You may remember Aaron Clarey — also known as “Captain Capitalism” — as one of the random manospherians interviewed for the cinematic abomination known as The Sarkeesian Effect. I don’t quite remember if he made it into the final cut of the official, er, “film.” He definitely did appear in Davis Aurini’s bootleg version, pontificating about the alleged lack of ethics in American journalism while, for some unknown reason, wearing a cravat.
Turns out that Mr. Clarey’s definition of “ethics” is a rather unique one.
On Monday, Clarey encouraged his blog readers to take advantage of a unique opportunity to earn some sweet, sweet cash — helping students cheat their way through college by writing their essays and term papers for them.
Clarey posted a pitch from his apparent pal Aleksey Bashtavenko, the head of something called Academic Composition, who started off by thanking Clarey for sending so many aspiring , er, ghostwriters his way in the past.
I’d like to personally thank Aaron and all of you who follow his blog Captain Capitalism, you guys have been the main driving force behind the recent growth of our enterprise.
After a slow summer, “Alex” reported,
we’re definitely getting much busier and this may well be our most lucrative semester yet.
Quite a few people have inquired about job opportunities with us and we weren’t able to receive help from all of you. Yet, we could definitely use all of the support we can get. Within a month, we will be entering the busiest juncture of the academic year and it will last all the way through the end of 2016.
As you can see, he’s all about the high-quality prose.
Alex, who claims his “full-time writers earn over $3,000 per month,” also has some job openings in the Craigslist spamming “subcontracting” department as well.
We’re also looking to expand our ranks of Craigslist subcontractors. Many of you have been posting for us regularly and invariably, this helped us get to where we are today. We pay $5 for each lead our subcontractors generate and another $1 for each day your ads have been live.
Presumably Clarey is getting paid for posting this. Is there anyone in the manosphere who isn’t some kind of grifter?
@ Policy of Madness
Thanks for that explanation. Social good being equal to shareholder value is certainly an… interesting point of view, but I can well believe it’s one adhered to by many people. Sounds like we need some more research into the relationship between the two!
And I didn’t know the high salaries don’t even necessarily accomplish what they’re intended to for the employers – that was interesting.
@Neremanth
The relationship isn’t completely nonsense. It’s true that when a group of people gets more stuff, they are more prosperous as a whole. So if you measure the amount of stuff a country has, you can estimate how well the people in that country are doing. When shareholder value goes up, the total amount of “stuff” that society as a whole possesses also goes up. Obviously, though, the problem arises because the stuff isn’t distributed equally, so “society” can be improved without all individuals in society being improved by the same measure.
It makes sense if you think of economics as a branch of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is the classical “the most good for the most people” moral system, but there’s a problem with it in that one can’t calculate “the most good” without being able to compare good across different people. But that’s impossible. I can rank what I like and tell you that I like one thing more than another thing, but I can’t rank my tastes and yours and say that I like this thing more than you like it. That can’t be done.
Economics solves this problem by subbing in money as a measure of happiness. If I am willing to pay $2 for something, and you are only willing to pay $1, then I must want it twice as much as you do, and so the most good in the world is accomplished if I am the one who gets it.
If you take that to its logical conclusion, all goods should go to the person willing to pay the most for them, because that person is the one who wants them the most and will get the most happiness out of them. Happiness could be maximized if everything in the world accrues to the richest person in the world, so long as that person was willing to actually pay the most money for those things.
How many problems are there with that statement? But that is the moral system of economics, and economics has powerful influence over our society. This is why one sees GDP used as a measure of a country’s wellbeing. Even if GDP didn’t have a zillion holes in it, there is a problem with using the amount of money slushing around an economy as a measure of how well individual people are doing. It’s an easy number to calculate, though, and economics says, while money isn’t what matters, it’s the most accurate measure of what does matter.
Utilitarianism is pretty fucked up, and we have made an offshoot of it our unofficial state morality.
@Josh
Usually I look up projects and awards and things the company I’m applying to has completed/won. Then when they ask a question like “Why did you apply to work with us?” or something I pull out something like “Well in 2015 your company won the XYZ management award and it seems like a great place to work” or “I was really intrigued by your work on ABC project and would love to get involved with work like that”.
