Patrick McKenzie

What do you want from me?

In one sense, that's money laundering, if the original money was the proceeds of crime.

In another sense, that's how every real estate transaction goes down at those scales.

And so often a facility at money laundering is one facility at operating the economy plus

you know, willingness to do that to hide the proceeds of some other crime.

I think I would be really good at money laundering.

I'm glad I haven't done it professionally, but it's fascinating intellectually.

Previous communications departments I've worked at probably explicitly anti-endorse that sense.

What can one do?

So I think interestingly, here is one of those places where culture is not necessarily merely the error term, but is actually descriptive in some ways.

Without pointing fingers at particular examples, because it gets contentious, there are some cultures in the world that institutionally have adopted more of a

how do you put it, pro-capitalist, pro-mercantilist, et cetera, like less of an ingrained skepticism regarding like earning money and accumulating resources as goal.

And there's other cultures which have an extreme ingrained skepticism about earning money and accumulating resources as a plausible goal.

And those cultures generate people who have very different negotiation strategies.

And when you, like, impact people with different negotiation strategies against, like, the reality of a well-operated, I don't know, Google, for example, they arrive at very different numbers.

What's the, is it Amy Chua who wrote Market Dominant Minorities, a piece about, a book about that subject, etc.

?

One of the things in that is that, you know, like...

all people are equal in the eyes of God and hopefully in the eyes of the law, but, uh, like, uh, not all cultures like physically make the same decisions with regards to the same, the same facts on the ground.

And that causes some disparity outcomes.