It’s Equal Pay Day, the annual holiday intended to remind everyone of the still very much real wage gap between men and women, so what better day for self-styled Manosphere “economist” Aaron Clarey to declare that the economic worth of women is based almost entirely on their hotness?
Clarey, who is not actually an economist and doesn’t seem to understand many of the basics of economics, points his blog readers to an article highlighting the success of VietJet, a Vietnamese airline famous for its bikini-clad flight attendants.
“[T]here’s a very valuable economic lesson here that all women, but especially western one’s need to learn,” Clary mansplains. “And that is what determines their economic value.”
The answer to that big question? According to Clarey, it’s how smokin’ hot the woman in question is.
“No other commodity in the world is in as high of demand as female youth and beauty,” he asserts.
And the reason why is that half the world’s population (the would be men) demand it. And not only do they demand it, they demand it highly. They demand it so much that they built civilization to
afford itwin it over, so much so to the point we could say nearly all of human civilization and global historical GDP was created to get it.
Well, you could say that, Mr. Clarey, but you’d be wrong. Not that this stops Mr. Clarey from making this dumb assumption the basis for his boldly retrograde economic theory.
As Clarey sees it, women need to stop complaining about being seen as sex objects and embrace the power of their temporarily pretty faces and hot bods. Women, he argues,
need to view this from a purely economic, empirical, and clinical point of view that I’m trying to make, otherwise the vital economic lessons that lay within will be lost on them and it will be their loss. … Half the population (that would be men again) demands and will pay a pretty penny for female youth and beauty.
There’s just one little problem for the little ladies: Looks fade, and since (in Clarey’s estimation) women don’t really have much else going for them, they’re kind of screwed.
“[M]en produce the vast majority of economic production in the world,” Clarey declares, and “whatever other skills, talents, desires, and ambitions a woman has, there just isn’t going to be as much demand for them compared to youth and beauty.”
So what can women do? Emulate Hedy Lamarr, who “was not only a stunner, but also a scientist on the side.”
Clarey assures the little ladies that they don’t have to choose between a modeling or acting career and a STEM degree — apparently the only two options women available for women who want to earn real money. They can do both!
Choosing to major in electrical engineering or going on to become a computer scientist does not mean you must forego modeling, acting, or simply benefiting from female beauty, and vice versa. Being the most demanded commodity in the history of the world is an added bonus and additional choice conferred upon pretty, young women in addition to the same career choices men have.
Trouble is, most women are just too lazy to choose either path, much less both.
Based on declared college majors and a simple walk in the public [sic], the majority of women are neither majoring in STEM nor maintaining their beauty. They are instead opting to major in the liberal arts and eschewing the gym, neither of which are in demand in the real world. And the reason why is very simple. Hitting the gym and studying math is hard.
You know what else is hard, Mr. Clarey? Being an actual professional economist rather than someone who plays one on the internet. Generally speaking, real economists don’t consider “a simple walk in the public” to be a substitute for actual data.
But I digress.
Clarey moves on to provide the ladies with more beauty tips.
To maintain your physical beauty you have to diet, eat right, run, work out and exercise. Additionally for women they must comport themselves accordingly, wear the right fashion, all of which is an effective and taxing part time job.
COMPORT YOURSELVES, LADIES! Your economic success depends on it!
Now, Clarey is well aware that many ladies will find his unsolicited advice patronizing, to say the least. That’s because THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH, if “the truth” is defined as “a bunch of stuff Aaron Clarey pulled out of his ass.”
Clarey goes all tough love:
You may find this insulting, you may find this offensive, but the real world of economics does not care about your feelings or what you’d like.
Suck it up, buttercup!
The real world demands engineers, computer programmers, doctors, accountants, plumbers, and electricians.
Apparently in Clarey’s imaginary world, these are pretty much the only real jobs out there.