Generally it flatters the people doing the interviewing and shows you did some homework about the company. Seems to work well enough for me, even if it’s not always sincere.
Miggy’s little rant confused me.
If fiat money has no intrinsic value and does not reflect the amount of work put into it, then why does it matter if “wellfare leeches” get given money for free? There’s no intrinsic value to it, and it does not reflect the amount of work put into obtaining it, so it doesn’t matter how it’s distributed, right?
@Neremanth
I’ve never heard vast income disparities justified as a “social good” – which is, oddly, something that seems to imply a social conscience. It’s usually framed in terms of incentives for the individual.
Wages are driven primarily by the availability of labour, rather than a measurable value of work.
So the executive class are utility monsters? I can believe it.
Also, I’m faintly offended that, times being as hard as they are, employers are apparently either still ignorant that they’re holding all the cards, or still suspicious of employees’ loyalty despite having them over the proverbial barrel.
@ Policy of Madness
I see. I didn’t really appreciate that the shareholder value is linked to the amount of stuff in a society.
That’s always been one of my biggest problems with economics, when it moves away from studying the purely financial. Particularly since so many economists seem to forget the part about money being an imperfect proxy when interpreting their results. (My other big problem is the assumption that everyone acts perfectly rationally, and in such a way that things like social approbation and other non-financial things don’t feed into their rational cost-benefit analyses. I know that again this is supposed to be only a simplified model to help in understanding the world, but rarely do I see that recognised when hypotheses are being formulated or results translated into real world conclusions.)
@ Bryce
Indeed, incentives for the individual tends to pop up a lot when people are explaining why some people get paid more than others, but when ethics enter the question, as when discussing the morality of individuals or coroporations using legal loopholes to reduce the amount of tax they pay, people will definitely claim that it is right some people have more than others because they contribute more. I guess in that situation they’re justifying high earners holding onto their salary, not receiving it in the first place, so maybe that’s why the arguments are a bit different?
In STEM jobs, your academic record is often a crucial part of whether you get hired or not because your ability to do the job depends on your understanding of the basic concepts and your writing skills. So STEM companies want to hire people who get good grades (B to A- range for most classes) in both their STEM field and humanities and social science courses.
Most schools report cheating on people’s transcripts, so employers will find out if you cheated in college eventually. In STEM, cheating pretty much means you’re never going to get hired since your skills are strongly connected to your record.
Of course, Clarey is driven by contempt for higher education in the U.S. His goal is to get people to view higher education as a joke and he hates the people he claims to be helping.
Neremanth and PoM, thank you for that very interesting exchange.
I know it’s been touched on in Sci-Fi before (and probably waaaay more than I’ve ever come across in my limited reading) but when I world-build in my head in idle moments one of the things I like to mull over is how to set up an economy – or a parallel economy – in which the currency is time (a bit like what you mentioned, Neremanth). Everybody only has one life, ergo everybody’s time is of equivalent value (which is deemed to increase when you have less of it left, hence an effective retirement age for the elderly).
Everybody regardless of circumstances gets food-clothing-shelter, healthcare and unlimited access to information-education; all adults have to chip in some time to do tasks that are needed for the benefit of society. There’s a sort of computerised bidding system so that if an essential task happens to be liked or at least not-disliked by many (say, maintaining the public gardens or cleaning the streets – in summer) you might need to put in 10 hours a week, but if a task is disliked by most (say, those same things but in winter) its tariff would go up and you’d only need to put in 2 hours a week; you get the idea. Me, I’d run a mile from childminding but I’d happily do some hours of sorting in a recycling centre – that kind of thing. The computer shows what tasks are currently needed in your neighbourhood, what skills and experience each one requires, and what its current “tariff” is, constantly updated.
Of course there would be infinite argument around which tasks should be included! And about how to account for the ones that demand a significant learning curve to be able to do them at all. But in my current imaginary world they include: education, research, healthcare, producing food, and building and cleaning/maintaining infrastructure (including social housing) – the things everybody needs and gets for “free” in this set-up.
