On Getting My Motorcycle Stolen, Why Crime And Communism Threaten Society In The Same Way, And The Importance Of Incentives

Crime has become a part of our lives, and it threatens the very incentive structures that keeps many Americans, including criminals, alive.

The Social Contract

What makes the world work? Well, lots of things.

At it’s core, I argue it’s signing (and participating in) the social contract.

I don’t know about you - but I didn’t sign anything when I was 12.

What I did do, is go to school and get disciplined—A LOT.

It’s miraculous how little I learned during my twenty years of formal education relative to a few years learning on my own.  What I did learn is how to fit in.

Before you misinterpret that, no, I did not fit in. But I did learn to follow basic rules, raise my hand when I wanted to say something, follow a schedule, keep my hands to myself, shut up (still working on this), and respect boundaries and belongings.

Some of that only matters by proxy to the social contract. Some of that stuff is the social contract.

The social contract says “I receive benefits of the social system, and in turn, I play by its rules.” and eventually it says “I contribute to the system.”

You can’t satisfy one of those, and I’d argue you can’t really even do just two (I guess you can obediently freeload). You need all three at scale for a society to work.

Freeloaders Are A Societal Burden

If you freeload, whether obediently or not, I’d argue you are by definition a burden to society.

Before I piss off half of America, I need to make a distinction: freeloading is not being sick, having a kid, raising a kid (the opposite of freeloading), grieving, etc.

Freeloading is sitting at home binging Netflix/Twitter/TikTok, working as little as possible to still collect your paycheck, getting shithoused all the time because no one expects anything of you, NOT raising your kids, etc.

In broader terms, freeloading is taking advantage of the system without meaningfully contributing to it by either improving it (working to create value) or perpetuating it (raising productive people who will eventually create value in it).

I won’t go into how contribution is actually the only path to being satisfied as a human, because this is a piece on economics, not philosophy, but contribution is important, and not just economically.

Right, so freeloaders are burdens, and that’s expected, and even okay, so long as most people aren’t. Kids are burdens that eventually become contributors. The elderly are burdens that already contributed a bunch. This makes it all okay.

BUTTTTT, this isn’t a blog post about freeloaders and burdens. This is a blog post about F**KIN CRIMINALS WHO STOLE MY MOTORCYCLE (AND DURING THE THREE WEEK BREAK IT TOOK ME TO EDIT THIS, ALSO STOLE TWO $5,000 BIKES FROM OUR APARTMENT BUILDING!)!!!

This is a vendetta. Me vs some random guy in Oakland. Some guy who wasted 40 hrs of my life, hundreds of my dollars in Ubers, gas, and deductibles, and then abandoned my motorcycle in the back of a stolen car in Oakland.

Criminals are burdens.

Criminals don’t stop at being burdens though, they go one step further. They break the rules, threatening the system’s future operation and removing the incentive for people, like ME, to contribute and remain productive.

How The System Works

Before I tell you what happened, I’m gonna tell you why I’m pissed about it (it’s not entirely the reason you think).

For society to run smoothly, there are a few base assumptions:

• Productive people trade their time, energy, and money to create value and reduce entropy in exchange for money and property.

• Rules (laws) are put in place to ensure the system works at scale, protecting the movement of goods and services.

• Property is protected, which in turn, protects people’s incentive to continue creating value.

That’s not extensive, but it is for the purposes of my argument.

Life Without A Capitalist Social Contract

If we lived in a communist society, we’d say no one is entitled to anything, everyone is entitled to everything, and ultimately we’re all supposed to exist in a world with no incentives.

Anyone who lives in San Francisco knows that this actually means a bunch of childless, non-productive people wanting their 6 figure lifestyle without their 20 hr/week 6 figure job, not understanding that it’s capitalism that makes complaining about capitalism over $20 drinks possible for them.

(Do not hire these people)

It’s not mimosas or virtue signaling that get people to do things. It’s incentives.

Incentives Are Why People Do Things

That is both the definition, and a painfully obvious statement that everyone who complains about capitalism needs to hear.

I’ve explained incentives in my post about how the economy started as a bunch of men stacking chedda to attract baddies (and raise families with those bonafide baddies), but for a refresher, people create value in exchange for money so they can get bu$$y and raise babies.

But maybe putting just enough food on the table and communal living is enough? Maybe if we all worked together, we could get along?

No, we can’t, that’s stupid.

Most people are too lazy to even put enough food on the table for themselves, but I’m getting 3 minutes ahead of myself.

The Russian Revolution - Lazy People Ruining Things

Even if you are industrious enough to feed yourself, the only people you’re really all that intrinsically motivated to help are people closely blood related to you, and one could argue that there’s even an incentive there (proliferating your DNA), but I digress.

