The Frustrated CFO

Price of a Digitally-Published Word

Some topics simply cannot let you be.  They are just way too potent.  For example, some time ago, in Part I of my Arts & Entertainment by the Numbers series, I already addressed the matter of earnings one can expect to generate if he or she decides to become a "writer."  If you recall, it was established that, with a few exceptions primarily driven by seductive (literally) subjects, or notoriety (oh, I am sorry - fame) of the authors, or some magical (again, literally) mass appeal, there is not much money in writing. 

Of course, I didn't talk about ALL "writing."  That post was focused on books, both fictional and not - the self-contained multi-page opuses that come into public distribution through more or less conventional channels, which in our contemporary world include not only the old-fashioned publishing houses, but also self-publishing (including web-publishing) and on-demand-printing.  The latter have been pretty much commandeered by our ubiquitous mega-villains, Amazon and Google.  

Surprisingly, the vast majority of books are still printed and bound; and pretty much all of them are digitized as AZW, EPUB, IBA, PDF, etc. publications.  From my personal experience I can tell you that royalties on e-books, being profitability based, are actually much higher than on the printed copies.  As you can imagine, distribution of files costs a fraction of physical printing, shipping, etc.

Of course, books are not the only products of the "writing" professionals.  I fitted playwrights into Theater and screenwriters into Movies.  And I didn't want to discuss the earnings of conventional journalists, not only because I am really appalled by the contemporary standards of that trade, but also because there is nothing particularly special about their compensation.  It's basically a pay scale - no different than the one for any back-office workers.      

According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average reporter or a correspondent makes about $21 per hour, or $43,780 a year.  Of course, those working in publications with household names, especially in DC or NYC, or at cable and broadcasting venues, earn above average.  But even then we are talking $53K-$60K annual salaries.  Nothing glamorous.

If famous faces of Barbara Walters, or Katie Couric, or Matt Lauer pop into your head, stop it - those people might've started as journalists early in their career, but that's not what they are now - through some peculiar twists in their fates they've become multimillion-dollar TV personalities with roomfuls of staff who do the actual work and get paid what I said above.  Moreover, as far as I am concerned, the professional comedians Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and John Oliver turned out to be much better newsmen than all those other smiley faces.             

But forget all that!  The remarkable thing about our electronically permeated era (as far as the writing is concerned, of course), is that the majority of the "written" words nowadays floats in the realm of computer codes; resides on some servers in the unknown to the authors locations.  The vast majority of that majority is motivated into existence by a singular intangible incentive - the writer's desire to verbally express his/her opinions and ideas; it's produced for no material reward at all.

This includes over 10,000,000 (that's 10 million!) individual and collective blogs, which produce over 4,000,000 (and that's 4 million!)  posts every day (hence, my utter surprise that my own humble entries are consistently found and read by people from different countries); online fiction publications; fan-fiction entries into various pop-culture Wikias, unpaid entries (in hopes of exposure) into a multitude of e-zines, etc., etc.  It's all created for no pay and mostly available for free (if you don't count the unbearable assault of advertising on more popular sites as your cover charge - I do).   

And even those who appear to be writing not on spec but on assignment or write on spec but get syndicated, possibly generating fees and royalties for their digital words at such giant contentmongers as, for example, The Huffington Post - nobody seems to know for sure how much money they make.  Well, people close to the subject probably have some scattered bits and pieces of information, but it's so sparse and inconsistent, it's impossible to draw any solid conclusions.  In fact, the aforementioned Bureau of Labor Statistics simply gives up on the matter, basically admitting that the new media is so, ahem, new that there are no set rates and no correspondent statistics.    

But I am not an official government agency - I am just a curious person armed with my common sense and capable of making logical conclusions.  Moreover, I have the freedom to extrapolate, speculate, and infer.  And infer I shall.    

