Your reminder about Gladwell telling the NYC story in Tipping Point is a good one.

I think another important issue in the US is the lack of a decision making group that can actually decide. APACS played a key role in running the project office leading up to the UK decision and something similar happened with Interac in Canada. There’s nothing really similar (effectively “above V/MC”) in the US.

As for the “broken window” concept, it reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s observations in his “Tipping Point” book about crime in the NY subways before and after they made a concerted effort to clean up grafitti on the trains. It’s not just a matter of tolerating crime. The fact that crime is tolerated encourages more, and of varied kinds.

Here’s one more point about indirect impacts that might help make the case for trying to control fraud with Chip & PIN or other techniques. There seems to be increasing attention paid to fighting money laundering that feeds money to drug cartels and terrorist organizations. Perhaps some research is needed on quantifying how much credit card fraud goes to fund other crime?

By the way, I like Dave Birch’s idea that we should be looking at a replacement for payment cards, instead of continuing to try to make old technology work.