Latest / Mechonomist Podcast / Jason Arday, Markets, and "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'"

Transcript

Jason Arday, Markets, and "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" · Mechonomist Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good afternoon, everyone.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Darrell Waltrip,
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: a famous race car driver,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: NASCAR driver, he once said, if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in the 60s, 70s,
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: and 80s,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: it was common for race car drivers to find some sort of advantage,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: whether it was bending the rules or completely outside the rules.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at any competitive sport,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: everybody's always pushing up against the rules as much as possible
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: to gain some sort of advantage.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you introduce competition or competitive markets into any type
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: of social situation, people are going to try and cheat to get an advantage.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what Jason Arday did.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: He took it to an extreme, but...
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: He saw that there had been a market introduced for cultural trauma or trauma.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he took that.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: He took that market to its limit and he showed the limit of
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: the cultural trauma market and most of his claims and the stuff that he said he did
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: and happened to him are completely fantastic.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: But.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you can't really even blame him because markets incentivize cheating.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there's other examples of this type of stuff,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: such as people claiming to be indigenous,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: people claiming to be black who aren't black.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when you create a market around indigeneity or womanness or blackness,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: People are going to naturally try to gain some sort of advantage in that market
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: by bending or breaking the rules.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not about
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Jason Arday being black per se
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Any other person bending or breaking the rules being a certain identity per se.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's that there's a market for those identities that incentivizes cheating
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: within those markets in order to gain some sort of advantage.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Jason Arna clearly gained an advantage.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's a full professor at Cambridge,
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: and he had worked this market in a way that put him at the very top.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we can't call into question all people of Black identity or all people
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: of Indigenous identity or all people who are playing the game of identity politics.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: We can't question all them based on their race,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: but what we can question is why does there exist a market for identity and trauma
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: to begin with?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why aren't colleges prioritizing
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: This type of narrative with cultural and economic capital
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: when these colleges should be prioritizing scholarship,
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: reasoned,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: objective arguments about social, environmental, economic, cultural issues.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: We got to get back to that because as there are flaws in it,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: it's not perfect,
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: but it's much better than people lying about who they are just to bend the rules of
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: a market that has just recently been invented.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I fear that this market will stay forever.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of hard to unmake an omelet and that there'll be some market
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: for these type of identity narratives in the future.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the Jason R.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Day situation shows that The ultimate limit of such markets in the sense
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: that anybody can make up any experience that they ever had and get ahead.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: If the lies are big enough, they're going to be caught and the market's going to correct.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not a matter of...
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Him being a black man or a woman being a woman.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a matter of identity.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a matter of markets and the fact that markets incentivize cheating.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my commentary for today.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you all next time.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, y'all.