The first fundamental truth about online presence is that the majority of people religiously believe in its powers of publicity.  Hence, the said number of blogs, shameless exhibitionism of facebook pages and personal sites, endless YouTube videos, etc., etc. - general population thinks that if anybody can "be found" today, it will be online.  A few miraculous stories of the Internet exposure actually leading to "fame" only reinforces this belief.  (And the sea of content is growing exponentially, if you catch my drift - but that's another topic).  In context of our subject this makes me think that those who get published in popular online outlets agree to do so for next to nothing, i.e. for much  less than even conventional writers get.

The second fundamental characteristic of the Internet itself as a business is that the majority of revenues generated by non-eCommerce websites, if any, come from online advertising, at least for now (I think this situation is going to change, but that's, again, another topic).  Advertisers, just like the general public, have their own system of the Internet faith - the click-per-view conversion.  In the web environment, the old admen rule of placement for the maximum consumer impact gets a statistical dress-up: a certain number of views results in a click on the ad's link; a certain number of clicks, in its turn, converts into a consumer acquisition, i.e. a sale.  Everyone is invested into the same idea: the more views, the more clicks, the more sales; hence, the popular pay-per-click pricing formula.  As a result, the online content is monetarily valued on its potential viewership. 

This made me think that the most logical way for an owner of a content-driven website to compensate a contributing writer would be based on some rate-per-view (just like YouTube with its videos).  The question is how much?  What's the digitally published word worth?  Apparently, even Labor Statistics officials don't know - most likely because reporting those earnings is still a gray area.    

Ah, but that's what the Internet is actually for - the information superhighway.  If something piques your interest and you know how to formulate your search, you will find what you need:  like the large UK blogging hub on everything pop WhatCulture.com (they are absolutely right - they have nothing to do with Culture, concentrating primarily on blockbusters and gossip in film, big hits and gossip in TV, mega stars and gossip in music, plus gaming, sports, WWE). 

The site's content model is based on accepting (not guaranteed) and publishing other people's submissions.  On their Write For Us and Get Paid page they openly solicit material from the potential contributors (Lists! Lists! Lists! That's their preferred format - "9 Reasons to Be Excited About Arrested Development Season 5" or "10 Actors Who Really Don't Belong in the Upcoming Movies" and shit like that).  Therefore, the "get-paid" rate is openly disclosed right there: £0.40 ($0.62) per 1,000 views. 

Aha!  With that in hand, let us entertain ourselves with some arithmetical exercising:  Yesterday, the most-read entry in the film section of WhatCulture.com was "10 Things You Need to Know About Captain America: Civil War" - it had 1.3 million views, thus generating its author $806.  Not bad, assuming he put it together pretty quickly.  Theoretically speaking, if you can pop one of this every day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, you can actually earn $210K annual wage! 

But the probability of it, of course, is quite slim - not only because no one on their own can research and write 260 entries a year, but mainly because it's hard to achieve such viewership: for example, the most read TV article had only 223 thousand views ($138.26) and the top one in a deeply hidden Art division (the only one in the whole site I personally found interesting - 10 Up and Coming Portrait Photographers) attracted exactly 2000 readers ($1.32 worth).  The audience's interest is fickle. 

This site is big and popular - the effort of a full-scope statistical analysis goes beyond my level of interest (I am sure the management has all the numbers readily available to them), but my quick-glance conclusion is that the average views per post is about 50,000 or $31 value.  So, ladies and gentlemen, even if you can do three of those a week, the more realistic earnings would be a modest amount of $4,836 per year.  

I say, don't quit your day job for this just yet - that is, of course, if you have one.

Video Quote of the Week: The Best Meditation Guidance for the Frustrated Likes of Us

No comments necessary!!!  Simply the best!

 

Quote of the Week: No Retirement in Your Future

  "Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous.  When I was sixty-five I still had pimples."

           George Burns

           1896 - 1996

 The Frustrated CFO's Comment:  At this point, the best my generation can do is to look for humor in our situation.

