Here’s what Wikipedia says about the game Fuck, Marry, Kill:
Fuck, Marry, Kill, also known as Kiss, Marry, Kill, as Bang, Marry, Kill, or as Bang, Smash, Dash, or with other synonyms or arrangements of the terms, is a social forced choice question and answer game. As one source describes it, “[w]e have heard of the game “Kiss, Marry, Kill” in which people fantasize about which of the three choices they would exercise on someone”. In the game, one person poses three names of people known to the other, typically either names of people known in their personal lives, or names of celebrities. The other person then has to decide which of the three they would have sexual intercourse with (or kiss), which one they would marry, and which one they would kill. The game has variously been described as ‘tasteless’ and ‘juvenile’.
The game resembles thought experiments in which one dimension is suppressed for clarity. Unlike in the real world, the choice is forced; the game assumes that the participant will not marry the person they fuck, and that they will not engage in sexual congress with (or kill) the person they marry. In real life, the three choices are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. But the game is fun. Wikipedia continues:
A 2008 article in The Onion captioned a photograph in a parody piece with “Sen. Clinton scans the Senate floor, passing the time with a quick game of ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill'”
Here’s a softball for readers attracted to women – Louise Erdich, Angelina Jolie, Elise Stefanik. The challenges will get harder as we progress. Readers attracted to men are invited to send in their own problem sets.
Part of the fun of the game is that it presents a tripartite choice. What would it be like if the choice were binary? Boring. “Fuck, Marry Kill” is at least nine times as fun as, say, “Marry, Kill”, or “Marry, Fuck”.
Most debates about the minimum wage present the issue of whether the minimum wage should be increased as a binary choice. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Five states, i.e. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, have not passed higher state-level minimum wage laws. That means that a minimum wage earner in one of those states will take home $290 for a forty-hour work week. Blink and read that sentence again. That’s two hundred ninety dollars in exchangefor forty hours of your life. Multiply by forty-eight and you get $13,920. That is just barely over the poverty level of $12,880 for a single person, and well below the poverty level of $26,500 for a family of four. By contrast, a first-year associate at a large law firm in New York who produces nothing more useful than transaction costs earns $190,000 a year. That is ridiculous. Isn’t the answer to raise the minimum wage?
Opponents argue, “No”, because raising the minimum wage would hit small business owners and price workers out of the market. As I understand it, empirical evidence is still incomplete. Some studies show that workers may have their hours cut, rather than being laid off entirely. Others show that increases in labor costs are passed on to consumers. Others show that workers do benefit, but that, if you factor in whole and partial layoffs, it is a leaky bucket. It is possible that people see what they want to see when they look at the data. A carpenter sees a nail, a Reaganite sees toxic government interference, a progressive sees an oppressive patriarchy, the malign influence of the Israel Lobby and systemic racism, and a Canadian sees donuts, moosemeat, a menacing French speaker who won’t keep his hands in plain sight, and a hockey puck.
Fortunately, there is a third way. It has been argued (I apologize – I did not think of this, but I don’t have the cite) that, when we discuss the minimum wage, the problem is poverty, rather than wage levels. If you raise the minimum wage, small business owners feel the pinch, but the people who benefit most from property rights and the rule of law – the biglaw lawyer shuffling paper and sending out exorbitant bills, or the guy working at Goldman Sachs doing – well, whatever they do at Goldman Sachs – pay nothing. That’s wrong. The way to address this is not to ask owners of laundromats, bodegas and diners to foot the bill for poverty, but to increase tax at the top brackets and to distribute the resulting revenue either through a guaranteed basic income or, if you prefer for people to work for their social benefits, the earned income tax credit. It is not Fuck, Marry. It is Fuck, Marry, Kill.
Similarly, there are three ways to deal with the social costs born by mobile home park residents when a park is shut down because of a change in land use. The law can require residents to bear the cost; it can require park owners to bear the cost, or it can spread the cost more widely. These three approaches are followed by Texas, New York and Florida, respectively. When a park shuts down in Texas, residents have a de facto right to thirty days’ notice, after which they are required to remove their home from the park or to abandon it, and they are not entitled to any compensation. In New York, park owners are required to provide two years’ notice to residents, and to pay residents up to $15,000 in compensation for moving costs.[1] When a park closes down in Texas, residents are on their own. By contrast, in New York, if a park shuts down, the owner must single-handedly shoulder the cost of park closure.
Florida takes a third way. Each year, park owners are required to pay a small amount ($5 per lot under management) to a public fund called the Florida Mobile Home Relocation Trust Fund (the “Fund”), which is administered by a public entity called the Florida Mobile Home Relocation Corporation. When a park is closed down, residents have the right to compensation from the Fund in order to help with the cost of moving their homes – $3,000 for a singlewide, $6,000 for a doublewide, and $1,500 in case a home has to be abandoned because it is structurally unsound.
Florida’s approach should be applauded for two reasons. First, it is a form of insurance. The risk of trauma from a park closure is shifted from the parties who stand to lose the most in the individual case and spread among a larger pool. As with all insurance, the enemy is not so much cost over the long haul, but the risk of a sudden, one-time knockout blow. Second, it shifts the burden of a transaction with broad positive externalities onto the people who stand to benefit from those externalities. Park closures cause horrific trauma to residents, but they can cause a lot of good, too. They can create jobs, increase the tax base, upgrade infrastructure, support property rights and may even increase the number of available dwelling units. In evaluating whether a park should be closed down, the challenge is not to see the trauma that the shutdown will cause residents – that’s easy. Instead, it is to look beyond the salience of that trauma, recognize utility gain and loss to all constituents, and to craft a policy solution that shifts the burden of residents’ trauma onto the parties who stand to benefit from the closure. A public mobile home relocation trust fund is the best way of doing that; it is both more efficient and more just than simply sticking it to the most salient villain.
In the real world, I would never buy a park in Texas or Florida because there is a risk that climate change will make those states uninhabitable in a generation. I have an emotional connection to my home state of New York, and the state has proven, despite some short-sighted legislative decisions, to be a great environment to grow my business. That said, if I were not me and everything else were equal, I would buy my next park in the northern Midwest. That region is less susceptible to drought, heat waves, forest fires, floods and earthquakes than anyplace else in the country, and it will have ready access to a large body of fresh water in a world in which clean fresh water will become scarce. However, if I were forced to assign the values of “Fuck”, “Marry”, and “Kill” to New York, Texas and Florida in a universe in which all dimensions other than regulation of the mobile home park industry were suppressed, I would order the list Texas, Florida, New York. Florida has sensible regulation. It’s a keeper. Texas is short-term, at best. New York is crazy. Fuck, Marry, Kill.
[1] This adds up quickly. Under the law, an owner of a 100-lot park would be required to pay $1,500,000 in compensation to residents, if she were to close the park.
Interesting game. Don’t think I’ll play it.