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To be fair, every one of the scammers who targets my elderly dad is either indian or mexican, so it wouldn't swing the balance that far back. Whenever they call while I'm over I get to learn some fantastic retro racial slurs from the 60s.
But, like, how many people scammed out of a hundred bucks is worth one 7-11 clerk executed in cold blood even after giving up the cash, or being lit on fire with gasoline or having bleach poured down her throat?
A lot of the anger at the media for not covering this stuff isn't the scale so much as the sheer hideous and callous evil of it, which they ignore to chase made up stories about white frat bros lighting a chick's hijab on fire.
The financial crimes equivalent would be the whole media totally ignoring Bernie Madoff in favor of writing a thousand pieces about some white bartender who was rumored to have under-reported his tips to the IRS, which I think people would get equally upset about.
Actuary tables put the (economic) value of a life at somewhere under $10 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States
Note that the federal govt.'s figure of ten million dollars is based on revealed-preference studies that estimate how much money the average person theoretically is willing to spend in order to save his own life, not on economic studies that estimate the present value of an average person's expected future earnings (or net tax revenue).
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That leads to the question is many people scammed for small amounts is equal to one person killed in cold blood in terms of loss of quality of life and externalities. But this is not an apples to apples comparison. The serial scammer would not be listed under homicide stats but somewhere else. If you just limit it to homicides or assault, then Sailer is right.
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