The rest of the time people do what they like, which could include both the non-moneymaking and the moneymaking things we do now. It’s just that you don’t get to contribute nothing to social well-being (or even actively detract from it) (by being a hedge fund manager, say, or running AVfM) without incurring widespread public disapproval; your refusal to contribute is in the public domain, so it could impact on your hedgefunding or your shitstirring activities. Obviously children and adults unable to chip in hours (for disability/health reasons etc.) are exempt.
In practice I’m probably never going to write the short story – and I haven’t seen the doubtless infinite holes in the idea – so I just thought I’d chuck it out here for fun. If anyone puts it in a story, let me know! 🙂
@ opposable thumbs
There’s a great story (I think by Asimov) called “No Connection”. It’s set in the far future where bears have evolved to take over from humans.
In their economy there are individual jobs and community jobs. You have to do a combination of both. So if you’re interested in books your individual job might be librarian but you’ll also have to put in a few hours each week on garbage collection (assuming there aren’t any people who want that as their main job)
There’s a nice bit where the protagonist’s kid tries to argue that ‘sleeping’ is an essential community function.
B-b-but sleeping! It are v Important!!!! For maintenance of healthy citizens! :-))))
Sounds like one I’d like to read 🙂 (not huge fan of Asimov lately, but I’ll look out for this one, ta!)
@opposablethumbs –
That sounds like a pretty good system to me, provided you could iron out the kinks!
(Besides the ones you mentioned, a few that occur to me are:
*how do you make sure there are always exactly enough tasks, so that everyone can earn enough credits to meet their social expectations and no tasks go undone because everyone is already earning enough?
*relatedly to this and to your point about the learning curve, what if a point is reached where there are a number of tasks still unclaimed for this week, and a number of people who still need to sign up for tasks, but none of the people can do any of those tasks, whether because they don’t have the skills needed, because they don’t have the physical strength or stamina, because the time clashes with one of their other tasks or other responsibilities, or for some other reason?
*presumably you can also get an exemption for short term illness, e.g. if you have really bad flu one week. What happens if a greater than average number of people are ill in the local area one week: how do you make sure all the tasks get done? What if everyone is unusually healthy one week: how do you make sure everyone can get enough credits?
*how do you make sure adults who are exempt for health reasons aren’t stigmatised?
*while it’s good that there would be exemptions on health grounds, presumably it wouldn’t be a blanket case of “if you have a health condition that means not every task is possible for you, you are exempted from all of them even if there are some you could do”? And for those for whom their health condition doesn’t mean they have issues with specific tasks but with the amount of time they work per week or knowing for sure in advance whether they’ll be up to a particular task on the day, presumably they could have a blanket exemption (or reduction) but still be allowed to take on any tasks they volunteered for as and when they felt up to it?
)
Anyway, I’m sure none of those are insurmountable! I’d love to see that become a reality, or to read something set in a world that uses that system. I’ll have to see if I can track down a copy of the story you mentioned, Alan!
@Neremanth, I think in this version of the Land of Cockaigne if by some chance no tasks at all need done within feasible travelling distance everybody gets a holiday – there isn’t a set minimum number of credits people have to meet per given period of time, it just depends on what’s actually needed. In practice that seems pretty unlikely, though, as there’s always something worth mending or enhancing for the neighbourhood and people who need caring for. Checking in on the lonely among one’s neighbours is part of healthcare (social-healthcare 🙂 )
Maybe at least some of these things might be things people want to do anyway, even though some tasks would be disliked.
There would be a maximum time, though, so that nobody spends more than part of their day/week/month doing things they don’t really want to (maybe with exceptions in case of dire emergency, like a flood or something, when the max could temporarily go up a bit?). Maybe if a task is really hated with a passion (unblocking a sewer?), its tariff goes so high that someone only has to do it for two hours in a month … I wonder if that mechanism would be enough to ensure essential tasks don’t get left undone? Eeehhh, it’s just a utopia-thing I wonder about sometimes late at night … 🙂
But I do think a system where people’s time is what’s valuable is potentially interesting, as it recognises that everybody’s life, and the chance to do as much as possible of what you’d rather do, is equally precious-to-them.