The Wealth of the Nation: Observation #3

Just like every other New Yorker, I have experienced the rush of LIE's giant billboard ads coming at me on the way out of and into the Midtown Tunnel on numerous occasions.  You cannot really avoid the experience - there are just too many possibilities that can draw you that way: JFK, LaGuardia, US Open at Flushing Meadows, its next-door neighbors the Mets, your relatives in Queens, your suburban friends with their Near Long Island homes, and maybe even rich acquaintances with summer residences in the Hamptons.  Hey, it's possible you just like sitting in traffic for hours.  Whatever is the reason, the majority of people who live in or visit NYC have been exposed to the visual calls of various brands, upcoming movies, TV seasons' premiers, etc. strategically positioned on that particular spot between the boroughs.

Liberal extremists and snooty hipsters unconditionally reject all forms of commercial publicity as the front-end of consumerism (yet, they all support it by the sheer fact of having facebook accounts and iPhones).  But I'm no hypocrite - I don't simplistically dismiss advertising and even consumerism itself as evil.  In full honesty: quality objects are quite necessary in my life for aesthetic, utilitarian, vain, and psycho-therapeutic reasons.  Quality being an operative word, of course.  Unfortunately, the majority of contemporary promotions target general public that cannot afford quality anymore.  And it has been reflected on the ever-changing billboards.

Over the years I've experienced a broad spectrum of reactions to the images coming into my view on LIE.  At worst, they've ranged from "Who the hell is this ad for?  Billionaires?" to "God, that's just cheap and ugly!"  And at best, I have been pleasantly surprised by the resurrection of a high quality classic (Longines); awed by the first digital installation (FreshDirect); excited by the success of a small business (7 for All Mankind - unfortunately, they sold out to a global conglomerate VF within a couple of years); inspired by the social changes we have witnessed (Queer As Folk).    

Sadly, in the last couple of years my reaction range narrowed to one very intense sliver of irritation, but at least the billboards were largely occupied as recently as four months ago.  Imagine my surprise last weekend when I saw that less than 50% of the boards were actually covered by promo bills.  I don't think I've ever seen them like that.              

No, wait!  There was a period back in, I believe, 2012 when a lot of ads had to be taken down and boards dismantled due to the strict enforcement of the billboard laws related to the size and distance requirements.  But it is safe to assume that both the space owners and advertisers overcame the regulation hurdles, since, as I said, I just recently saw practically all billboards occupied.

So, that's not it.  What then?  Two things, really - the national impoverishment and the incurable social-media degeneracy.

You see, the billboards are not cheap.  It's not Super Bowl prices ($4.5 million for a 30-second spot this year), but still - an LIE billboard rents for about $30K per month.  And that's at the time when every single company that targets the consumer market with its goods or services MUST make room in their advertising budgets for GoogleAds (which also owns YouTube), iAds, facebook, Twitter, etc.  

Multiply that consideration by the wavering consumer confidence (I don't care what the "official" numbers are showing) compounded with the dwindling buying power and you come to the point when even the companies selling the highest volumes of consumer goods have to start making tough choices: whether to allocate $300K per year to a physical spot with a maximum of 210,000 possible views a day (LIE's 2014 auto throughput) or to a virtual spot tied to some viral YouTube video that generates 5 million views in 5 days. 

The empty spots along the expressway testify to the choices the companies are making.  It's totally opportunistic, of course.  Moreover, from my POV it's also totally short-sighted - there are so many existing and potential problems with online advertising, I intend to write a separate post on the subject.  It is possible that we are yet to see the times when advertisers will be fighting for the physical publicity spaces.  But for now, more and more billboards along the highways and on the City's buildings will go empty. 

I have a feeling that even the famous and fabulous digital screens at one of the most visited places in the world (50 million visitors a year), Times Square, may end up going dark at some point.  After all, nowadays the tourists and locals alike are mostly looking down at their electronic devices, not up.  So, it would be only fiscally prudent for the consumer-oriented companies to spend $1M-$4M a year (2015 rates) some place else.