If women don’t train for these jobs, or take advantage of their “additional option of translating your youth and beauty into money,” well,
[t]he only other option is what nearly 75% of women choose and that is to pursue fields where they need to beg, plead, and pull teeth to get funding. So whereas Intel will willingly pay a female computer science graduate $80,000 a year for a job in Silicon Valley, or a rich husband will willingly set up a beautiful woman for life, the ugly women’s studies or communications major has to literally go begging to non-profits for charity or lobby the government to force taxpayers to pay for their pointless career that nobody ever demanded and does nothing to benefit the world.
Clarey — who does not himself have a STEM job — demands that women embrace STEM as the only game in town other than marrying a dude with money or simply being pretty for a living.
The reality is that the world demands STEM type majors. Not the touchy feely malarkey that passes for the liberal arts. And if you don’t like that, women (unlike men) have a fortunate alternative option. An enviable “Plan B.” You can use your looks and youth to score a husband, resources, a career, and other financial advantages men simply can’t. Beyond that, there are no other options.
Let’s take a quick look at some economic data on what jobs women in the real world — as opposed to Clarey’s imagination — actually do.
Here’s a chart from the Department of Labor (click on it to see it full size.)
Yeah, teachers and nurses, who needs them? And we might as well fire all the administrative assistants while we’re at it. It’s not like business will grind to a halt without someone doing all the unheralded but vital behind-the-scenes work that keep them functioning, oh wait. A closer look at the data also shows that women make up more than half of all accountants and auditors, so clearly there are more than a few women who know something about math.
Also, I don’t see a listing for “modeling,” so apparently this option for taking advantage of what Clarey thinks is women’s primary economic asset isn’t available to quite so many women as Clarey seems to think.
Women make up nearly half of the work force. You’d think that someone claiming to be an economist — or even someone who just “walk[s] in the public” — would have a slightly better understanding of what women actually do for a living. But that would require looking at data from places other than his posterior.
Clarey also takes aim at those who suggest that maybe men should learn to think of women as more than just sex objects. As Clarey sees it, this is RANK TYRANNY and he won’t stand for it!
No, seriously, he uses the word “tyranny.”
Do not men have the right to like what they like? Are they not allowed to be free to have tastes and preferences?
The problem in thinking there’s something wrong with men for being attracted to female youth and beauty (as they have been since time immemorial) is that it is women forcing their desires on other people. It is telling them, nay, demanding others want what they want them to want. Not what the individual wants. And you can call it whatever euphemistic phrase academia has concocted to make it sound valid, good, and noble, but when you boil it down, it’s nothing more than rank tyranny
Clarey really isn’t very good at this whole economics thing. Or the whole blogging thing. Maybe he needs to take advantage of an entirely different career option.
Take a look at this video below (and yes, I know I posted it yesterday as well). Clarey is the guy wearing the oh-so-styish “I [heart] NY” t-shirt. Watch him walk. Do you think he’s got what it takes to be a runway model?
WE HUNTED THE MAMMOTH to bang HB10s!
Funny how these manospherians feel the need to vehemently defend men’s preference for good-looking women yet are foaming at the mouth when women prefer good-looking men (Chads). Maybe it’s because women actually get to choose to have sex with men of their choice whereas most of those men would like to have sex with women of their choice but can’t.
it is quite showing ,how people like Clarey don’t think women have sexual preferences. it is like ,we have commodified women, and don’t see them as full people.
I wish more hetero women realized that they are allowed sexual desires, and demanded their needs to be met. or women’s money is too icky?
I understand that in a heteronormative society, men preforming sexiness and sexual availability, is seen as “feminime” and “gay”, and hetero women are often just as invested in upkeeping this system as hetero men are.
So I will be deprived from men running around in joga pants and croptops in the future. Or male flight attendants serving people in speedos. As an enthusiastic conosseur of male beauty I am appaled by the lack of freedom men have in this aera. where are the MRAs standing up against this injustice! :”(.
Does the popularity of Chippendales, Thunder Down Under and the Magic Mike movies mean men are valuable for their abs and pecs?
