Tyler Cowen: only ~76k real hackers exist, mostly government — why cyber losses stay contained
joshua_saxe · x · 2026-10-30
Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution), drawing on security researcher Joshua Saxe's analysis, argues cybercrime losses stay lower than expected because criminals aren't the imaginary MIT-genius adversaries:
- Modeling estimates 720,000 people in the online criminal economy, 90% in scam/fraud call-center operations (some human-trafficked).
- Of 76k actual hackers, the vast majority work for governments; of the remaining few thousand criminal hackers, most do ransomware.
- Criminal orgs must base in middle/lower-income countries (fraud call centers in Nigeria, ransomware kids in Belarus's informal economy), where attacker wages relative to local defaults cap talent quality — a lower-skill demographic, not the 'Waluigi twins' of AI safety imagination.
- Supply-side bottlenecks on both ends explain why cybersecurity losses aren't worse.
The post includes wage-comparison charts and praises Saxe's fuller write-up.
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