And I find it very telling that the most gigantic (the whole block, 77 feet tall by 323 feet long, 20 pixels big) and the most expensive ($2.5 million for EVERY 4 WEEKS) LED advertising screen was taken by the company that makes billions on online advertising - Google.  They can actually afford it easily. 

Of course, the blank billboards are good news for graffiti artists like Rambo - more real estate for them! There is a poetic justice in that: the promotion of consumerism gets replaced by the guerrilla art.  Historically, the explosion of street art always went hand-in-hand with the economic downfalls.  That's why in the past it frequently (and expediently) turned into Prop Art - going from philosophical expressionism straight into political activism.  People should remember that as a valuable lesson in social science. 

In my opinion, it's not accidental that the crumbling of our ecological and socioeconomic environments coincides with the aesthetic degradation we are experiencing right now - when people bow to false idols and nepotistic, masturbatory garbage is passed as the "contemporary art" by the pushers from auction houses and big-name galleries.  I can only hope that real artists will fulfill their soul-changing mission and force people to look away from their little crack-emitting handheld displays and up at something awesome and powerful.          

Quote of the Week: "Orange Is the New Black" Checks Off Nepotism on Its List of Life's Wrongs

 

Joe Caputo (Litchfield Penitentiary's Assistant to the Warden):  The fish stinks from the head.  And I'm not the head!  I am actually down by the gills somewhere.  So, once I call the police and US Marshals; and the DOC investigators start sniffing around, it's going to look a lot worse for the 'Director of Human Activity' here at Litchfield!

Danny Pearson (MCC appointed Director of Human Activity):  Whoa!

Caputo:(ironically) Whoa!

Pearson:  Whoa!

Caputo:  Whoa!

Pearson:  Whoa! Yeah...

Caputo:  Whoa, whoa, whoa! Yeah!

Pearson:  Slow down!  Why do we have to involve all those people?

Caputo:  We have an escaped convict!!!

Pearson:  Let's just go get her back!

Caputo:  Who?

Pearson: You and me.  Where did they take her?

Caputo:  The bus station in Utica.

Pearson:  Let's just get into a car.  We'll go get her, bring her back. Yeah!  Nobody has to know.

Caputo:  So, you're saying, the two of us should go and apprehend an escaped convict?  This is not The Fucking Bloodhound Gang!  Okay?

Pearson:  Well, I don't know what to do!  I honestly don't know what the fuck to do!  Do you know how I got this job?  My Dad is one of the SVP's at MCC.

Caputo:  (smirks and nods his head in full comprehension and disgust)

Pearson:  Yeah...  This is going to be worse than when I got kicked out of Ohio University...  I have no idea what I'm doing..

Caputo:  Fine.  I'll go.  On my own.

The Frustrated CFO's Comment:Most shows experience some sort of a slump in the third season - the story exhausts itself, the characters become too familiar, writers run out of surprising ideas.  Not this show, though!  This 3rd season!  It's so good, some critics and viewers rate it higher than the fist two!  There is so much excellent, nuanced stuff!  And this Caputo guy, who got promoted by the producers into a main character - I painfully relate to his plight of never-ending bad decisions.  There are always insults added to his injuries: not only that he gets a new boss, but it's somebody's useless offspring on top of it.  You just know, there is no happy ending for Caputo - he'll never get out of prison.

 

WTF, Greece? Or The Luxurious Arrogance of Poverty

The funny thing is that I went to Greece precisely in the last moments of their Euro-backed temporary prosperity - in August of 2009.  By the end of that year, the Greek government had no choice but to come clean and admit that they "slightly" understated their national deficit, by like... 112%.  After that it all went down the hill and now we know where Greece really is - in deep shit.

It's a beautiful country!  Very beautiful and very proud of its history and culture, its ancient glory.  Sometimes to a fault, but that's another story.  Meanwhile, in this one I must say that, while our own Greek experience was nothing short of fantastic, we just knew that the shit will hit the fan pretty soon.  There were signs, both metaphorical and tangible.   

