's assuming you can at least filter for competence.

PNW seemed less grifty than SW. Midwest is middling-grifty. DC was also middling. I think for grift to become a big force in the economy, there has to be a disproportionately bigger local wealthy class and smaller middle class. https://twitter.com/nerdsnipe/status/1326592988848431104

Like, take something like dentistry or hair-styling in LA. There's a lot of rich people here for who are willing to pay big premiums to get exactly the service they want. Everybody wants that business. The cost of being a producer gets indexed to serving the premium market.

But then, those who can't get enough of the premium business are forced to serve the larger but less profitable middle, and resent it. So they turn to grift. By contrast, regions without a large ultrarich market get structured to serve the middle class.

Pick 2 of 3: affordability, trustworthiness, competence. If you try to have all three under high inequality, you get griftonomics.

In Nevada, competence fails. In LA, trust fails. For the rich, affordability fails.

In traditional societies, the way people resolve this is to replace impersonal trust (yelp ratings etc) with personal trust (the doctor or dentist is also a family friend etc) and sacrifice some competence (the family friend may not be the best at stuff)

The only way to get all 3, and drive down grift levels (and thereby, cortisol levels and vast amounts of hidden transaction costs) is to a) expand the middle class b) shrink the inequality span, so that the bulk of any service sector orients towards serving the middle.

The ultrawealthy have a distortionary effect on consumption that everybody participates in. I'm fine with the yacht market getting oriented around the wealthy and their indifference to cost. But you do not want things like healthcare, groceries etc. to be 1% oriented.

The problem is there is a part of America -- and not just the Trumpy part -- that thinks obscenely priced luxury consumption plus grift-ridden, sketchy-quality general consumption is a good condition for an economy to be in. It's not. This condition tends to kill wealth creation.

Here's the problem. Wealth creation rests on energy and attention of people with banal middle class lives. The more time they spend reading yelp reviews of car dealerships and wondering if their dentist is cheating them, the less time they have to work on making Elon's rockets.

There's a reason grift-ridden economies tend to be highly extractive. If you own coal mining operations, you only need some miserable miners and a small middle class. If you're building complex software or rockets, you need a big, fat middle class.

The rentier wealth-extracting class I suspect, is responsible for all the "bad" inequality ("good" inequality is the kind where wealth is partly proportionate to risk appetite, adjusted for safety net, rather than effort). And it's not always obvious.

Right now, the entire economy is dominated by some sort of obfuscated rentier dynamic driven by financialization. It's not just the Sacklers extracting opioid wealth out of unseen masses. Almost everything is that way, with diffuse extraction going on to power it.

I'm mostly venting about some relentless grift navigation challenges we've faced recently (mostly handled by wife, so I've been largely protected) and it is so soul sucking I can't see it being sustainable. This shit is going to blow up one way or the other in the next decade.

The entire inequality debate has been pwned by a socialist narrative, which is part of the problem. There is a stronger, more robust, capitalist argument inequality: it is inefficient, it kills wealth-building, amplifies extractive economics, and erodes competence.

It might seem self-serving to argue for a middle-class focused economic model, but both trickle-down (from wealth favoring policies) and trickle-up (UBI etc) are wishful thinking. Middle-out is the only thing that improves all 3 classes. Bourgeoise virtues.

Competence erosion is the biggest risk. And it hurts all 3 classes. The wealth of the rich is of no use if there's no competent people to pay to do what you need. And without competence in the middle, the grind at the bottom turns into increasingly unbearable oppression.