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Comment by automatic6131 | Hacker News Reader

Can't you see how bad it for Kenya - or anywhere - for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?

What you do for a living isn't neutral, there's an opportunity cost. That person in Kenya writing an essay for someone else isn't doing journalism or writing a great novel, or starting a business or whatever. Now, for sure, Kenya isn't the best place for doing those things anyway, but it's never going to be if a whole pool of labor is doing bullshit work like grinding out college-level essays. There's no path from where Kenya is today (not great, not as bad as you might think though) to where the West is where work like that is a part of its economy, is there?

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It is very patronizing to think that these Kenyans have those kinds of opportunities, and have foolishly traded them in for a job writing essays. This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.

Having said all of that, let's not overstate the difficulty of writing college level essays, especially essays that are good enough for someone who isn't able to write such essays themselves.

> This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.

But the opportunities in Kenya weren't taken from them? That's what the poster is trying to explain: A country should make sure their brightest are gainfully employed and compensated. That's how you build a better nation.

Three parts of bugger-all is still bugger-all. Can't take opportunities that weren't there in the first place.

That's a very faulty understanding of economics and labour. Wealth is created by man interacting with nature. Most nations in the history of the world created their wealth without being dependent on foreign money. Of course there are endless opportunities in Kenya, just as in other countries. The limiting factors are political and/or cultural. If some of the most barren countries in the world could spawn rich nations, what's lacking in Kenya?

This depends solely on what you're defining as an opportunity. Are the job positions there today? I.e., the "opportunity" that's an alternative to writing essays for foreign nations? Not enough of them. Could they be after a long cascade of primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary development? Yes. But they aren't there today. That's the key thing. People need to put food on the table today.

> A country should make sure

and the weather should make sure to rain often enough to not cause famine.

Now maybe they have more reason to try - since the college fraud money tap has been closed.

That is not what they are saying. They are saying that for the economy of Kenyan as a whole having a bunch of smart people writing essays for westerners does nothing to improve the local economy. If they are instead working to provide services or build infrastructure locally that will improve the economy for everybody there.

And where does this demand for their services come from locally?

You can argue that about anything.

Can't you see how bad it for America - or anywhere - for people bright enough to understand stocks to be wasting their time selling stocks to rich people in Western countries

Economies are too complex to judge any one person’s choice of how they participate in them. If starting a business (or being a journalist or writing a novel) was a better idea, perhaps some of those Kenyans would have done that. But writing college essay brings (brought?) new money into Kenya that can be reinvested in new businesses, journalists, and novels. In the absence of non-corrupt foreign investment in Kenya I think this could be a big booster for their productive economy.

Or maybe not. But who are we to judge?

I don't see why price discovery in an information market is comparable to essay writing in search of a social credential for someone else?

Meaningful work (generally) requires capital, and Kenya has very little capital. Capital has a compounding effect, so bringing in external capital now can pay dividends later.

Capital is an abstract. Kenya is rich AFAIK, and there's no material limit in how much they can continue to build up their nation.

>Can't you see how bad it for Kenya - or anywhere - for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?

OR is it because this phenomenon is proof that the ability to write winning college degree level essays and dissertations and the accumulation of a industrial scale workforce of talent able to create such works over multiple sophisticated subject areas and subjects, has no benefits for a actual economy and can only persist as a activity if supported by a highly distorted systematic foreign reward arbitrage?

The reality is that in most developing countries, the more you can “hide” your work from the government, the better. People are drawn to online work because the government doesn’t really understand it nor does it have a clear framework for regulating it. This means you can keep working without some government official asking for bribes and bureaucratic paperwork.

It's bold to assume that a significant number of them even have an interest in writing novels, are capable of writing fiction with ideas that are original enough to bring them a decent income or publishing deal. How often does that actually happen in the USA? Almost never. It's a dream that can't be reached.

Equally, how many journalists does a country need? Not everybody can be a novelist. Not everybody can be a journalist.

At least you admit that essays are bullshit work; they don't actually assess an individual whatsoever if they can be outsourced, and are thus not fit for purpose of assessing someone.

> for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?

That's an issue for the American education system, not Kenya's population.

Came here to say this. Why are we worried about Kenya when we are cheating ourselves? The society that suffers when American students simultaneously defraud American universities, devalue American degrees, and cheat their own education — is America

It’s more complicated though, because many universities are defrauding the students as well with overpriced tuition and degrees with limited value. Basically, it is a circle of fraud with the Kenyans, in this case, selling the shovels to the suckers.

I don't understand this argument. The Kenyan is exporting essays to the United States. Would you also call it bad for Kenya if she were building cars for export to the United States? What's the difference? And an American who exports software or cars to Kenya—is this bad for the United States? I don't understand why.

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