> Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.

buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.

I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).

edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.

As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.

So what happens when we do make accomodations to them? That their peaky, gifted performance comes out, they don't get ejected by the school systems anywhere near as often as they were before, and now end up in top institutions. Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.

you can even see this in tech workplaces: The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway. So it should be no surprise that in instutitutions searching for performance, the number of people that qualify for affordances for certain mental disabilities just goes way up.

That's not to say that there cannot be people that are just cheating, but it doesn't take much time in a class with gifted kids to realize that no, it's not just cheating. You can find someone, say, suffering in a dialectic-centric english class, where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.

In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that need help, and parents are actively and explicitly ask for it, even if the kids are borderline. Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. IEP students are also assigned to regular classroom so they are not treated differently and their identities aren't top secret. Mind you, the parents here can easily afford additional help if needed.

In other neighborhood, a long time family friend with two young children, the older one doesn't talk in school, period. Their speech is clearly behind. The parents refuse to have the kids assign IEP and insist that as long as the child is not disruptive, there is no reason to do so. Why the parents don't want to get help, because they feel the older child will get labelled and bullied and treated differently. The older child hates school and they are only in kindergarten. Teachers don't know what to do with the child.

I suspect this is similar - rich parents are doing anything for an edge in their child's education and can get any diagnosis they desire. It's an unfair system.

FTA: "Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of cheating—they give you an unjust leg-up on your fellow students, but they also allow you to cheat yourself out of genuine intellectual growth."

Isn't that... good? What else would be expected if you have a disability, and need accomodations?

Okay, I was an undergrad at Stanford a decade ago, I graduated with two majors (math, physics) and almost another minor (CS) so I took more credits than most and sat in more tests than most, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single person given extra time on tests; and some of the courses had more than a hundred people in them, with test takers almost filling the auditorium in Hewlett Teaching Center if memory serves. Article says the stat “has grown at a breathtaking pace” “over the past decade and half” and uses “at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years” as a shocking example, so I would assume the stat was at least ~10% at Stanford a decade ago. So where were these people during my time? Only in humanities? Anyone got first hand experience?

15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.

Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.

Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.

We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.

Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?

What the actual... Lack of journalistic integrity rears its head once again. Executive function and social challenges do not make a person "not smart."

Going back to the core of the problem, I feel that this does need to be controlled. It's one thing to disability signal online to gain clout, it's a completely different thing to drain resources from genuinely disabled folks. Disabilities need to come with diagnoses.

I wouldn't be surprised that this is part of some coaching program too. It seems too random for folks to just "stumble" on a hack. There are few of these outfits which advertise that they can "get your kid accepted into colleges" if you buy their services.

> But the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.

If we take honesty out of the equation, what's the downside for not declaring a disability, if it's not that hard to get a note from a doctor? You get better housing, and more time on tests. I am surprised the number is not higher, actually like 75% or something.

I don't think I needed more time on tests but I definitely needed medication and counseling. The counseling resources available at the time were not adequate and medication was difficult to get.

Once 10 or 20% of students are doing this, it isnt unexpected for everyone to start doing it just to get on an even playing field. As usual, the poor students lose out because they cannot afford the doctors or expediters who can facilitate all these things.

This is a blunt quote, but it gets at a key part of the problem: Qualifying as having a disability can come with some material benefits in many schools.

The intentions are good: Schools are doing what they think is best to accommodate and help students with disabilities. It has been a high priority for decades. However, some of these accommodations come with academic advantages. Extra time on tests is the most common one I've seen.

Combine this with the ease of qualifying for a disability (look up the right doctor online, schedule an appointment, pay insurance copay, walk out with a note) and it became an easy, cheap, and tangible academic advantage.

One of the schools I'm familiar with switched to giving everyone the same, longer time period for taking test because it was becoming obvious that the system was being abused.

I suspect Stanford selects for students who are smart, yes, but most exceptional at gaming the system. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of watering down the difficulty of classes and standardized tests.

Long time ago something came up like this in the Netherlands. Some massive, unexplained increase in disability.

I asked how could this ever be possible?

He asked: "Are any of the disabilities that show a massive increase not objectively measurable but still eligible for subsidies?

At the time I thought it was such a backwards way of thinking but over the years I can't shake this sentence.

When I was in school, the department that dealt with accessibility could chop the spine off a book, scan it and give you a high quality ebook. I also knew someone who was flagrantly cheating with some test-taking accommodation.

