And Bedbugs. REH
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 2:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Professional Ethics (of economists) 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/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