THIS. This is basically the crux of it; for all the pretentiousness and insistence that they know what’s best for the world, they never actually act on it themselves, and what they actually do does not reflect what they think other people should be doing. They’re pathetic.
Also – the “Alt Right Dogs” trailer will always be a classic display of their incompetence. Incompetence by their own standards, that is. Look at them – do you really think they reflect the ideal of the Non-Cuck Manly Masculine Man they constantly rave about?
It would be so interesting to see the world from such a screwed perspective. It takes a LOT of bitterness to view society in such a way. Not surprisingly, a lot of Nazi ideas and policies we studied for GCSE are very similar to the general “manosphere” outlook. Not an exaggeration. Their ideas about men and women and the roles they should fulfil are pretty much indistinguishable. Not to mention the views on racism, immigration etc., which may as well have been copied word for word from Mein Kampf into these clowns’ blog posts.
I have heard that people tend to have romantic/sexual relationships with people of a similar level of attractiveness to themselves.
This would be a problem for a bunch of guys who think they are the paragon of manly attractiveness and also think that any lady who isn’t a D-cup with a teeny barbie waist and perfect hair is too ugly to look at.
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
I ask and ask again but you look right through me
Seems I’m not the kind of woman you see
I came up on the side out of curiosity
Askin’ around to know
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
And folks quite your type I believed were the key
To probing the depths of the den
But here we go again
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
Try to grab your attention for quite a spell
Don’t even have the mind to tell me to go to hell
I’m coming to a conclusion, if you can’t tell
‘Bout people with your eyes
There’s nothing to disguise
The info’s coming to me as clear as a bell
I could go on and on
But that wouldn’t make a very good song
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
To you, a vacant piece of eye candy
Standin’ around and lookin’ awful pretty
Now, I don’t exactly fit that model of thinkin’
So it’s no wonder you won’t look me in the eye
I’m guessin’ if an a-fab, feminine-presenting fella doesn’t please your [BLEEP], then
You pretend not to notice, whistlin’ Dixie as you pass by
Because where do we fit in your…very strange worldview?
We ain’t gussied up sittin’ round like Peach or Daisy
Your fantasies are such that we can get by with a pretty pout or two
And hence, by that logic, we’re willfully lazy
But the truth is we’re not all conventional, you’re staring at the sky
Letting the blazin’ rays of the sun bleach your virgin eyes
Blindin’ yourself to us by your side, tryin’ to ask somethin’ on a whim
You’ve allowed your view of the real world to become frightfully dim
Stop starin’ at the big burnin’ orb in the sky
Don’t think about askin’ the big fella “why”
Just let your eyes adjust, and look around you, please
The women that you speak of are these
Not conventionally attractive
Varying levels of active
Just like your XY (though that don’t mean a guy), we try and we try, yet the bar’s set so high, to get past it some die, others merely cry, not all see eye to eye…yet we’re human, is our existence subtractive?
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
A human female (as one identified)
But you can’t see it ’cause your eyes are fried
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
What’s a woman? (a woman, a woman, a woman)
A person not wholly unlike me
But you’ve sealed off your ears now, apparently
I’m going back to the articles with all the cool music recs ‘scue.
During my hospitalization last year, I had a number of nurses looking after me. (ICU nurses are the best!) One of my favorites was one who was in her 50s and would be scorned by the MRA/MGTOW contingent for not only being past the wall but not pretty enough.
Lemme tell ya, when you’re on oxygen and scared you might not live through the night, the sexual market value of your nurse is the least of your concerns.
PS – And just to be fair, I had male nurses on my medical team. None as cute as my husband, but valued all the same.
Hmmm… has Clarey considered what the reign of his idol trump (ok, I don’t KNOW if he’s a trumpling, but I’m willing to stick my neck out on that one) is going to do to all those STEM jobs the hot babes are supposed to be studying for??
ETA; Troubelle, good stuff!
This guy is a complete and utter moron.
I have nothing else to say about that.
