The Oikonomics of Automatic Benefits Transfer (ABT)

No, "oikonomics" has nothing to do with pigs. The word "economics" is on everyone's lips today. We use the word all the time, although we have completely forgotten what it means.

The English word "economics" is descended from the Greek word "oikonomia", literally, "household sense". The derivation is no coincidence: in ancient Greek times, and, indeed, until recently (the beginning of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago), the basis of the economy - the creation of wealth - was the household.

The ancient Greek household economy divided work between three groups of people: male citizens, their wives, and their slaves. The overwhelming majority of male citizens were farmers, with a minority employed in construction and service industry. Women were responsible for making clothing and raising children. Slaves worked in mining and metalworking.

Although modern Feminist and ultraliberal scholars decry the perceived injustice of ancient Greek society, what they fail to realize was that this tripartite division of labor was universal in the ancient world because it was the most efficient at meeting the needs of ancient civilizations, doing the best they could with the very low level of technology available. In practice, life was so brutally hard for everyone - men, women and slaves alike - and everyone was so busy just doing the huge amount of work it took to get by day-to-day, that there just wasn't time to consider alternatives. Not that there really were any.

This, then, is the suitable context for the decline of slavery in the Southern US and the real cause of the American Civil War: the Confederate States of America (like Nazi Germany, which bore a significant resemblance to ancient Sparta) are best understood as an ancient barbarian nation brought forward two millennia into the modern age and inevitably drawn into conflict with a contemporaneous society.

I say "barbarian", because, unlike the ancient Athenians, Romans and Persians, who managed to do some remarkable things in their limited free time, the Confederacy, like ancient Sparta, Scythia, Gaul or Macedonia, had no cultural accomplishments, a failing that contributed to the demise of the society.

"Gone With The Wind" is ultimately accurate in portraying the American Civil War as a clash of civilizations: the ancient slave society versus the modern industrial society. The novel is also accurate in another sense: identifying that, indeed, something intangible was lost in the transition from ancient oikonomia to modern economy. Modern industrial society created two basic problems that have yet to be resolved to satisfaction: economic surpluses, and the separation of economic produce from man's labors.

Recently I read an article about the European economy in which the practice of transferring funds directly into the bank accounts of European women "just for having children" was decried. Indeed, we have similar systems here in the US, where women are "paid" to make babies.

The impulse to outrage at such systems (and the prolific abuses they engender) overshadows the basic premise of EBT and other "get paid to make babies" systems. In the ancient Greek oikonomia, the role of women and family in the raising of children was inherent in the functioning of the system. When the basis of the economy moved out of the house and from people to machines, this basic dynamic became confused.

Our modern industrial society places no market value on the rearing of children (which is one of many examples of why free markets don't exist and don't work) - so in order to keep society going, it is necessary and appropriate to compensate women for their efforts. The alternative would be starvation, food riots, social breakdown, etc.

Now that we understand the premise of EBT - the "value" of the "work" it takes to make babies - we can get some ideas as to how to fix the system.

Operating under the premise that bringing children into this world and providing them with the appropriate care and attention is a worthy pursuit that should be compensated by society in lieu of fiscally rewarding occupations, it stands to reason that the system should reward good performance.

Parents who raise well-behaved children who reach their full potential should be more generously rewarded than those who do not. I would argue that children who top their class at each grade and are recognized as good citizens based on social participation (book faires, church, sports teams, social work) should see their parents rewarded with bonuses. I would even go so far as to argue that Social Security payments should be tied to the progress of the next generation.

Feminists have long made the rather trite argument that divorced women should be entitled to the same quality of life that they had when married so that they would not be disincentivized from leaving husbands they find abusive (or, more often, boringly responsible). This argument is commonly associated with really stupid Feminists who idolize Lysistrata but ignore the point of the story: the adaptive value of the oikonomia, the household division of labor.

If we accept the value of the oikonomy and the utility of the labor of wives and mothers - and the opportunity cost to a woman (or man) of staying home and raising children well, then, I would argue, EBT and similar "pay to make kids" systems should offer compensation that scales with the earnings of the other spouse and the ending wages of the full-time parent.

Such a system would remove the choice that most women and families face between making ends meet via two wage-earners and having time to spend with the kids. The system would in large part pay for itself by removing large numbers of women from the labor pool, raising salaries for the remaining, mostly male, workforce.

It is easy to lose sight that arguably the two biggest changes in the American economy since the idyllic 1950s - and the real causes of the degeneration of American society - have been automation and the entry of women to the workforce.

In sum, I very much agree with Benito Mussolini's observation:
"Women and machines are the two main causes of unemployment."

