Money

In the wake of yet another highly publicized tragedy, the U.S. sympathy market has been flooded with condolences, both genuine and counterfeit, causing the price of thoughts and prayers to plummet to an all-time low.

Walt Wisher, chief economist at the Dubbles Institute for Social Economics, says that a solid one-minute prayer is now worth one-tenth of its 2006 value, and that the value of thoughts has fallen so sharply that they are now virtually worthless.

“This tragedy-induced drop is just part of an unprecedented 10-year inflationary period to which there’s no end in sight,” Wisher said. “While prayers still hold some value, especially in rural areas, thoughts are worth almost nothing.”

Wisher says that in some major cities, you can find traders offering a whole barrel of thoughts for nothing more than a single kind regard.

“They’re even shipping U.S. thoughts by the ton to Venezuela, where farmers are using them as manure,” he said.

Until recently, the value of thoughts and prayers had remained stable, with prices only slumping during national tragedies, such as when the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded in 1986 and in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.

Nowadays, however, with smartphones and social media so ubiquitous, Americans are devoting many hours every day to consuming news about tragic events — while simultaneously sending hundreds of thoughts and prayers.

“Before Twitter and Facebook, people generally held on to their thoughts and prayers, and would only use them in extreme circumstances, such as when friends and relatives were directly affected by misfortune or violence,” Wisher said. “Even when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, most Americans sent either a few heartfelt thoughts or a prayer, but not both, and certainly not in the sheer volume that we’re seeing today.”

“My own sister is known to send thoughts when her Facebook friends post complaints about bad traffic, and one time she offered a prayer for a neighbor whose son failed his driving license exam.”

The value of thoughts and prayers is so low, according to experts, that funeral mourners are said to be pooling them to give them actual meaning. Also, in some online communities, the phrase “sending my thoughts and prayers” has become shorthand for “I don’t care, so go screw yourself.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School is offering a new course this fall: BUS 415: Concealing Your Psychopathic Identity: The Secret to Becoming a Master of the Universe by Adopting the Persona of an Empathic Individual. Intrigued by the title, I arranged an interview with Dr. Howard Roark, Dean of the Wharton School, and Prof. Maxine Moregreen, who is teaching the new course. What follows are the verbatim notes from our conversation.

Roark: This course title refers to the high percentage of our students who are clinical psychopaths. And I say that with a mixture of awe, envy and immense pride. Wharton’s MBA psychos eat the lunch of Stanford and Harvard B-School students.

Me: You’re not saying that Wharton is populating the world of high finance with serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or, god forbid, people in the mold of Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lambs,” are you? 

Roark: (chuckling) No, no, nothing like that. Some 3-4 percent of the U.S. population can be classified as psychopaths, individuals totally incapable of feeling empathy or remorse and lacking any social conscience. These psychopaths in suits are found at the highest levels of government, business and the military. One of every ten people on Wall Street is probably a psychopath. Heck, I might be one but you’d never know it. (Roark displays an enigmatic grin.)

Me: So this is your ideal applicant pool?

Roark: Yes. We want these exceptional outliers to apply for admission to Wharton. We then try to weed out any psycho wannabes who show signs of “Empathic Distress Disorder” (EDD), or even a scintilla of genuine concern for others. We show the applicants graphic images of the loaded hold of a slave ship, pictures of torture victims at Abu Ghraib, and photos of a dead baby washed ashore from a sunken refugee boat. Any sign of empathic engagement results in immediate rejection.

Me: Professor Moregreen, tell us how your new course bears on this?

Moregreen: Sure. I try to provide students with a public face that conveys empathy. Psychopaths are almost always mistaken for normal people but we’re all about removing any risk of discovery.

Me: How do you do that?

Moregreen: The best way to manipulate consumer behavior is to leverage the message, “We really care. We want to walk a mile in your shoes.” If customers believe your brand truly cares about them, they’re likely to adopt brand loyalty, and even become brand evangelists.

In my class I invite professional stage actors to portray optimized empathetic behavior. Another day, we watch the classic 1956 zombie film “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to gain appreciation for the challenges facing “pod persons” as they try to avoid detection by normal people. Not to drop names, but former President Bill Clinton skyped with us, demonstrating the facial expressions, voice inflection and hand gestures behind “I feel your pain.” He’s a master.

Me: Your attention to detail is impressive.