The sheer incompetence of that trailer is killing me.
1) If you’re gonna rip off a classic film, lean into that fucker. Those guys need to be the in black suits with skinny ties. They need to be shot in slow motion. They need to all walk with authority.
2) It’s called depth of field, look into it.
3) It’s called composition, look into it.
4) Cut to the tempo of your music.
5) Stop editing with a potato.
I’ll be damned if I let a man wearing a tucked in ‘I heart NY’ tee tell me what I should do with my appearance.
Troubelle, did you write that??
So, what’s with these dudes and their obsession with engineering? It’s always one of the manosphere approved occupations. Half the trolls we get here claim to be engineers.
I think it’s because law and medicine have become so much less male dominated as of late. So they pick the most stereotyped as male job they can think of and worship it.
@PeeVee
Yup. There’s a reason I’m a Bard. I’ve been writing lyrics on here since, oh, about December 10 of last year. Weird Eddie can tell you all about it. I’ve gone up and down in production, but…that right there is all me.
Engineering student about to graduate here: the guys in my class aren’t this kind of dumbass, because they have better things to do with their time. Bet these guys only claim to be engineers because they are misinterpreting “stripping column”, “orifice”, “thrust shaft coupling”, etc.
Engineering is fun if you are mentally thirteen years old, though.
Troubelle, I know you have been writing lyrics; I’ve even heard dlouwe’s melody put to your lyrics…I know the reason you’re called a Bard.
You’re very talented. I just wanted to make sure before I started Googling YouTube for the song, lolol. Because it’s glorious!
Oh make no mistake asshole, most women are well aware of your and other like-minded knuckle draggers’ ideas for where our roles and values lie. We just reject them for being entirely full of shit.
@PeeVee
Hyeh, sorry about that. I’d rather make sure you know than leave you high and dry.
Feel free to cover it, if that’s your jam. Just lend me credit…and royalties, if it gets to that point.
@WWTH
I think it’s got more to do with the ‘we built everything’ routine. Their thinking is that Engineer=Dams, bridges, computers, guns=civilisation. So engineers are therefore the most important people in the world, and are (supposedly) all men, therefore men built everything significant, QED. It really demonstrates the utter paucity of their understanding of history, sociology, economics, or indeed anything to do with human societies whatsoever.
WWTH:
Leaving aside the 329-year-olds, what proportion are software “engineers”, though? Scare quotes because it’s not really engineering if you don’t need to wear PPE.
Thank goodness we live in a world where men like Clarey don’t get to determine how women are valued. We are much more than our looks and Clarey cannot stand the fact that women are able to survive without depending on men like him.
Well, if I fill one hand with men’s “demands”, and the other with shit, guess which one I’ll fucking care about first?
Look, I’ve already piled up all the fucks I give about what men demand and would pay for!
Because it’s not like men aren’t models and are in high demand because of their smokin’ good looks.
Poor thing must be crushed that he can’t be a model!
Or it could be that women are pressured against going into STEM fields because of sexism and many of us realize we weren’t put on this earth to be your pretty little commodities, but facts have obviously never stopped you before.
Well, brownie points for at least admitting that putting on a nice outfit isn’t as easy as some dudes would like to think it is.
Funnily enough, the real world doesn’t care enough to conform to your
boner feelingsfaux-economics either!As a graphic designer: You better pray you don’t ever need a logo.
Or a package. Or a branding scheme.
Or anything designed involving colors, type, or images.
Oh, absolutely! Men are free to like what they like and have tastes and preferences!
However, the flip side of that is I’m free to not give a shit about them.
Which is where we find the source of the issue. Clarey seems to think that only women have to conform to this “economic plan” of his. Not a word about what men have to do. Just that women have to all be pretty eye-candy and work in STEM or snag a rich husband.
See, I’m also free to like what I like, and have my own tastes and preferences, and men are free to not give a shit about that either.
Glorious things, free will and individuality.