Because we’re humans, that’s basically the rule book: you help yourself, your family, and anyone who can help you or your family.

Yes, people help others, but Maslow and I would agree that’s pretty high on the hierarchy.

You might be thinking this is cynical (which I disagree with), but I didn’t make this up.

I’ll use the Russian Revolution as my example, because I’ve been reading a lot of Russian novels from before communism, and that Russia place was poppin’ before the lazy people took over.

So what happened?

The serfs were freed.

No, that was actually fine Jack.

Oh, ok.

Some of the serfs were industrious.

No, that was fine too.

Got it.

People working hard to build a life for their families by creating value for other people. That’s cool.

Okay. So what was the problem? Well, it’s what happened next.

Some of those serfs, along with the lords they previously served, were so good at creating value that they created EMPIRES of value creation. Some people call these farms, but “farms” is so blasé. Farms are boring. Empires are HOT.

They worked to build empires, and those empires (ok, that word isn’t working anymore)…those farms created something like 100% of the food (that’s where food comes from lol).

Some of the serfs didn’t build farmpires. Actually most of them…most of them didn’t do anything at all.

With no one forcing anyone to work the lands, many became profligates. I’m editorializing, but medium story short, they didn’t build empires. They just kinda kicked rocks and drank vodka. In modern day language, you could say these people were “disadvantaged”.

Communism had a solution for this: private property shouldn’t be allowed. If we took Bikini Bottom, and pushed it somewhere else, that somewhere else being back to the people, everyone would have land!

Farms could belong to the people. The means of production could belong to the people.

But how do you justify redistributing land? Well, you don’t.

You convince people they’re being oppressed, stolen from even.

You convince “disadvantaged” people that anyone who owns land has unjustly taken it, because how else could a person create a farm? It has to be oppression and thievery!

The landowners are oppressing everyone, and that’s…not very chill.

With this new paradigm, disadvantaged people thought “wait a minute, this is my empire/farm?”, and because a mob of stupid people will always win in a fight against a few smart people, the farmers were “brought to justice” by the people, thus returning the means of production to the people.

BUTTTTT, we all know what happened.

Incentives (like money, property, etc.) drive people to spend their time/money/energy to create value. This value creation benefits both the value creator (through the money/property they get in return), and the whole of society (through created food, technology, etc.).

In my tenuously relevant communism example, pre-commie farmers created a ton of value under the assumption that they would receive a monetary reward for generating that value. They traded money + time + effort to create value (food), which they could then sell for more money.

It’s an incentive-based system.

As mentioned wayyy at the top in my assumptions for this whole thing to work:

money + time + effort = value (food for people) + more money (the incentive)

In this totally sound mathematical proof, it’s clear that everyone wins here. I, a 19th century farmer, spend a bunch of my time, energy, and money, and in return, the people get value (food) and I get paid.

Fair, fair, that’s obvious, but what happens when we remove money (the incentive) from the equation? You know, when everyone works together on the public property they “took back” from those farmers?

Well, everyone starves.

Life With A Working Social Contract

In my above example, when incentives were removed, no one did more than they had to.

The converse to that is: with the right incentives in place, some people are allowed to generate SO MUCH value that even if 80% of people do nothing but take from society, it still works!

Enter billionaires.

People Are Not Equal - Power Law

I’ll say it again, but in paragraph size this time: people are not equal.

Anyone who’s ever been on my team in a group project knows this.

Some people do a lot, and some people…don’t.

In a working society, most people can freeload and still eat and eventually reproduce, and that’s okay!

I’m not just bitter about 7th grade biology (I am bitter about it, it’s just not the only reason I’m writing this), it’s that this is everywhere.

The Power Law/Pareto principle says that 80% of outputs (in pretty much any system) come from 20% of the inputs.

What’s even more interesting, is within that 20% of inputs, there’s a power law of its own!

Put more simply:

20% input accounts for 80% output

and of that 20% input:

16% input accounts for 16% output

4% input accounts for 64% output

So showing that on its own:

80% input → 20% output

16% input → 16% output

4% input → 64% output

What Does It All Mean Bazzle?

Most people (80%) take more than they give.

Some people (16%) give and take at a roughly equal amount.

A few people (4%) give WAY MORE than they take.

The Elon Musks of the world are in the 4%, and any people you see arguing on Twitter about inequality are in the 80%.

It’s the reason startups are awesome (no dead weight), everyone is ideally in the 4%.

It’s the reason you hire a 40 year old over a 25 year old (the average 40 year old is in the 4% more than the average 25 year old).

It’s also the reason why we can’t have an equity-based society.

In the Communism example, if everyone was capable of outputting the same amount, MAYBE everyone wouldn’t have starved to death. The personal incentives are gone, but people could at least feed themselves, right?

