Who cheats?

By Stephen J. Dubner

Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself: I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t.

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavour. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names – inside-trading CEOs, pill-popping ballplayers and perk-abusing politicians – who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the WalMart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him.

Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security Number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children – children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms – vanished, representing about one in 10 of all dependent children in the U.S.

Stephen J. Dubner is the author of the national best-seller Turbulent Souls, which was based on a cover story he wrote for The New York Times Magazine (where he has been a contributor since 1994). He is also the co-author of Freakonomics, in which he and Steven D. Levitt set out to explore the hidden side of... well, everything. You can read more about Stephen J. Dubner at www.stephenjdubner.com.

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