Yeah, how dare we tell men that we don’t want them to judge us for not being an effortless HB10, and wanting to do something with our lives that they don’t personally approve of!
And how dare we tell men that women aren’t theirs to ogle as they please!
Women not wanting to be pretty eye-candy STEM scientists is tyranny! Tyranny I say!
Musing to myself: Huh. When I’m out in public, all the people that catch my eye are women. Maybe I should just start considering myself a lesbian? [sees a pic of Jason Momoa] Hold up.
@PI
Jason Momoa? Didn’t you hear, Brad Pitt is the designated sine qua non of all male hotness! Only he is the pinnacle to which all feeeemales aspire to…
…scuse me, gotta look at that pic again.
$80k in Silicon Valley is not that much money, JSYN.
When I lived there in the dotcom boom (and bust) it was very good money, but rent has more than doubled since, and everything else has gone up with inflation.
I have no idea how anybody can have a teaching job or worse a custodial or food industry job in that area — even at the time it was nearing impossible.
It’s always amazing to me that people think women can’t do math, because every company I’ve worked for has had a huge majority or solely female accountants. Likewise, nearly all my math teachers in school were female. He actually MENTIONS accounting, without even bothering to look up that yeah, actually, more women are accountants than men.
The company I work for has a nearly 50/50 split on female engineers. I’m not sure how transportation engineers stack up against, say, mechanical engineers in gender demographics, but I WILL say that probably part of the reason we have so many female engineers is because, like… our president and CEO is a woman. And many of our directors are women. It’s almost like when you can ensure a safe work environment where women aren’t “the woman” in an office of sexist dudes, and if you actively recruit and look for female engineers, women just appear! As if out of thin air! Or maybe because they’ve been there all along…
Anyway, I always find it funny when people bitch about communications and marketing people, as if I just sit at my desk and eat bon bons and my company didn’t hire me to do actual important work that’s valuable for the company. Oh yes, they just create busy work for me so that they can do me a favor and give me a job, not because they actually need a person to do the things I do. Then these assholes turn around and drape love over computer programmers when there are some tech bros creating a million useless apps* that benefit pretty much no one but a small niche, but investors throw money at them anyway. It’s almost like… if men do a thing, people LOVE it and it is SO important for society but if a woman does it, it’s useless and dumb.
*I will also argue that, according to MRA standards of rugged masculinity, things like Twitter and Facebook are useless too, but for some reason they don’t get flack for it. Hmmm, wonder why…
I’m an accountant. I’m following in my grandmother’s footsteps. She started working as an accountant almost a hundred years ago.
@PI, Banananana: Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just be here gazing wistfully at this photo:
http://derekwinnert.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/41914cab4c6c2a3bbfbf0f80e768c518.jpg
Oh, my…Vincent Price was spectacular… *fans self*
I remember he called himself “Captain Capitalism” one time – which is either the name of the worst superhero ever or the name of the best supervillain ever.
OT: if you want to hunt the mammoth, you now can! Just go play on a varsity team at Williams College:
https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2017/4-2017/amherst-announces-mammoths-mascot
I double majored in computer engineering and social studies (I’m one of those women who wants to have it all :-P), and I currently work as a software engineer.
My hobby: confide in my arrogant programmer colleagues my struggles with humanities in college, how difficult they are, and how I wish they were as easy as engineering. Doesn’t get old.
As for my time and looks, I’m afraid I’ll dismiss Mr. Economist’s advice and opt to call them mine and not for sale. No amounts of “demand” could possibly compare to spending them with people I enjoy being with.
That was some astral projection right there…
It’s probably low-hanging fruit, but…
Try slightly less than half, dipshit. I understand gay men skeeve you out and you think lesbians only exist in porn (and asexuals not at all), but your knowledge of sexuality is almost as bad as your knowledge of math, economics, and psychology.
@Dallillama:
My dad’s an engineer. He works with machines that make canned sodas. Engineers don’t actually build shit, they design it and update it. I don’t know the makeup of his coworkers, but I know my mom runs basically everything of their shared business outside of engineering and talking with clients. It’s almost like people with different skillsets need support from others, or that skillset is useless.