But that wasn’t the case. We saw what happened. Not that.

If we use my above example, 20% of people could at least produce enough to survive. 80% of people could not.

In Communism, we did achieve an “equitable outcome”. Everyone died.

Why Equity Doesn’t Work

Equity assumes we are all capable of outputting the same amount, and that it’s systemic problems that keep some people from outputting “their potential”. It purports that economic incentives (property ownership) promote inequity/inequality, rather than the obvious reality that people are just different, and property is actually just an incentive for the productive people to be productive.

In practice, most people could not even produce enough for themselves.

You need that productive 20% to create enough value for the 80%, because the 80% cannot create sufficient value to offset removing the incentives for the 20%.

Using more basic math to explain bad incentives:

With incentives

With the right incentives, 20% of people create 80 value points, 80% of people create 20 value points.

80 value points from the 20%

20 value points from the 80%

= 100 value points

Without Incentives

With no incentives, 20% of people create 20 value points (enough to eat), 80% of people create 20 value points.

20 value points from the 20%

20 value points from the 80%

= 40 value points

60 less value points, which in this example, means most people starve.

Without incentives, you cannot have a society. Much like everything that fails to account for second order effects, it’s a bad framework.

What Do Incentives Have To Do With My Stolen Motorcycle?

EVERYTHING!

No, but quite a bit.

Remember, we defined three parts to a working social contract:

• You play by its rules

• You generate value for it

• You benefit from it in exchange for the created value

These aren’t arbitrary, independent things. They are linked.

Generating value is tied to getting benefits.

Those benefits can only exist if they are protected by rules.

No rules → no value generation

Without rules, you end up with the same outcome as communism: the 4% are disincentivized from producing in excess.

When proper rules are in place, incentives are protected enough for the 4% to feel justified in spending time + money + energy to generate excess value, because they get rich in the process.

That excess value trickles down so everyone gets to eat (benefits from the system), and the people creating that excess value get yachts.

People hate the rich, but for the most part, if there is a billionaire, they created value for 1,000,000,000 people, and you can thank incentives for that (and the rules that protect those incentives).

Unless you’ve never used a computer, oil, social media, transportation, etc. you have no grounds to talk about billionaires being unjustly wealthy, because you made them that way by giving them money for the value they generated for you.

So coming back to the motorcycle. Stealing my motorcycle challenges the incentive system, and thus the value generation system.

I’m not saying I’m a billion dollar person, at least not yet, but I definitely strive to be in the 4%, and when property I acquire with my monetary rewards from generating value isn’t protected, I feel less inclined to pursue more rewards, leading me to generate less value.

In a good system, value and incentives are at least a linear relationship. I get more money when I create more value, so I’m incentivized to create more value.

Everyone wins.

That’s capitalism.

The Outcome of Stealing On Incentives and Value Generation

Said more simply/confusingly: you steal my motorcycle, I produce less because my belief in the protection of my incentives shrinks, and in turn, I generate less value.

In more general terms, when criminals steal, they not only break the social contract, they break the rules that protect incentives, undermining the system it upholds.

If that system which guarantees incentives for value generation, breaks down, meaning less value is generated overall, the 80% suffer most because of it, because they’re the ones who benefit most from it by getting to not starve.

And you thought a Russian doll of stolen vehicles in Oakland was ironic.

That is why we have to be tough on crime, and it’s why young people, who don’t produce anything or appreciate the purpose of the rules should never be in charge.

A Happy (?) Ending

The new zeitgeist is that private property is only wrong if it was acquired wrongly. If you’re doing too well, or you don’t have a month arbitrarily named after an arbitrary thing about you that you didn’t choose, you acquired it wrongly.

Every bad thing that happens to you is at a minimum your problem, and more often than not, justice. You stole your success, so your stuff being taken by someone who was oppressed by you in the process deserves your stuff.

I don’t understand the rules because they literally don’t make sense, but from the communist lens, they at least can be explained (doesn’t make them sensible).

Economies don’t work when productive people know that when they acquire property, that property can be taken away from them.

People stop working as hard. People stop buying goods. Economies stop working when that happens, and the people at the bottom suffer the most.

Striving to create more value than is expected of you is the most noble pursuit, because you are striving to at least be less burdensome, if not actively contributing to make the pie bigger for those who are just here to eat.

Comforts only exist because someone who actually did something in the world generated enough stability for that luxury to be available.

But that is not the default in society.

Without incentives and protection of those incentives, no one benefits from the system. Not the 20%, not the 80%.

The 20% might survive because they do things. The 80% almost certainly will not.

In the 3 weeks it took to edit this post, two burglars broke into my apartment building and stole $10,000 worth of our bikes. The motorcycle is currently being rebuilt.