Finance Profits a Ripoff?

Yglesias » The Economics of Ripoffs:

The great genius of capitalism is facilitating mutually beneficial exchanges. I want a can of Diet Coke more than I want 8 pesos, so I hand 8 pesos over to a shopkeeper and he hands me a can of Diet Coke. Win-win. Then there’s fraud where you outright lie about what’s happening. That we understand, and it’s generally illegal.
But there’s this whole other world where, to a greater or a lesser extent, one party to the transaction is getting ripped off. We know this stuff happens. People buy lottery tickets, people put tokens into slot machines, and people pay fortune tellers. You can model all this behavior as self-interested and mutually beneficial by simply asserting that the people buying tickets are obtaining some large quantity of subjective utility from the lottery, but I think examining lottery marketing tends to cut against this interpretation. And this can move up from the realm of pure gambling. I saw a TV ad the other day marketing life insurance to AARP members. The idea of life insurance is that average payouts are less than average premiums (hence profit), but this bad investment may still be a good idea for your family because the economic impact of the loss of a breadwinner will be so devastating. But the whole logic of life insurance completely fails to apply to retired people.
I thought of this all recently in terms of continuing discussions of the mysterious sky-high profitability of the financial sector.
We often have this conceit that ripoffs are an economically marginal phenomenon that applies to, sure, tourists and gambling addicts and maybe naive poor people going to see tarot card readers. But if you look at the price premium people are willing to pay for “organic”-labeled products and the dubious science behind the theory that these products are superior to conventional varieties, I think it’s clear that yuppies aren’t immune to getting ripped off, either. And I think we should be open to the possibility that this is happening in finance. How much do the sundry pension fund beneficiaries, 401(k) holders, endowed nonprofit managers, etc. of the world really know about the investment game? Are they really that much more savvy and sophisticated than their working class lottery ticket buying peers? Or does their self-image as savvy sophisticates make them that much more prone to being ripped off? After all, Bernie Madoff was able to swindle a bunch of very sophisticated investors out of a great deal of money. He did it through actual, prosecutable, criminal fraud. But not every scam and ripoff is a fraud, and not everything that’s legal is a mutually beneficial transaction.