As opposed to, say, avoiding starvation.
Typical misogynist shit. Have to paint all other men with his own douchery to avoid realizing he needs to STFU.
Stop talking about us as if you’re at a fucking slave market before I break your nose. Let’s also note that modeling is actually a stressful career with time-consuming shoots, time-consuming beauty regimens, and irregularly timed assorted shit and could take up enough time to displace a more traditional job. And also note two more things: That men like this equate “modeling” with “sex work or porn star”, and that while the world is 100% saturated with beautiful women these assholes consider only a very small percentage of us “pretty”.
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.
What even is “the liberal arts”? Artists are essential to the function of society, they give us a soul worth living for. Does training to be a therapist count as liberal arts? How about specializing in administrating non-profit charities?
Well, I’m certain he must look like Adonis. After all, a misogynist would never be a hypocritical bastard.
Because it is.
Because it is, and you know it.
…We live in a consumer economy based on people consuming stuff they LIKE to excess. Economics really does care about your feelings and what you like, in as much as capitalists try to manipulate those into making you buy something. Otherwise, the current administration wouldn’t be trying so hard to make strikes and protest illegal – what the people feel and the people want are powerful forces even the government cannot face and win.
But definitely not sewage workers. MEN, AS DEFINED BY PAUL ELAM, HAVE A RIGHT TO STEW IN THEIR OWN SHIT! FUCK YOUR MEDICINE, MA!
Ughhhhh. I don’t have the energy to get through the rest of this. It’s the same boring, irrelevant shit as before.
More and more people have noticed that a disproportionate number of engineers hold bizarre beliefs or get involved with strange groups. See RationalWiki on Engineers and Woo and the Salem Hypothesis
I have to share this, and I think this particular post is the most appropriate, being sort of related. In the course of muh current research I looked in on the Rational Male site (Katie forgive me but I had to). The comment below had been plucked from a previous post and brought to everyone’s attention as “very enlightening”:
I actually understand some of it … 😐
Jason Momoa looks sexy I desire him as a commodity. However as he is a human being he doesn’t really act like a commodity. I cannot call a shipping company and have them ship a container of Momoa. I don’t think I can buy stocks in him. Oh well I’ll just admire the pictures.
Its a pretty dumb idea this Clarey guy has come up with I mean he could have asked literally any woman what they do for a living and he would have realized his theory was wrong… oh wait.
If women are all getting liberal arts degrees then it must be the top degree for women right? Oh it’s not? It’s business and that’s the top degree for men too? Well then. https://www.collegeatlas.org/top-degrees-by-gender.html
PLEASE DON’T TAINT HEDY LAMARR’S NAME BY WORKING HER INTO YOUR STUPIDITY.
“[M]en produce the vast majority of economic production in the world,”
Was going to post some stats about this, but found this instead:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/03/the-zombie-statistic-about-womens-share-of-income-and-property/?utm_term=.0525fd1e5975
But I can still post this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Women_Counted
@Kivutar I used to date a guy who enjoyed giving erotic readings from my old motorbike’s maintenance manual.
@Wanda Can I come work for you? My company makes a big deal about hiring women engineers, but most of us (including me in a couple of weeks) leave because of the work environment.
Been thinking recently about economics and whether there is a way to rehabilitate the field. I’m not an economist myself but I took enough classes as an undergraduate to know about at least some of the major issues with it.
The biggest one is the doctrine that a dollar is worth a dollar to everyone, and therefore currency can be used as a proxy for utility. If one person will pay $5 for a latte, and another person will only pay $3 for the same latte, then the latte must be worth more to the first person and the first person should get it to maximize the increase in happiness in the world.
That’s always been obviously bullshit to me, but I never had a better way. I’ve been thinking lately, however, that a better proxy for utility might be what the marginal dollar will be used to buy. If you gave me an unexpected $5, I might spend it on a latte. If you gave that same $5 to a homeless person, they might spend it instead on the first good meal they’ve had in days. The homeless person is going to get a lot more out of that meal than I would get out of my latte, so to maximize happiness the homeless person ought to get the money.
Ranking what the marginal dollar will be factually used to buy against a hierarchy of needs, in other words, is a better proxy for utility than willingness to pay for a given item. I’m currently at the stage of trying to tear this model apart to see where the flaws are, so if anyone has a critique I’d like to hear it.
eta: Opportunity costs also factor in here. That $5 can be used to buy a latte or a meal; the meal is higher on the hierarchy than a latte, and therefore the opportunity cost of the latte is a higher-ranked meal. The person who is going to buy the meal, at the cost of not buying a latte, will put the $5 to better use, and therefore should get it.
@Mish
Out of the many words and thoughts that came to mind while reading that, the only ones I’m willing to repeat in public are:
-That’s disgusting
– I hope she leaves him and gets full custody of their daughter.
@PoM: The problem of value in economics is incredibly fundamental and I’ve been down to the pointy end of a degree.
Marxist economics (please note, Marxist economics is not “Communism Economics” it is a class and labor based theory of Capitalism as opposed to an individualist and money based theory):
They tried to develop a different measure of value based on how much time it took workers collectively to bring any product or service to completion. Thinking too hard about this makes it obvious why it hit a dead end on the theoretical front.
Your critique is definitely present in more sophisticated economics texts, at least in what I was taught. Economics is learning a bunch of stuff in 1st year that you spend the remaining 2 years learning why it’s wrong and simplistic.
A critical issue with any system in economics is measuring it. How easily can your theory be measured and tested? How will you develop a value hierarchy of what is more and less “needed”? What about when you get down to wants? Which wants are higher or lower on the hierarchy?
You could run into a variety of class, gender and race issues with the hierarchy as well. Women need pads but men don’t, how does this affect their position in a hierarchy?
Last thought, also consider substitution issues. To keep to the same example tampons and pads can substitute for one another in a pinch, which one then has a higher value, in what circumstances, and how is this determined?
“Global historical GDP”? This statement makes no sense, at least not in the context Clarey is using it. Tracking “GDP” is a modern thing, maybe 300 years old at best, so he’s limiting his argument to the modern era, yet he claims all of “human civilization” has been built on getting girls? Like I said, it makes no sense. Also, Clarey is 40 years old. Why is he still talking about such childish nonsense?
I think writing the hierarchy would be fairly easy, because people obey it when they allocate their monies. Shelter is #1, because those who have enough money to afford shelter always prioritize it; people will factually go without food to make rent. Food is probably #2.
You’re right that it’s more complicated for things that some people need and others don’t, such as child care or medical care. Child care does not figure on my priority list at all, but for some people it is directly behind food. How high you prioritize medical care depends on how sick you are and with what. This is, of course, the problem with utilitarianism and its kissing cousin economics, and I haven’t claimed to solve it. Not yet anyway. 😉
I’m not sure that the nitty-gritty of the hierarchy list is really important, though, because the implication for gross policy decisions doesn’t require one to compare closely-related needs. We can easily say, for instance, that it’s more important to keep people fed than it is to enable people to buy their 10,000th share of Apple. People will always feed themselves before they buy shares of Apple, so SNAP is a better value, from this standpoint, than tax cuts for the already-wealthy.
I have a good solid undergraduate understanding of economics but don’t claim to be an expert, although I have ruminated on it ever since.
@Fujimoto My dad was an aerospace engineer, and he warned me about these guys, who I guess were still around:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
I remember seeing some of their literature (may still have some) back in the day.
Yes, I know only too well how ‘valuable’ being young and female is. If I had been prepared to have sex with men for money between 12 and 18 I would have made an absolute fortune. But, oddly enough, that did not appeal to me. Neither did marrying a rich man 3 times my age, or making money in any other way off my youth and my looks.