BY WOSSENSEGED ASSEFA
At the end of the street sits a small shop. It has small blue neon flickering light reading “Grab Pay and Go”. To the common eye, it may seem like an ordinary neighborhood shop, but that is soon to be revealed to be far from the truth. The closer you get the more unique it becomes. First, you notice that there is no security guard nearby. ‘Maybe he went inside the shop’, you think. You open the grey colored wood-framed glass door and peer inside. What you see baffles you. In every other shop, you have been to there was a cashier standing inside and a few cameras scattered here and there. In this unique shop though you see a big whiteboard in place of a cashier with the words “Grab what you want, put the money in the box at the corner, thank you and see you soon” written on it. This is what a Scandinavian friend of mine told me while describing what a shop in his home country neighborhood looked like.
While the genuineness of the story can be put up for debate, there is a much bigger lesson at hand. When looked at closely there are at least two ways this shop is benefiting the owner, the customer and the economy as a whole. First, let us assume the price of a bar of soap in the shop was 5$. The Scandinavian shop had no cameras, cashiers or guards since people were supposedly honest, they paid the price (5$) for the product they took. If this was practiced in our country, it would lead to many businesses failing and shutting down since theft would be commonplace. Because of our dishonesty, as any rational human being would do, the owner is forced to set up security parameters. These include the aforementioned cameras, cashier and guard, which end up being extra costs. Since these things are an extra cost to the owner the weight of their cost is distributed throughout the products, meaning the bar of soap’s price goes up a dollar without its value increasing at all. If you are the dishonest person this will affect you first and foremost because there is an avoidable cost that you will be paying from your own pocket. And since one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel other honest members of society also share the burden and pay the unnecessary costs that come with dishonesty. And therefore in theory, by being honest the Scandinavians have successfully eliminated extra costs that come from sources that don’t add value to the product. That is benefit number one.
The second thing to look at is the wastage of human capital and potential. The cashier and guard hired in the shop are there to stop people who would act dishonestly; they do not add any value to the products in the store. Using our previous example this means they are there to simply stop the soap from being stolen, they do not make the soap better at killing germs, smell better or become less toxic. So, because of the act of dishonesty, two valuable labors are lost, and although they could have been adding value to a product that could help society they are there babysitting. When this is multiplied by millions of stores and shops with cashiers and guards the cost of dishonesty becomes rather weighty. By being honest the Scandinavians have avoided unnecessary costs and at the same time used labor to produce value. That is benefit number two.
I first noticed this price being paid when I was a teacher, a few years back. I had a colleague who was a well versed high school English teacher who had a very loud voice. The school had some common rules like; ‘Don’t wear lipstick’ and ‘No long nails’. The students weren’t very happy with the rules so they did what the rules told them not to. After some time, the school administration decided to enforce the rules and decided to choose a teacher that would fit the job of law enforcement and since my colleague had a loud and law enforcing voice he was chosen and given a raise with the title “administrator” added to his name. This of course made him happy, but what the school administrators did not understand was that they had lost a person who was adding value to their students’ English. English is a subject a lot of our students struggle with, and the position change meant they lost a competent teacher of a very valuable subject. On top of this, his income raise also meant that the students’ parents would now pay more to accommodate that. Our students, by being dishonest, lost a value-adding teacher and increased costs for their parents.
It is logical to assume that when the number of criminals decreases the number of crimes and law enforcers also decrease and in a country where dishonesty was never heard of; there would be no need for law enforcers. If there were no corruption, there would be no need for the anti-corruption organization. People would be obeying the law by themselves. On top of that, the financing going to law enforcement would be used in material providence and social equality. Both material deprivation and especially inequality have long been known as contributing factors in crime, therefore, it should not be surprising that there is a strong relationship between inequality and violent crime across countries.
If honesty was prevalent there would be no crimes and the number of police officers being recruited will dwindle and with the low rate of crime being committed; people who would have previously been police officers will start working on something else that would be value-creating. Their labor would be used up in economic sectors like construction, transportation, agriculture etc…. This is basically hitting two birds with one stone. On one hand, we have the cost going into law enforcement flowing into other productive sectors of a country and on the other hand, we have more productive manpower which includes both the “criminals” and the “police”. But because of our lack of discipline and prevalence of dishonesty; a person with unmined potential wastes their labor on guarding us and preventing dishonesty.
A recent study from the University of Helsinki examined the Nordic record on homicide. On the one hand, these countries have some of the lowest murder rates in the world, ranging from about 0.5 per 100,000 people in Norway to about 1.6 in Finland. On the other, Nordic clearance rates (the number of murders that result in an arrest) were as follows: In Iceland, 100 percent; in Finland, 99 percent; in Norway and Denmark, 97 percent; and in Sweden, 83 percent. These countries also have many fewer police relative to their population and vastly fewer people in prison.
Commonly countries celebrate the increase of their police force as if it were a sign of security. This may seem true but what the increase in the police force suggests is a prevalence of dishonesty and hints the losses that the country is entertaining. This however does not by any means mean that we as a society do not need police or law enforcing officials. The need for the police will always be here since the evil side of human beings is here to stay. The point being made is that in a disciplined society like that of the Scandinavian countries; the cost of law enforcement or in other words the cost of dishonesty is highly minimized, and maybe we as a society could learn from them to diminish the price we pay for our dishonesty, because as Rita Mae Brown puts it, “The price of dishonesty is self-destruction”.
Stay Safe!
The Ethiopian herald January 14/2021