The Guild Wars 2 Fallacy: Microtransactions as a Free Lunch

I was looking to buy GW1 gold and came across this [b][url=http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrien-on-microtransactions-in-guild-wars-2]interesting but completely overlooked blog post[/url][/b]...

It says in big letters
[quote]… it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who spend time.[/quote]

But then in the text of the article it says completely the opposite:

[quote]...microtransactions were an afterthought in Guild Wars, whereas with Guild Wars 2, we had an opportunity to integrate the microtransaction system from the ground up...

...If you want something, whether it’s an in-game item or a microtransaction, you ultimately have two ways to get it: you can play to earn gold or you can use money to buy gems...

.... Because gems can be traded for gold and vice versa, we don’t need two different trading systems, one for gold and one for gems. In Guild Wars 2, everything on the Trading Post is traded for gold, but of course, somebody who wants to earn gems can just sell items for gold, and then convert the gold to gems...

...If a player buys gold from another player, he gets the gold he wants, the selling player gets gems she can use for microtransactions, and ArenaNet generates revenue from the sale of gems that we can use to keep supporting and updating the game...[/quote]

Supporting and updating the game? WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-IIn-DG-c[/youtube]

Anyone remember that video? Anyone?

[quote]...the argument runs, "a MMO needs a subscription to support the game"...if this were the late 90s I'd agree...but today this simply isn't true...[/quote]

Yet the GW2 dev team that some people fete trots out that [i][b]exact same argument[/b][/i] (cost of support) when it serves their purposes.

The "content" argument is also malarkey, and here is why:

The GW2 blog draws a comparison with one game, EvE, which is faulty given that EvE is a small and very niche game that appeals to the ground up to relatively well-to-do overgrown nerds in the finance and programming fields. EvE is also an older game and as such does not reflect the driving forces of modern MMO administration. GW2 diverges from this comparison in that:

1. GW2 will not be a super-hardcore elitist niche game like EvE; it is aimed at the broadest belly of the market. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that the design and administration of the game, which are the defining characteristics of a MMO, will reflect this.

2. GW2 is a brand new game, conceived, designed - and funded - in today's MMO business environment.

This one very flawed example deliberately disregards much more relevant examples such as WoW and Star Trek Online. Both are much more modern games designed for a much broader audience. In both cases, switching from a subscription model to microtransactions disincentivized the running of the game as a going concern and coincided with sharp drops in content production and quality of customer service.

My point here is this: the would-be groupies of the GW2 dev team, who think they're the white knights, the "good guys" of the MMO industry, are willfully delusional. They're in it for the money, just like everyone else.

The top comment on the Youtube video that was previously linked to me and I linked here again is:

[quote]Complaining about subscription fees not being present is like saying your taxes aren't high enough. [/quote]

However, that complaint is, under certain conditions, a perfectly valid one.

Higher taxes and what they buy is preferable to the absence of the stability and equalization of opportunity provided by a strong public sector. Everyone must pay for healthcare, transit, food and water, housing, education, security, etc, in one manner or another, but paying for all those things via taxes is all-around a better deal than paying for all those things piecemeal according to an arbitrary system predicated on the willful self-delusion of the participants.

And by that I mean those people who think they're keeping more of their paycheck when they get a tax cut, then turn around and spend vast sums on personal security, gasoline, auto maintenance, student loans, insurance, emergency rooms, rent, and bottled water.

Paying a subscription fee is exactly the same as paying taxes. It is an economic contract with a society, predicated on the realities of human nature: that individual human beings need the patronage of a higher power to defend themselves from the vicissitudes of fortune and the intentions of other men, and that nothing is free.

A MT system is exactly the same as a so-called "free market". It is predicated on the abject fallacy that those who control the board will honor their word when they have no reason to and be restrained from human evil by the transcendent, Buddha-esque enlightenment to understand the futile and self-defeating destiny of all human greed.

The subscription fee, like the voting booth, is the lever of control.
Remove that lever - through faithlessness by way of folly - and the system will run amok.

The analogy between contemporary politics and gaming is not coincidental nor contrived. Apples and oranges are mutually comparable as kinds of fruit, and both politics and gaming are products of contemporary folly. Contemporary folly is a foible that West Coast liberals and Midwestern rednecks share in common.

Both groups of little people think that they can win in a game with no rules.

[quote][b][i]"So what about you, Aestu? You're still here..."[/i][/b][/quote]

My answer is: like everyone else I play the game of life...and e-life. Merely because I understand the faults of the system does not mean I am willing or able to fully divorce myself from it; I merely approach it from a position of knowledge rather than willful ignorance. The choices I make reflect that.

P.S. I am tripping on bean curd, bean sprouts, rice vermicelli, aspartame and MSG right now. Bear with me.