Good point about how would one design the system to take account of the specific nature of somebody’s disabilities. In practice the whole thing would probably be fiendishly complicated (apart from anything else, person A might want to do some hours of childcare but the kids concerned just might not like them. Somehow the system has to take account not only of the amount of time put in but also of the tasks getting done in a way that is satisfactory to everyone else involved …).
Why yes, I probably do witter on in my head far too much, why do you ask 😉
This utopia actually sounds quite a bit like Oz. Everyone works part time doing tasks that are suited to them and there’s not really a money based economy. Sometimes there’s money but it’s not important. Sometimes there is no money at all. Continuity isn’t really the series’ strong suit.
@opposablethumbs –
Those sound like some good ways of dealing with potential problems. Sign me up!
Absolutely! I’m glad it’s not just me.
@weirwoodtreehugger-
Huh. I read all the Oz books a couple of years ago (well, all the ones by Baum anyway) and I either didn’t notice that or don’t remember it for some reason. Looks like it’s time for another read through! (Dorothy/Ozma forever!)
@PoM
I mentioned a major component of how things would have to change recently in another thread, to wit economic democracy. Also a universal basic income. Combine with some changes to eliminate the ‘housing as investment’ issue and you’re well on the right track.
I argue that it’s both possible and useful, if to a limited degree. For instance, people who have a roof over their head and know where their next meal is coming from can safely be assumed happier than people who are sleeping rough and eating what they can beg or scavenge, and furthermore that the increase in happiness going from one state to the other is greater than the increase in happiness of buying a second yacht; thus, a utilitarian argument says we should structure our economy so that everyone has food and shelter, and if rich people are less rich because of that, so be it. You can also look at things like life expectancy, morbidity rates, and other lifestyle indicators as useful proxies, on the grounds once again that a long, healthy life is generally preferred over one cut short by sickness. Can’t be applied to absolutely every aspect of an economy of course, but still useful.
@Neremanth
It really isn’t, despite what the shareholder class and their supporters claim. Or rather, it is, but not in the way they claim.
PoM notes that the standard argument is thus:
This presumes that shareholder value is meaningfully linked to the actual production of goods and services (and furthermore that the goods and services produced are ones that someone needs/wants and can get and use), while this is in fact very often not the case.
Shareholder value is linked to stock price, and stock prices fluctutate for reasons completely unrelated to a company’s actual productivity, based mostly on the seat-of-the-pants opinions of stockbrokers and hedge fund operators, all of whom get a paycheck regardless.
For instance, in the recent housing bubble, a lot of housing got built as an investment, but most of the ‘value’ increase came from trading loan instruments back and forth at ever increasing prices, a side effect of which was dramatically increasing homelessness and the cost burden of housing on the homed, both of which are considerable drags on the economy. This is exacerbated by the fact that most of the money that’s paid in rent and mortgages functionally vanished from the economy to be passed around hedge funds and commercial banks, withough douing any economic work whatsoever along the way.
The bubble before that was the tech bubble; shareholder value exploded for practically any company with ‘Web’ in their name or mission statement, despite the fact that most of them never produced anything whatsoever.
In both of these cases ‘the economy’ was supposedly doing great, but huge swathes of the population benefitted not at all from the supposed economic booms, despite shareholder value rocketing up right and left.
That’s because classical economics falls right the hell apart as soon as actual human motivations and behaviour patterns are factored in.
Ah, I have never read any Oz (the first thing I think of when I see that word is Australia 🙂 )
Mind you, the film is so famous it’s bound to have got into my mind by osmosis!
(I have nobly and resolutely refrained from saying Ozmosis, of course.)
@opposablethumbs
You may want to look into Looking Backward: 2000–1887. It’s an early science fiction novel positing a world in the distant, far-away year 2000 when the world has gone uber-socialist and has become a utopia. There are some loltastic things in there, like the idea that music is provided by a live orchestra playing 24/7 and this music is piped into houses, because the author didn’t envision radio or music recordings, but just laugh yourself out over those and move on.
The basic way this world functions is that labor is considered a public service that everyone has to perform when they are young, so that older people are not working but instead pursuing hobbies and knowledge. It’s an interesting read.
