“It’s absolutely amazing, but under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit.” Thus spoke accountant Leo Bloom, played in The Producers (1968) by the much-mourned Gene Wilder. In Bloom’s thought experiment, a dishonest producer would raise a vast sum by selling the profits of a Broadway show many times over. Provided the Broadway show was a flop, nobody would come looking for their share of the profits and the fraudsters could retire to Rio. If the show was a hit, of course, “well, then you’d go to jail”. That was where Bloom and his partner Max Bialystock ended up: their musical, Springtime for Hitler, was far too good.
In the real world, people tend not to become richer when they do a worse job. There are exceptions, of course. In 2013, a jury found that Fabrice Tourre, formerly a trader at Goldman Sachs, had misled investors about the nature of “Abacus”, a complex financial security — and done so because that was his job. Abacus was, like Springtime for Hitler, a bet on collapse mis-sold to investors who did not seem to fully understand it.
Both cases are extreme examples of “moral hazard” — the odd phrase that economists have taken up to describe perverse incentives that encourage people to be careless, reckless or even outright saboteurs. Moral hazard traditionally applies in insurance cases, and indeed recent reports from Vietnam describe a woman who cut off her hand and foot in an attempt to collect a six-figure payout from her insurance company. There was a rash of such self-harming frauds in the Florida panhandle 50 years ago.