I know somebody whose husband invested all his savings with Bernie Madoff. Imagine that plot twist: you discover one day, by reading the paper, that you'd exchanged the product of years and years of your luck and labor for a few nonsensical annual reports. Now you start over again, from zero, at age 45, assuming you have a job. Hearing this story moderates my urge to complain. I get monthly statements showing shrinking balances, and still have the hope, at times faint and distant, that the diminishing assets will one day have a cash value for somebody. My money story is like a tentative diagnosis by a doctor who wants to cheer me (and the economy) up. My friend’s husband got the definitive death sentence.

What do you think when you hear you’ve been robbed? There are economists who hold to the theory of rational choice, and I guess they would say that the Madoff victims got, in exchange for their money, something of value: a comforting illusion that they were doing better than almost anyone else. If they had been eaten by a dinosaur last summer, they would at least have died rich (not really, but in their own imaginings, and in the dinosaur's belly, who's to contradict your fantasy?). Think of all the things that an investor would do if the Fates permitted time travel, but had set down as a rule that the outcome of your financial strategy must be a total loss by September 1, 2008.

Rather than reward so richly Madoff’s annual reports, with their clumsy accounting and amateurish prose, you might support a number of MFA creative-writing students; some of them could probably turn out a fair-to-middling birthday ode for somebody you know. If you want to do good in a Benthamite way, my suggestion for the greatest benefit to the greatest number is clean-water projects in poor countries. Hundreds of early deaths averted, over a decade, for capping a spring in one village: that would be a nice placement for five hundred bucks, if you could fly back to 1998 and write the check.

The small children who are the quickest to die from water-borne disease would soon, since you prevented their pitiful death and burial, be crowding the benches on the village school. If there is a village school, that is. Take twenty thousand and run to 2003, to be there for the kindergarten class.

Kids learn better on a full stomach. Set aside a regular amount for rice and beans to be ladled out at noon. You’ve now freed their parents from some amount of worry. They can use the energy to think about things a step or two removed from survival. Maybe some of the resulting ideas will add to the social capital of the village and make life better.

Oh, you forgot to vaccinate the kids. Now that more of them are making it past their third year, that’s an added cost, but a nice problem to have, assuming that you think human life is worth the annoyance of living. The babies of 1998 are turning into eleven-year-olds. They need outlets for their energy. You should have bought more soccer balls instead of loading up on Rolexes for Bernie.

This starts to sound like Sim City. Still, it’s better than a big box of bupkes.

Of course there are theories that say that the creation of liquidity is a good in itself, and that even the Madoff scam had the effect of making people feel rich, so that they spent, and the money they spent cycled around the economy, benefiting the Rolex man, the immigrant dishwasher in the fancy restaurant, the mortgage officer, etc. But you probably wouldn’t have chosen to benefit that network of individuals in preference to all others if you had known what you know now.

Maybe I should behave as if I knew what I am imagining the Madoff victims should have known, and think of my savings as embarked on a one-way voyage to Bupkestan, and not the enhanced round-trip that I’d been taught to expect all through a life lived in relative boom times. Behavior that might seem irrational becomes rational under different conditions of knowledge. (If that knowledge is knowledge.) Come what may, the clean-water projects are getting continued checks from me, until the day I need somebody to install one in my own village.