“The Voyeur’s Motel” is a New Yorker story mostly about sex. But the subject of this blog posting is a section buried in the middle:
[The voyeur, who ran a motel in Colorado,] also got bored with cataloguing his guests’ dishonesty. They sometimes tried to cheat him out of the room rent, and hardly a week passed without his witnessing instances of chicanery. One working-class couple asked him for a few days’ grace period to pay their bill. Foos spied on them the next day and heard the husband tell the wife, “The dumb guy in the office thinks I have a check coming in from Chicago, and we will fool him the same way we did the motel in Omaha.” Foos locked the people out of their room and kept their possessions until they paid him.
Diary excerpt: “Conclusion: Thousands of unhappy, discontented people are moving to Colorado in order to fulfill that deep yearning in their soul, hoping to improve their way of life, and arrive here without any money and discover only despair. . . . Society has taught us to lie, steal, and cheat, and deception is the paramount prerequisite in man’s makeup. . . . As my observation of people approaches the fifth year, I am beginning to become pessimistic as to the direction our society is heading, and feel myself becoming more depressed as I determine the futility of it all.”
These experiences prodded Foos to concoct an “honesty test.” He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in, he would say to Donna, in the guest’s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside. Foos then watched from the attic as the new guest found the suitcase and deliberated over whether to break the lock and look inside or return the suitcase to the motel office.
Out of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact. The others all opened the suitcase and then tried to dispose of it in different ways. The minister pushed the suitcase out the bathroom window into the bushes.
A lot of U.S. government programs are set up with the idea that Americans are fundamentally honest. Offering enhanced payments for disability is not going to change the number of people who seek to collect SSDI (see “Book Review: The Redistribution Recession“). Certainly we wouldn’t ever expect 97 percent of retired government workers to claim disability benefits. Hardly anyone would have sex with a drunken married dentist in order to harvest the $millions in tax-free child support that a Massachusetts or Wisconsin court would hand out. Nobody would work the FMLA to get full-time benefits out of a part-time job. People aren’t going to work in cash jobs in order to remain eligible for free public housing.
Readers: What do you think? Do we trust this motel owner’s data? If the data are right, is much of the current U.S. system set up improperly?
Related:
Check out the book “Liars and Outliers” by Bruce Schneier
The problem is that America was founded and populated initially by people from relatively high-trust societies, but then they let it fill up with Italians and whatnot.
http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/04/15/where-trust-is-high-crime-and-corruption-are-low/
Compared to what?
Compared to Americans 100 years ago, definitely.
Compared to Americans 30 years ago, somewhat.
Compared to citizens of some other countries, yes.
Compared to citizens of most other countries, no.
Only if self-deception is included as a form of dishonesty are Americans leaders in it.
Yeah, there were never any con men in America until those eye-talians started showing up. If 97% of the recipients of a certain program are cheating, this is being done with the implicit consent of the administrators – they know better than anyone not to trust the recipients but the system must be set up so that they benefit from it too, or at least are not being harmed by it.
Phil,
It seems to boil down to character and ambition, or lack thereof. Lots of Federal assistance programs are based on honesty from the applicant, and I think we’ve seen ad nauseum that an honesty-based system is a farce in our country.
Coming from a rural area where many people’s life goal is to “get on disability”, I would answer your question with a resounding YES. As in yes, many among us are crooks.
There needs to be a thorough investigation before these various Federal, state and even local subsidies are bestowed upon seemingly every other person in America.
But if we do that, we’ll be warned of people dying in the streets from starvation and exposure from our well-meaning liberal cohorts, not to mention being called racists and other cute names.
Off topic, but I’ve never understood how being illegal could yet somehow be legal?!
Only in America.
It’s hard to be god, isn’t it, motel managers and journalists? Humans, and, it seems, in particular drifters pushed out of California, are so disappointing.
The classic question is whether you leave your car and front door unlocked. Where I grew up, we did. Not sure what’s the case these days. How are things in Cambridge?