Towards the end of our trip, massive wildfires broke out in several areas.  On the morning of our drive to the Athens International Airport for the flight home, the vile smell of the scorched earth was already clinging to everything in the capital and its suburbs.  It felt as if we were escaping a cinematic doom, with the burning forests chasing us away.  Greeks and their theatrics! 

My fiscally attuned mind picked on far less dramatic, more subtle hints.  Small, but significant things; especially peculiar for a country that has an official status of "developed" and boasts "a high-income economy, a high quality of life, and a very high standard of living."

For example, practically every person we've met there had relatives in the US; and not second or third generation immigrants, but people who left in a past decade or so.  Since Greece has been a stable democracy for at least 35 years and it is pretty homogeneous racially, these people are obviously not political refugees.  Like for the majority of immigrants, their underlying reason for leaving the homeland is economic.

Also, there were scores people in their 50s and 60s who have already retired.  That actually could've been considered a sign of wealth, indicating significant personal savings.  Except that was not the case - all these people were relying on substantial government pensions.  Speaking of wealth, quite a few of more or less prosperous Greeks have businesses locally but reside in the US, Canada, Australia, and Germany, pulling substantial chunks of their capital out of their home country (Greece readily allows dual citizenship). 

The brand new (opened only two months before our arrival) Acropolis Museum, standing right next to the undergoing massive restorations Parthenon, simply blew my mind.  It is extraordinarily impressive!  With data from several sources I was able to estimate that,  between the museum and the archeological site, their owner, the Ministry of Culture, had spent $320 million (at the Euro/USD conversion rate of the time).  I wondered how a country of 11 million people with 2008 GDP smaller than Exxon Mobil's annual revenues could possibly afford such undertaking!  Well, it couldn't - the Greek government dipped into Eurozone lending pool to finance these projects.  And that brings us to the current stalemate.    

God!  There are so many economic, political, and social reviews out there on the subject of the Greek disaster, it would be just a waste of time to try to stick another two cents into the cacophony of bullshit prediction and "analytical" speculations.  Moreover, most commentators seem to be focused on the problem I've noticed back in 2009 and already pointed out above - the youngish pensioners.  So, what else there is to say?  Yet, I know a thing or two about countries that de facto belong to the third-world realm, but delude themselves into believing that they are big international players!  Hence, I may offer some additional insights. 

You see, average citizens don't get ideas of grandeur and prosperity out of thin air.  Every Emerald City has its own Wizard of Oz.  And those are always people of power with national (and international) reach; invariably they are all liars. 

With some nations (e.g. Russia) it's enough to bluntly smack green glasses of absolutely empty, never-ever fulfilled promises straight onto the noses of the countrymen and they will believe that they are surrounded by jewels.  In other countries, like Greece, the illusions must be more finessed - you actually have to give something tangible to people to make them believe that their lives can be no different than, let's say, in the Netherlands, or Sweden.  

As I said, it gets tricky:  In Scandinavian countries, citizens themselves are charged with an obligation to fund their state benefits through heavy income taxes.  But Greek politicians who rode to power on social programs have no resources like that - there is not enough domestic income to tax.  The national wealth is not real, it's just pretend.  What to do then?  Not to worry - it's all thought through: If your country is a Eurozone member, you have a shortcut - you can qualify for member loans (Acropolis, pensions, welfare - everything from the same Euro pot). 

The Prestige of this magic trick is this: in order to qualify the Greek government lied to everyone internally and externally - they falsified data, facts, statements and whatnot, obscuring the fact that the national wealth is not really there.  And no matter what people who benefited from thusly financed cushy social programs think, these opportunists had only their own personal interests and political aspirations in mind.

Of course now it is difficult to take any benefits away!  Greeks don't want to give them up.  Oh the luxurious arrogance of the poor!  They want to keep all their benefits and their pride intact at the same time - get their debts forgiven, receive more money.  They feel entitled! They are one of the oldest members of the Eurozone!  If their European comrades want to keep the Union intact, they will bite their tongues and save their Greek brother, no matter what!  Plus, no terms and conditions! 