That ebook service was just a nice thing that more people should have taken advantage of. One or two of the professors even subtly encouraged using it to pirate textbooks.

To be clear I am not making light of or dismissing legitimate issues. Simply pointing out that there are some that take advantage of the systems that exist.

You actually are starting to see this in the corporate world. People with a laundry list of diagnoses and other statuses that make them very tricky to let go for performance reasons.

If you have learning disability that requires "assistance" at an elite university, then why can't I play in the NBA with stilts while being allowed to double dribble and travel?

Sure would be awesome for me to play in the NBA! Probably wouldn't be good for the NBA though.

And the professors and TAs were not even allowed to ask the students what they needed those accommodations for.

Tests should be open book, open notes, and an extensive amount of time to do the test. The questions should be such that they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not just how well you can parrot back information.

Whilst I would love tests to be open internet, this lends itself to very easy cheating. The material being taught and what notes you take about it should be enough to answer any questions posed to you about the material. Especially those that demonstrate an understanding of the material.

Accommodation Nation: America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121559

Performance-doping by a large percentage of students at prestigious schools has been going on for decades. Separate from the people who are wired differently and really need the chemical tuning.

Also, it seems a lot of students are on anti-depressants. (You might be, too, if you had pushy overachiever helicopter parents always pushing you. Or if the same career that paid for your affluent upbringing, including college admission advantages, came because a parent operated very selfishly in general.)

Meds seem to be a go-to solution for many affluent families.

Adderall doesn't let someone be the brightest student, but it helps them keep up with courseload, of study-heavy or lab-heavy classes -- to compete with the students who have better/more prior education/experience, better work practices, who prioritize studies over partying, or who are otherwise brighter as a student in some regard.

Of the students who didn't actually have an ADHD disability, but ended up relying on the meds anyway, they aren't bad people. They're actually generally nice and smart, like everyone else. I hope it keeps working for them, or they are able to wean off without ill effects.

One thing I really worry about is a different but related problem: a culture of cheating, most recently accelated by ChatGPT and the like. That seems to be having really bad societal effects already.

One thing I wonder about is whether some of the students on other meds, like for depression, are having too much edge of passion and creativity taken off. Although the college admissions and career prep books and coaches tell students how to give the corporate-standard performative indicators of "passion", that comes out as a very different thing, and maybe all the meds has something to do with that. (I suppose a professor who's been engaged for a few decades would have a good perspective on this.)

Stanford can make the student pay any costs of the accommodation if Stanford wants to push back on the student. E.g., if the student requests extra time on tests, Stanford can estimate the total cost of employing the proctor and bill that (amortized of course over the amount of extra time).

But yeah, it is kind of excessive how much special treatment a person can get in US society just by being rich enough to afford a doctor who will sign whatever letters the person needs (and being shameless enough to request the letters). Another example is apartment buildings with a strict policy of no dogs. With a doctor's letter, the pet dog becomes a medically-necessary emotional-support animal, which the landlord must allow per the same ADA discussed in the OP.

If you know the stuff, regurgitating it faster is a trivial optimization.

Fast-forward 20+ years and I find out I have ASD and ADHD. Knowing may have helped give me some better ideas for strategies, but part of me is glad I didn’t know, because I didn’t have an excuse and found a way through. Though I’m not sure any of the accommodations I hear about would have been helpful. I never needed more time during tests and having to take care of an animal just sounds like more on my plate. Had I actually spent time with tutors to study, I likely would have burned out. I needed a lot of downtime away from people.

I can totally believe that some kids who excelled in high school, enough to get into Stanford, would fall apart in college without the same structure and would need some assistance. But I do question what that will do for them when they need to go out and get a job. I know companies are supposed to provide accommodations if needed, but I have to believe that will impact their career. I haven’t told my manager or anyone since I found out about my own issues. It used to not be a problem at all, as my old manager let me work my way and he may have even known before I did, he was good at picking all kinds of things out like that. Currently I’m struggling for the past 4 years or so, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highly selective school that’s by definition going to be picking gifted kids over less gifted ones, and from that group will pick those that were accommodated appropriately.

(There could also be cheating - I don’t know either way. I’m just commenting on the premise of the article. One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs. Hopefully it’s fairly obvious that this claim is totally illogical. Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.)