Moregreen: I offer practical tips to convey undetectable “faux” empathy to obtain the inside information for establishing trust. These include: showing curiosity about their lives, asking questions about hobbies, learning the names of spouses and children, and using a mirror to practice that all-important warm smile. Depending upon the situation, a hug and even a few tears can close the deal. We caution our students not to engage in the latter behavior without sufficient practice to pull it off. It must come across as spontaneous.

Finally, passing the course requires performing a flawless impersonation of an empathetic person. This is done before a focus group of marketing and advertising executives, and, believe me, they can detect a phony from a mile away.

Me: This has been totally enlightening. Do either of you have a last takeaway for our readers?

Roark: For spring term, Professor Moregreen is offering an exciting new course, MGMT 711: Social Impact Investing: How to Do (Very) Well by Pretending to Do Good. It’s already oversubscribed!

Note: The World Health Organization has declared the Zika virus an international public health emergency and some four million people may be infected this year. Zika may cause brain damage and unusually small heads in newborns — a condition called microcephaly. Women who become infected while pregnant are at especially high risk.

Uppyurs Pharmaceuticals, the drug manufacturing behemoth, is frantically attempting to vanquish rivals Novartis, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and others by producing a Zika vaccine. A copy of the minutes from a recent Uppyurs executive board meeting was surreptitiously obtained by the author.

According to the minutes, “If everything breaks right, we will have a Zika vaccine on the market by mid- 2018 and we anticipate revenues in the range of $7.5 billion. Proceeding with this is a no-brainer.”

The document also reveals that $78 for a single Zika inoculation will price the vaccine out of reach for all but the wealthy in the world’s 35 poorest countries.

“One of our serious challenges is to neutralize a guilt-ridden American public’s demand to make the vaccine more accessible or even — God help us — free to poor people,” said CEO Darren Slickerton. He added:

• Because Americans are almost pathologically compassionate, we’ve been working on an empathy-inhibitor medication under the brand name ClearSoul. We can report that ClearSoul has been clinically tested on Uppyurs’s upper-level management and has proven 100 percent effective. ClearSoul promises to be the most lucrative product in Uppyurs’s history if not the history of the world. We saw a need and filled it. ClearSoul will be timed for market release just as Zika is declared a pandemic.

• Massive lobbying of Senate Foreign Relations Committee members so any government attempting to develop an inexpensive, generic version of the vaccine will be immediately accused of aiding and abetting global terrorism and be targeted in U.S. drone attacks. We anticipate this will be an easy sell to the media and the public.

• As a distraction and to lighten the mood, we’ll prepare a series of small-headed baby jokes such as, “Why will Brazil’s soccer teams fail to make the World Cup after 2028? They’ll be unable to head the ball.”

• Friendly media sources have agreed to “tell Uppyurs’s story,” an inspiring narrative we’ve ghostwritten and which recommends that a Nobel Prize for Selfless Giving be created and bestowed upon Uppyurs Pharmaceuticals. As a PR move, we’ll donate the Nobel Prize cash award of $1.5 million to the “Tiny Hoodies for Zika Victims” campaign and emblazon them with the Red, White and Blue Uppyurs logo.

• Candidly acknowledging the fact that immunizations in underdeveloped countries now cost nearly 70 times as much as they did in 2001, but that’s only because of supply and demand. Not enough poor people have died off but that should change soon.

• When questioned about lowering costs for the Zika vaccine, our standard mantra is that we need to pay huge legal fees for patenting the manufacturing process, and who could deny the fairness of $25 million dollar bonuses for each member of our board of directors?

• Regrettably, governments of these desperately poor countries can only afford one vaccination program, including but not limited to Zika, whooping cough, TB, cholera, Ebola, Nipah virus, malaria, hepatitis B and D, HIV/AIDS and dengue fever. Given the immense profit margins for us, we’ve already bribed most public health ministers to choose Zika. The others will be banished from office by inventive, high-profile sex and corruption scandals.

• Our invariable response to all criticism will be: failing to maximize shareholder profits would be an egregious violation of our God-given, fiduciary trust. Anything less would be both un-American and socialist.

• Finally, we’re working on an exciting new marketing slogan, tentatively titled: “Uppyurs: Making the World Healthier for Those of Us Who Really Matter.”

“This meeting is adjourned and as always, God Bless America and God Bless Uppyurs.”