This attitude manifested itself on 07/05, when 60% of the country voted in support of saying "No" to the bailout package that was on the table at the time.  The CNN Breaking News I've received that day said that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hoped that

"this will force Europe to hand over more money with less austerity attached, and cancel some of Greece's enormous debt."

For a hot second there it seemed that pride will become the top priority; that they'd rather starve standing up then eat kneeling.  Greeks were celebrating in the streets of Athens.  Where is all that pride coming from amidst all the lying and data falsification?  And who can afford to be proud when your national economy is in a state commonly known as a "free fall" and your banking system is in a virtual shut down due to empty vaults?  I don't know.   

But then, only four days later, they retracted and accepted the original offer:  zero old debt forgiveness; the bailout in the conventional form of loans; compulsory pension cuts and tax increases to make sure that the Greek government can serve this new debt and the old debt, i.e. pay interest to the lending Euro-brothers.  And now Mr. Tsipras says "YES, PLEASE" and is willing to battle his own MPs to ratify the requirements into laws! 

Doesn't it all sound like some sort of a kindergarten (aka political) game of delusional children?  But hold up!  The conditional bailout is not a guarantee.  Will Greece pass all those mandatory economic reforms as laws?  Will the PM be able to pull through?  The 6 million Spartans may still have a chance to keep their grand stance instead.         

The unspoken truth is - if that what happens tomorrow, it will be the best possible outcome for the European Union.  I mean, none of the members can really afford this bailout (Remember? France wants to sell Mona Lisa to cover exactly 0.1% of its own national debt).  It would be a much better fiscal option for other countries to let Greece follow that Exit sign straight out of the Eurozone.  

Post Scriptum to Pseudoscience Post: Michael LaCour

A week ago I posted my comments on pseudo-economics  and a couple of days later someone drew my attention to Michael LaCour's mess.

That's right, I am not up to date on my bullshit news!  And if some of you are not either:  Michael LaCour is a political-science PhD aspirant at UCLA.  Last year, he successfully pushed through academic approvals and straight into mass media his research, which "empirically proved" that voters' opinions on gay marriage could be positively shifted based on a single 20-minite conversation with an LGBT person relating his/her story. 

Of course, it was a fake!  Not only the results were falsified, the entire study was a fiction.  As I was trying to explain in the previous post, there is a lot of this shit going on, especially in social sciences.  Surprisingly, it got exposed as a fraud within just one year!      

Oh, my!  What a case in point!  Or rather a case in multiple points I've been addressing from time to time.  Here are a few:

Point 1.  Nowadays, you can literally fake anything - data, documents, careers, personae and personalities, talents, beauty, courage, loyalty, honesty, news, finances, science, art, national histories, even entire lives, as long as you wrap it in an impressive package and  your lies hit the right spot in the target audience. The gullible, superficial, ignorant, and plain stupid majority of contemporary humans make terrifically fertile soil for all kind of schemers and fakers to sow their poisonous seeds.  What used to be a crime of skillful con artists and corrupt governments has become a way of life for quite a few people; many of them very successful and well known.        

Point 2.  Nobody is doing their job and/or paying attention.  It is impossible to count how many times I brought up this issue, both in writing and in conversations.  LaCour's blatant fakery passed with flying colors through multiple stages of mandatory academic, "accuracy-liable" reporting, and widespread public assessments.  Faculty advisers, peer reviewers, editors of research journals, social justice non-profits, mass-media reporters and their respective editors - they all accepted and approved the study's premise, methodology, findings, and conclusions.

Even LaCour's "co-author," Columbia University political science professor Donald Green didn't bother to check the validity of the data presented to him.  (This is how it works, by the way, in academia in all countries - you need some professor's name on your papers to get them published).  I can vividly see all these people, too impotent to engage any critical reasoning, speed-reading the first and the last 10 pages of the paper and being bedazzled by colorful charts and tables of numbers. 

Point 3.  Media and public perception will always prevail over reason and truth.  Because for the past several years gay marriage has been one of the hottest topics on the journalistic radar, publication of the study in Science magazine worked like a spark for the international print media engine.  As the result, the research was headlined in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, and This American Life. 

Because people read about it in these "respected" newspapers and magazines (oh, they've failed us so many times - but people don't want to learn), nobody questioned the fact that the study contradicted the times-proven concept that the vast majority of people tend to hold on to their social and political opinions regardless of what they read or hear.  Moreover, everyone's daily personal interactions are miniature studies in people's staunch stubbornness and inability to absorb opponents' arguments; alas, that was also ignored.

It takes an extraordinary power of persuasion of some very special people who possess illuminating brilliance of the mind, impressive oratory skills, and innate guruship (all of it at the same time) to alter minds and souls.  And I don't think you can find 100 of those in Los Angeles, or the entire state of California, or any single nation.  Hell, let me be honest - I think it would be hard to find 100 people like that on this entire planet.

Yet, the confused liberal do-gooders got so excited about the "scientifically proven" possibility of influencing potential voters through a simple tool of a 20-minute conversation, many of them shook their donors' wallets and scraped their budget barrels in order to fund multiple LGBT canvasing projects.  Are you ready?  Ireland's Yes Campaign publicly connects the successful legalization of gay marriage in that country six weeks ago to their use of LaCour's paper as a template in targeting conservative voters with personal stories' recounts.  Not the years of political struggle, constitutional law reviews, tremendous cultural shifts of the past 20 years affecting generations of people in many countries, but one single (and short) conversation!      

Point 4.  Common sense is all you need to see the truth.  (It's getting to be my mantra, isn't it?)  David Brookman, another graduate student at University of California (only in Berkley, not LA) took a quick look at some of the input data presented in LaCour's research and went like, "What the fuck?"  Or something to that effect - I wasn't really there.  He didn't need any heavy investigative machinery or extensive computer modeling - just simple arithmetic in his head: 10,000 of "recorded" contacts at a disclosed incentives of $100 a pop, that's... $1,000,000!!!  Who the hell funded this scientifically uncertain PhD research in the first place?  (The fact that nobody, not even the co-author, has put two and two together before Brookman did literally makes my blood boil.)  And was it some highly reputable survey organization that handled this substantial sum?  Nah, the name didn't ring any bells, like at all.  After that it was just unspooling the lies.  

Point 5.  The unrepairable damage of pseudoscientific bullshit.  They come in different shapes and forms, and they can manifest themselves right away or in the distant future, but there is no question about it - nothing good ever comes out of pseudoscience and falsified research.  Whether it's Nazi's eugenics providing foundation for racial extermination, or "medical cures" of homosexuality destroying lives, or pulp sci-fi replacing healthcare and education for millions of people around the world - some terrible fallout always follows. 

Without getting all preachy and embarking on a rant about the amorality of LaCour's con, let me instead mention its two more tangible negative outcomes.  

As soon as the fraud was exposed,  The Wall Street Journal (one of the original heralds of the "revolutionary" findings), in a typical swing to the other extreme, gave its editorial page to some conservative "scientists" to vent their righteous indignation.  These theoreticians, of course, couldn't possibly miss the opportunity to denounce all of social science (I guess, that includes Economics) as unscientific and nothing more than "liberal wishful thinking." 

Because so many civil-rights advocacy groups associated themselves with LaCour's bullshit and, as I mentioned before, spent gifted, bequeathed, and granted funds replicating the experiment that never was, they discredited themselves as organizations and people who didn't know what they were doing.  Even staunch supporters feel embarrassed by those leaders who succumbed to someone's unscrupulous methods of advancing their academic careers.  I am guessing, a few non-profit heads will roll.

And truthfully I cannot possibly feel sorry for these fools.  Just like I didn't feel sorry for Bernie Madoff's victims.  These people want to hear the "good news" so badly, they become eager and willing participants in these not-so-clever schemes.