My friend had a very good life, until he took a job that really clashed with his, uhm, tendency to be a perfectionist. When we caught up (because we hadn't spoken in a few years,) it was clear he didn't have much insight into how his perfectionism worked against him in the job. (It was a job where quantity was more important than perfection.)

What would have helped my friend more? Not the diagnosis that he needed untimed tests. Instead, counseling where he understood his difference, how to make best use of it, and when he needed to let go and not be a perfectionist.

OP has likely never had a kid with ADHD (I get it, they're like 24), getting a kid to be ADHD diagnosed is neither fun nor something you would do lightly in the US.

Which is also why older millennials would just not get diagnosed and just struggle more. Tech is full high functioning people with ADHD and autism, it's not surprising you'd see so many students at Stanford being the same.

"Obviously"? "is clearly bogus?"

Not to me. I see too much rhetoric and assumptions. In an article in Reason magazine, I expect more -- to demonstrate careful thinking that cuts through lazy common-sense thinking.

To make sense of a situation, one of my favorite tools is simple: a causal diagram(s). See [1]. This requires effort, and it should. Making a useful, communicable model that forms the foundation for your argument takes practice. Here's a disability-related example: [2]

I want to live in a world where causal models are demanded by readers.

[1]: https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/images/volu...

[2]: https://ibb.co/5XcGyLK0

In 2004/2008/2012, 11% of college students had disabilities. It was 21% in 2020.

In 2020, 69% of students with disabilities had behavioral or emotional conditions - up from 33% in 2004.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-105614.pdf

  - Charlie Munger

Imagine trying to teach ~30 kids when there are 12-15 with an IEP (individualized education plan) with these rules in place. Inevitably, someone will come at me for blaming IEPs, but when they are being exploited in this way the quality of instruction absolutely tanks. Part of this was eliminating AP-standard-basic tiers of classes, so now everyone is in the same class. The "concept" is that kids that are excelling will help the kids that need help. (It does not work this way, the excelling kids get bored, basic kids get bored, chaos ensues.)

My friend, who loves teaching, and has been doing for a decade before this change, is counting the days to her retirement. She says that class has become Burger King, which is have it your way. She has very little say in how these are structured.

Districts love this stuff because it makes them sound like they care about students, but the reality is it's parents pushing down on teachers for better grades at the cost of quality. This doesn't challenge kids in any way, it teaches them that if you complain at the system you can have it easier. My friend has stopped bothering to attempt to change this and is going along with the program as the negatives have obvious career limiting side effects.

It's a classic DDoS / degradation attack.

Personally, it seems insane to me. I get that it's some kind of min-max for Stanford students, nothing like this existed when I was in uni (an eng college). We took our thermo exam, the average was a D+, and we liked it! Of course there was a curve, but the message I received was a humbling one. You don't know as much as you think you do, and you better think twice when building powerful things.

I've suspected for many years that ADHD is like Medical Marijuana. Some people really need it. For others, it's just a way to get legal access to stimulants.

This has created a kind of symbiosis between the wellbeing officers who make careers off of many students needing accommodations, and fit and healthy students who get academic advantages from being "diagnosed" disabled.

There are obviously students with genuine needs, and the wellbeing people are usually very nice and extremely empathic and caring. So you end up looking like a cruel asshole when you try to point out the perverse incentives within this system.

It's perfect.

For a long time already, I've looked back and thought that all those accommodations were a flaw in the way my generation was raised. In the real world you don't get that, you need to find a way to overcome and/or turn things that make you different into strengths and leverage them to your advantage. It's interesting to see how things have and haven't changed.

Oh, and on another note, I just sent this article to a friend with the comment, "I was finally able to get that Vyvanse filled at an independent pharmacy."

Sure it is not nice or moral but that is the life now.

I suspect that many of these people would be able to make it through college with good grades regardless of accomodations, but at the cost of reduced emotional and mental health.

And there are also probably others who legitimately have ADHD or Autism, but don't really need any special accommodation to do well academically.

Poor people denigrate mental health issues and don’t have reliable insurance to do anything about it quickly even if they wanted to buck the trend

Rich people fawn over mental health issues, and can quickly get diagnosis over telehealth, rescheduling with a different provider in minutes if the current one won’t diagnose

Well, considering * gestures broadly at everything *, I'm sure more than 38% of students are struggling with near-debilitating anxiety and depression. The future doesn't look very bright right now. I can't imagine what being in college must feel like. I've been doing this job for like 20 years and I feel incredibly uncertain about my future most days.