Here’s another moral dilemma more suited for the current audience: If you got a letter of admission to Harvard and you knew they were 100% mistaken about it, would you tell them or would you accept? Full scholarship, of course.
Maybe that would be an interesting next experiment. Call the New Yorker.
Based on SuperMike’s comment, I conclude that Americans are not only dishonest but some are also racist revisionists who think that early European arrivals were so much better for destroying Indigenous people and taking their land before the whatnots arrived.
In terms of dishonesty, I think the biggest moral failures are at the macro, not micro level. The big lies serve only to inspire the minister in the hotel. The top remaining presidential candidates are awful moral examples. So yes, I would trust the hotel owner’s data. And yes, things are set up improperly. And no, I don’t think it is going to get better any time soon.
Tom, given that Harvard is the Slytherin of the Ivies, the letter of admission is not in error, it is a test of your moral appropriateness for the institution.
BTW, I’m currently a full time DCE student at Harvard.
Good point, David. Accepting also provides Big Slytherin with some discreet future leverage, particularly if the error is glaringly obvious. Everybody wins.
philg: “Are Americans fundamentally dishonest?”
Basing the existence of a “fundamental” property on a few cherry-picked examples is kind of a lie (or an example of poor understanding of statistics).
philg: “Certainly we wouldn’t ever expect 97 percent of retired government workers to claim disability benefits.”
This is a similar lie too.
Based on some comments here and what happened in the USA in the last 10 years I would say that stealing people’s land/money/properties is not dishonest. Is just the puritan way of doing business. Nobody in the big financial firms who created the recession got punished. They just paid a fine without admitting any wrongdoing. Cheating on your spouse though is a completely different story. Now that’s dishonesty!
Honesty is the only policy for live an ideal life. Not only fundamentally but also totally honesty can do it. And you are right that US people are fundamentally honest.
Supermike – isn’t that survey a chicken-and-egg situation? Is it surprising that in countries with lower crime and lower corruption people are more trusting of each other?
David – since the original white supremacist version of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus occupied my mind first (as instructed by my public school primary education), doesn’t it half the right to that territory indefinitely?
Dan – stealing people’s money / land / properties is standard procedure for the government as long as enough people agree to it.
Sam
https://biz.yahoo.com/wallstreet/071214/sb119760031991928727_id.html?.v=1
Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were “very” or “extremely” willing to marry for money.
Of course, when the mercenary marriage proves disappointing, there’s always divorce. Among the women in their twenties who said they would marry for money, 71% said they expected to get divorced — the highest of any demographic. Only 27% of men in their 40s expected to divorce.
Says Mr. Prince: “For these women, it’s just another step on their journey to the good life. They want to be paid what they think they’re worth and then move on.”
Welfare programs and honors systems amenities and benefits only work for a generation, maybe two. After 30 years any system that can be riddled with parasites, probably will be riddled with parasites.
I feel exposed to be in a position to decide. I would need a quick and fast standard for honesty. The kind for a suitacase in a short stay motel supposedly with hidden cash.
I then have to deliver a public service, you say. Given: only 1 out of 7 citizens can be trusted. First, I would be completely crushed. The accountability! I can hardly trust myself to mange my own affair.
Fewer and fewer people would go along if I just pull a few words from some big books.
Let’s have some small books. The officials could publish complied stories of government benefits frauds.
How did each of the two suitcase (with locks intact) returners decide?
I was in the room when someone said last night:
We have smart people. They didn’t do anything (so far). Perhaps we have to work together. Committment and agreements. Oh, the trust that would require.
is much of the current U.S. system set up improperly?
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Foos’s “honesty test” is pretty extreme. A friend summarized his view of human nature: “10% of people will never steal anything, ever. 10% will steal everything that isn’t nailed down. It’s the 80% in the middle that you need to keep an eye on.”
If 2 out of 15 people passed on the chance to steal a thousand dollars, demonstrating their complete honesty, that’s better than 10%.
An example of how inefficient a low-trust society can be (from Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay):