Last night, I commented on Tom's reference:
>> http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2011/09/professional-ethics.html
>
> Over the past 30 years, the economics discipline has been
> systematically subverted....Many of the most prominent economists
> in America are now paid to testify in Congress, to serve on boards
> of directors, testify in antitrust cases and regulatory
> proceedings, and to give speeches to the companies and industries
> they study and write about with supposed objectivity. This is not
> a marginal activity; it is now an industry, run by a half dozen
> large companies.
>
> I didn't know that. Why does that remind me somehow of the privatized
> prison industry?
Saw this on Slash/dot:
How Bug Bounties Are Like Rat Farming 104
Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 20, @11:00AM
from the first-we-hypothesize-a-problem dept.
Gunkerty Jeb writes "In a keynote speech at the United Security
Summit, Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, drew parallels
between the increasingly popular (and successful) practice of
software vendors offering bug bounties and a new industry
springing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the population
has recently found itself beset with a growing rat problem. In
order to help mitigate their rodent problem, officials in
Johannesburg began offering a small monetary rewards for each dead
rat turned in. It was wildly successful, and it didn't take long
for fresh batch of entrepreneurs to pop up and exploit the
situation. Of course, I'm talking about rat farming. Evidently,
business minded individuals have taken to breeding rats, only to
kill them and turn them in for rewards. Obviously, rat farming is
somewhat unscrupulous, but security researchers are doing the same
thing: breeding bugs in the lab, then leading them to the
slaughter for a nice payday. And it's a good thing."
Which probably isn't a totally new thing [1] but a reminder about how
that works with prisons, weapon systems and (allegedly) economists.
The way it works out for (software-) bug hunting -- the relevance for
Slash-dotters -- seems to be free of the malignancy/fraudulence of rat
farming:
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/how-bug-bounties-are-rat-farming-092011
as one commenter there (somewhat intemperately) observes.
So the question is: how do you structure privatization of prisons,
corporatized for-fee economics consulting or any such activity so that
it works like bug-hunting and not like rat-farming? Do we need to
somehow extract or sequester such activities completely from
capitalist incentives?
- Mike
[1] The Paris rat-catcher of circa 1689 in Stephenson's _Quicksilver_
was already (and quite entertainingly) into rat farming.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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