There’s plenty to discuss and disagree with these policies but the author’s willingness to make broad judgments about college students’ behaviors and internal states based on poor understanding of ADHD, the ADA, and what’s actually going on at these schools is incredibly poor journalism by this author and by Reason.

If this brings you points at entey exams or similar bonuses - why not (mis)using that mechanism?

Or maybe I have as a European the wrong impression about positive discrimination based on race in universities? (I do not nit jave recent data, just remember that people mentioned that they did not play the "race card" to be admitted)

  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11903426-show-me-the-incentive-and-i-ll-show-you-the-outcome

I think university students are just weirder now. They just don't have the same social skills as before. Maybe Covid has erased social skills and behaviors, or maybe the internet is too prevalent.

I don't know what the social equivalent of the Overton Window would be, but I think that's shifted so hard that traditional autism tests would mark most modern students as autistic.

> here's been a rising push to see mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions as not just a medical fact, but an identity marker

Of course, there are also true cases where it takes 4 hours to complete a 30-minute test.

All it does is kill the GPA signal completely. One amongst many before, pure noise now.

[edit: not denying people need it. but it appears like folks that don't also use it]

I’ve had good luck with places like Notre Dame and Cal Poly where the kids are smart, and willing to work very hard. From the Ivy League I’ve had more luck with Cornell hires than the others.

It’s a small sample size so I’m curious what others see.

When I went to the DMV and couldn't pass the vision test without my glasses, they put on my driver's license an indication that I only passed with the accommodation of corrective lenses.

Does Reason do even the most basic fact checking? The most recent “issue” of the DSM (DSM-V-TR) was released in 2022.

I don't doubt that many of those students are faking having a disability to game the system in order to benefit themselves, but this article and the discussion around it are anything but intellectual.

Any functioning individual can go to a therapist and get an immediate diagnosis of an affliction, simply because therapists won't get clients if they don't provide the avenue for being funded by health insurance.

This is all aside from the fact that these disabilities can be used as a way to get all sorts of special treatment. That's just icing on the cake. They see each other doing it and say why not me as well. It's a feign mental disorder chain reaction that's gone critical. Sexuality as well. They like to collect labels like Pokémon. Massive social benefit.

Under the Trump administration, accommodations for mentally disabled people are no longer enforced. Most of the enforcers were laid off. The new policy is “encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” [1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/endi...

Cheating? Really? There’s a passing reference to getting an accommodation if partly through convenience as cheating. This throwaway line holds a lot of the problems of education in it. It denotes a view where education is less about learning than point scoring. Getting an accommodation for an extra day on a project is no more cheating than if a student asked for an extension.

Plenty of other accommodations, though maybe not all, are similarly not-cheating. It’s not cheating. It’s also not fair but so what? Put aside the system burdens doing this under the ADA may cause and your left with, what? Students being given more leeway and flexibility to 1) learn and 2) demonstrate that they have learned material.

This should be much less about “omg students taking advantage” and more about about “hmm, maybe this says a lot about how poorly things are currently done and better they could be with more thoughtful design”

Or possibly the other way around: "Completed degree on standardized terms "

I call BS. There are lots of “adult life” occupations where the above are not needed are or not as important.

Not to mention that deadline extensions, extra time, or delegating a presentation to someone else are very common in many fields.

When the get to the workforce, then what? When I was in a position to hire, I made the decision to not interview anyone who went to Elon. The school did not in the early 2000s use a standard grammar book and at least according to my kid's papers, the profs had little to say about poor grammar, rambling sentences, poor logic, etc. Great.

Since the work was about writing and speaking, grammar and logic were important. Fast forward to today, and I guess I'd have to make a decision about not interviewing kids from top-tier schools.

- You're lying to yourself about how good of a fit your are for the program.

- The professor/administration is getting inaccurate data about the teaching efficacy.

If you want to know if you can be a civil engineer despite your disability, the last thing you should do is correct for the disability in your primary success metric.

it's not 38% - it's 1 in 4 or 25%, according to Stanford's own website https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae

and that number includes students getting literally any kind of accommodation whatsoever. Allergies, food allergies, carpet replacement, etc, etc

but it's wonderful we can debate this, really. I'm glad we get to exchange words, everybody, all of us!