Now, my personal preference for how to solve poverty etc. would not be to eliminate money, but to eliminate the worst consequences of not having any money by having government-run public housing that literally anyone could use at any time for any reason. No means testing, and food would be provided as well as small necessities, so it would be possible to live there indefinitely with no income whatsoever. But if you get an income … you can still stay, until you decide you’re good to leave, because no means testing would be done. It’s an imperfect solution, but I think it would solve a lot of social ills if anyone could leave a bad housing/domestic situation at any time and find a safe and humane place to sleep that very night, no questions asked.
Most people in academia on the far left don’t agree with “socialism” anymore as it was traditionally understood. They support some form of a regulated market economy with alternative business models (like cooperatives) and a sort of no means testing welfare system. That’s either universal basic income or guaranteed food, basic needs supplies like soap, housing, and medical care. Of course, all that would fundamentally change how the economy works.
The non-Marxist people calling themselves “socialist” or “democratic socialist” don’t really know what they’re talking about. It only makes sense now if you mean the transitional period in the class struggle in a Marxist or Neo-Marxist framework.
@Dalillama – thanks for that interesting further explanation. I’ve certainly learned a lot in this thread!
@ Policy of Madness –
That also sounds like a nice system! (It might put hoteliers out of business, depending how nice the accommodation was, but I’m sure they could find something else to do.)
And that sounds like a very interesting book – I’ll have to track that one down too!
@Neremanth
It my idea-world, public housing would be like a large bed-and-breakfast or a cohousing arrangement, with individual rooms for people but dinner is taken in a communal setting. You’d have to register when you “checked in” so to speak, and there would be tight security to keep non-registered people out, and some measures would have to be taken to make sure that the people inside remained safe. But of course it isn’t a prison and you can come and go as you like.
I don’t really see it as being more than comfortably utilitarian, and there would be, without a doubt, some social stigma attached to it. That’s unfortunate but it would be unavoidable. I realize that this would make some people reject the idea, because people shouldn’t be stigmatized for needing assistance? And I agree with that? But the usual method for avoiding this stigma is housing vouchers, which doesn’t actually work (everyone in the neighborhood knows who the Section 8 folks are regardless of what the house looks like) and which turns government benefits into a wealth transfer between the government and landlords. Housing vouchers make my eye twitch, if you can’t tell. So it would be a humane place to live, clean and safe, but not a replacement for a hotel for people who can afford hotels.
But yes, the instant availability of free housing would be disruptive. Poor people could move more easily from city to city, needing only bus fare really. Nobody would need to be homeless. Nobody would have to stay in a bad domestic situation. There would be a floor on housing quality, because housing that didn’t measure up to public housing just wouldn’t be used. Of course, I’m assuming that money would go into this, and the buildings would be maintained and secured so that they remained clean and safe at all times. That’s a huge, huge assumption, and I realize that. There is a lot in this that would run into a wall in the real world, but I sometimes daydream about it anyway.
@ Policy of Madness – ah, ok, I guess the hotel business needn’t start getting too worried then! Still, it sounds like a good replacement when travelling for those whose budget or preferences mean they’d currently stay in hostels (unless the registering is too much of a hassle or the stigma too great). Which isn’t a bad thing! For one, having a mix of people might help with the stigmatisation; and it could be a good opportunity for people who are living there long-term to network and find out about opportunities elsewhere.
I do like the sound of this a lot. It’d be amazing to think that no matter what happened you’d always have somewhere warm and safe and dry to sleep, something to eat, and an address (so you could get employment). And the fact that you don’t need any resources to move to a new location is just fantastic: that is a very nice feature!
It seems Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 is out of copyright in the US and anywhere where copyright lasts till 70 years after the author’s death (he died in 1897), and it’s on Project Gutenberg (confusingly at 2 separate locations: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 and http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/624; I haven’t yet figured out what the difference between them is). So I’m about to download it and have a read! (Well, the second part depends on whether my Kindle’s playing nice, as sometimes it connects when I plug it in and sometimes it doesn’t, but if it doesn’t work this evening it will happen sooner or later.)
Thank you for the rec, PoM, and for the link, Neremanth! I’d never heard of that one; will have to try and check it out. Motivation to get my latest chunk of (non-utopian) work done and sent off … :-s