White collar criminals

                After reading the article from the Political Economy Research Institute I began to think about the cost of this sort of publication on public health and welfare.  While we are often able to focus on the human cost of a homicide (as we saw earlier in the semester in the Philidelphia homicide data) it is difficult to think about the widespread cost of white collar crime.  The U.S. Department of Justice quantified the monetary cost of white collar crime at anywhere from 400 billion to 1.7 trillion dollars.  Being that I cannot adequately express what that amount of money may do to a human being I thought about a much smaller example, comparatively so, of white collar crime in recent years.  Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme cost his investors over 64 billion dollars and financially crippled more than 2,400 (the other half of Madoff’s clientele are reported to have not been injured financially).  Add to this minor financial issue that his actions were the estimated cause of three different suicides, including his own son, and the toll seems worse still.  As a result of the Grecian austerity measures there were a total of five homicides during the riots and the suicide rate has doubled prior to before the announcement of the measures.  I suppose that if we were to directly attribute just these five homicides indirectly to Rogoff and Reinhart then we could say that they were only the catalyst for 2.5 deaths each and that doesn’t seem quite as bad as Madoff’s crime.  Does it?

http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal#Suicides

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=167026