Thank GOD, the OLD FATHERS of academia left some room ... to walk circles in ... and that they left so many of the questions they had and inspired to be left unanswered by the few/many who got in/didn't get in(to) the space that would give the incredible rarity of human brains with that specific kind of passionate curiosity in this (Tao universe measure something) vast galaxy of ours that bit they ... deserved? needed? wanted? desired? hundreds/thousands of generations worked incomparably hard for ... ???

so that we wouldn't be cursed with looking at the results of TWO COMPANIES IN 20-FUCKING-25 that are tapping that insanely sexy big ass of Space around this cutesy blue-and-green little planet of hours/ sorry, ... "ours", ... like, ... somewhat "ours" ... ... ...

Heyyyyy, are there any cool new toys on Alibaba or whatever the name is or something? There's some German genes in the neighborhood who can use a camera

Very clearly the author has never visited Stanford or UCB.

Which is to say, "elite" universities do not base admissions solely on what I assume they mean when they say "smartest."

medical industrial complex

toxic food

air pollution

enshittification happening in all industries

it's destroying the integrity of the human genome with each subsequent generation worse and worse and will result in a culling of the species over time toward more stable subgroups likely in more remote regions not affected by these things as much

My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic

Saying that people who are using accommodations are cheating is morally repugnant.

Instead of saying that we need to clamp down on people claiming disabilities, we should open up the accommodations to everyone.

... and this generation of students has every reason to be anxious and depressed. I'm surprised the number isn't over 50%. They're watching the white-collar jobs (the kind of jobs that justify a Stanford degree price-tag) get hammered by AI with no plan to back-stop the unemployment resulting than the same answers from the past (i.e. mutterings of "bootstraps" and "saving" and "stop eating avocado toast"), they're watching fascism creep over the nations of the world again, they're watching the annual thermometer rise, the weather get worse, and the world pass tipping-point numbers that our best models suggest will lead to incredibly sweeping climate changes... And they're watching the current leadership of the planet do not enough to address any of this.

I have a teenage niece that is 100% convinced she'll never own a home. I don't have anything concrete to tell her to convince her otherwise.

So yeah... Maybe those double-digit percentage numbers are pretty justified by all of this.

This is clickbait. There are diseases and disorders, and we have medicine to treat them so that people can be functional in society (particularly, work and school).

Nothingburger.

You can't tell me you think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk (!), etc., have "normal" brains.

Whether that should count as a disability or a superpower is subjective. ADHD and Autism often present as strengths in one arena, and weaknesses in another. Speaking overly broadly: An aptitude for hard facts and logic, with a difficulty with emotions and social cues.

That's not to say that everyone who presents as such should be given the same accommodations. It's probably being abused. But that doesn't mean they're lying about their brains. It took a doctor to diagnose it. What more would you want to see beyond "a doctors note"?

A former friend who was quite sociopathic would often parrot "if you're not cheating you're not competing"... There's plenty of evidence in plain sight supporting that trope.

It reminds me of the transgender "debate". That the medical establishment is someone acting contrary to science. That all of these people with years of training are part of a conspiracy to hurt children. Not surprising that this sentiment is popular amongst libertarians and applied to other students. It's disappointing to see so many echo it's sentiments without critically thinking about the piece.

As said by Charlie Munger: "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". In the UK, 23% (and climbing) working age adults are now registered as disabled [1]. For a qualifying disability you can claim personal independence payment (PIP) that gets you between £73.90-£110.40 for living plus £29.20-£77.05 for mobility, which is not means tested [2]. That's up to $249.98 USD a week untaxed on top of your regular income - you can imagine why people may be incentivised. Worse still, Citizens Advice which is 60% taxpayer funded [3], actively tell people how to fill out the forms to guarantee a positive outcome.

I have no idea why people would want to register as disabled though... /s

[1] https://www.scope.org.uk/media/disability-facts-figures

[2] https://www.gov.uk/pip/how-much-youll-get

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Advice

These days you can assume any loophole must be exploited by people who not only are unashamed in doing so, but rather proud of their prowess to exploit. It is an ADD diagnosis for extra time, a disabled placard for better parking - hell the new meme is motile people pretending to need wheelchair access for priority boarding at airports.

It is the metastatic presentation of a society too fat, gluttonous, and imbalanced to function in the face of any actual adversity.

I don't blame anyone - American society is cruel, untrustworthy, alienating, and unforgiving. Spoils are awarded to the least scrupulous actors and all negative outcomes are externalized. Take what you can and fuck everyone else, right?