So, does crime pay?

Does crime pay? Can you get away with murder?

These are important and unsettled question in public health, government, public policy, social and economic development, religious studies, banking, personal ethics, and corporate ethics.

Furthermore, these are questions that should be amenable to systematic study and evidence gathering by scientific researchers.

One thing is certainly clear, regarding this type of crime or terrorism in general - it's probably way more cost-effective to stop the behavior before it begins than try to intercept it mid-stream. Once criminals take power, it's hard to unseat them from the outside. And, so far as the rule of thumb is correct that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," this is a closed reinforcing feedback loop, where power leads to corruption that, in the short run, leads to more wealth and more power, etc.

For all their downsides, people who believe firmly in a Final Judgment by God and in the idea of hell and eternal damnation are probably less likely to commit crimes or fall into corrupt practices than those who don't believe there is accountability because they haven't seen it yet.

Again, we have multiple systems thinking concepts intertwined in this discussion. The big ones off the top of my head are:

Is there a negative (discouraging or punishing) feedback loop in society that is not obvious to casual inspection? (in this life, not in the next one, as that one is hard to observe directly.)

If there is such a loop, with "lags" and "amplification", so that it arrives finally "with a vengeance", who ends up in the line of fire? The person? The person and family? Anyone in the vicinity? The corporation? The neighborhood? The culture? The whole country? The whole planet and all Homo sapiens? The whole galaxy?

If there is such an echoing loop of any type, can we say anything more about the behavior? Is there rapid gain from a crime, followed by it slowly eroding? Is there rapid gain, followed by an oscillating instability that decays over time? Is there rapid gain, followed by rapid loss and an escalating oscillilation that results in destruction? What? Or is the response of the world purely random and what we see is what we get? Is there gain in this life, but then payment for bad karma in multiple successive lives?

If there is a downside, what is the mechansm of "enforcement" or delivery? Do crimes against people or humanity result in some internal change ("guilt"?) that drags people down? Or some external change ("loss of trust") that drags people down physiologically? Or some external change (loss of social capital and direct investment) that slowly sinks the whole environment?
Or what? Are socially destructive people, like pathogens that destroy our own bodies, somehow flagged ("opsonized") somehow for later neutralization and removal by some other agents, besides the local "justice system", effectively a social immune system?

As with evaluation of any action, the value of the result is probably context dependent and almost certainly boundary dependent and scale-dependent. Viewed locally, at short range, one answer may be obvious. Viewed at mid range, other answers may be obvious. Viewed at very long range, yet different answers may be obtained by competent observers and researchers.
This effect needs to be accounted for in evaluating observations.

So, a king could take some action against a neighboring country that, in the short run, appeared to gain territory or wealth, but in reality turned all the other previously neutral countries against that king, so that, long term, the king's reign was cut short. A tactical victory, but a strategic catastrophe.

Every military strategist knows that it is possible to win a battle but lose the war. In fact, it's possible to win every battle and still lose the war. I used to teach the board game "Go" at Cornell, and MBA's would consistently lose that way - they would focus on short term material gain, ignoring entirely long-range positional loss, and then, after winning a series of battles (by their flawed accounting system), they would suddenly realize that they had lost the entire game. No wonder this game was a required skill of all Japanese Samurai soldiers.

So, are kings, corrupt politicians, organized crime bosses "winning" or "losing"? That's an interesting question that can be studied. I'm not sure it has been.

And, even if it is 100% certain that some behaviors lead to a short-term benefit but a long-term disaster, people go ahead and do them. Smoking is a prime example.

What's the answer? Various people have various opinions. This is a very hard question to answer scientifically with existing concepts and measurement tools. Many CEO's or their large stockholders and investment companies would love to know the answer to this question, but haven't yet turned to "public health" as the researchers to go find out the answer for them.

Ineresting question, though.

(Image by Darco TT )