41. The Economics of Dignity 🔗

When you "pull yourself together" you pull yourself together to approximate a consensus definition of human. For eg. stand up straight or slouch depending on what's fashionable right then. That definition evolves over time.

The idea of "respecting the dignity of humans" is really trying to define basic human rights in a way that allow anybody to "pull themselves together" to the current local consensus definition at reasonable cost.

The idea that having to crawl on all fours in front of an old-fashioned monarch is dehumanizing is relative to a modern definition of human. Back then, it was probably the case that "pulling yourself together" in the king's court meant crawling on all fours in a particular way

Slouching was indeed the fashionable posture at one point. A Brief History of Fashionable Postures | Vogue

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arguing for human rights and dignity becomes much more complex when you want to avoid assuming a particular definition of 'human' but still capture humane ideas about how to treat people in the concept

A good part of the project of civilization is to construct and sustain a notion of the human that creates a meaningful separation from other animals. And to a surprising degree, this is defined in terms of keeping one's composure... as in the composed performance of "humans"

This might seem arbitrary. One might cynically say that in these terms, human rights become defined as "the right to act" in a certain theatrical way. Except those performances are how we transact social sustenance with each other.

Hello, how are you, pleased to meet you.

One of the problems with labor economics is that it is structurally blind to the evolving invisible notion of dignity that we must maintain to feel human and that life is worth living.

I recall an episode of shark tank or something where mark cuban refused to invest in someone because she refused to play air guitar for him. I forget the context.

My reading of the incident was that the woman was anchored on a particular notion of performed (but not performative) dignity that would have been debased by that kind of behavior among strangers.

Cuban was unwittingly asking her to debase herself by her idea of dignity for no good reason. He seemed confused by her refusal because by his notion of dignity, it would have been a low-cost way to land an investment, because it wouldn't have bothered him to do it

Now there's a pragmatic thing here... he could, as an investor, be thinking, "you came on a tv show for investment, and if you're not willing to debase yourself a bit for the cameras, how will you get through the endless humiliation of being an entrepreneurial success"

As I argued in the economics of pricelessness, it is axiomatic in the saints-and-traders dialectic that traders expect to trade dignity for profit. That's almost the whole definition of the commerce ethos posture in Jane Jacobs sense The Economics of Pricelessness

Now this brings up an interesting question. Sure you should have the right to debase yourself in others' eyes as much as you like in pursuit of personal profit. But can/should you use any power you have to force others to debase themselves by their definition of dignity?

This is pretty much the definition of humiliation. In the mild case, I adopt a conservative posture: never knowingly ask anyone to compromise their personal sense of dignity. This is the reason the opening joke in the EoP post works.

It is doubly humiliating because first the rich guy used the power of money to undermine the woman's sense of her own dignity, then took away the incentive for the undermining. That's pure sadism. Dehumanizing someone because you can.

In a way, humiliation is the currency of the labor economy. A purely dignity-respecting economy wouldn't work. It wouldn't be liquid enough. The way you get it moving is to allow unknowing assaults on dignity.

Original version of joke in EoP
--
Man: will you sleep with me for $1 million?
Woman: Okay
Man: will you sleep with me for $5?
Woman: WHAT! What kind of woman do you take me for?
Man: we’ve already established what kind of woman you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.

Dignity respecting kinda non-joke (modulo your absolute moral view of prostitution)
--
Man: will you sleep with me for $500?
Woman: WHAT! Do I look like a hooker to you?
Man: My apologies, in my country prostitution is legal, and I don't yet understand dress norms here

The boundary of the labor economy is a noise band around common knowledge of the local ecosystem of "dignities". It moves slowly towards "more corrupted" by traditionalist scopes

In an increasingly connected, globalized, remote transactions world, it is becoming harder and harder to price in the cost of navigating the fuzzy boundary of "dignity". Distant remote corporations can unknowingly assault local dignities for decades, with the resentment building

The dissonance shows up in the gap between performed and felt dignity. This is why the waiter may smile at you, but spit in your food. He's performing dignity in a way that allows him to go on living because he can't overtly challenge the expectations.

So a good question for economists to consider is: can price-based mechanisms price dignity in a way that lowers the rate of waiters spitting in your food?

And note that surveillance is not the answer, since people forced to perform a debilitating and dehumanizing level of dignity they are powerless to resist will always find some unobservable space to indulge in compensatory behaviors.

If the waiter can't spit in the food because there are now cameras in the kitchen, he will key the car of patrons in the parking lot. If you put cameras there he will start anon-trolling members of the patron class online. Etc. etc. It's a dignity arms race.

It's also the human face of the perfect information problem faced by markets. The challenge is to put a price on hostile behaviors practiced in darkness by those forced to perform in humiliating ways just to survive.

Pricing in invisible restorative behaviors sentient agents practice to maintain themselves in a state they consider "dignified human" while living visibly under conditions that constitute a continuous assault on their idea of dignity.

Even perfect surveillance doesn't solve the problem. In that case, the rage and resentment just builds up invisibly in the psyche, until it explodes, either in isolation (mass shootings say), or via collective aggression.

In a way, this is the central problem of our times, for both technology and economics. Creating a properly priced dignity market that can seek equilibrium without periodically exploding via beserking or rioting or other kinds of humiliation-revenge/dignity-balancing.

The problem isn't, and never was, technology taking away jobs. The problem is, and has always been, economies taking assaulting dignities.

Not sure how to approach solving the problem, but a good starting point is, if you have to have a policy that your employees have to act nice in certain ways beyond the natural niceness levels of random pairs of humans, you're creating an invisible dignity deficit

That, or you're somehow hiring exactly the wrong people. Like selecting the naturally rudest sorts of people for waiter jobs. Which is... not smart. Selecting for natural cheery/nice temperament otoh is fine. But demanding 15 pieces of flair means you're doing dignitynomics wrong

And if otoh, your mix of incentives draws only the desperate who will comply with any kind of absurdly dignity assaulting policy, it means you're a predatory business. You're arbitraging baseline levels of misery/desperation and externalizing the costs.

A much more explicit example of this is if your employees have to seek social welfare like food stamps to make ends meet in your full-time job. That's a straight-up subsidy you're taking advantage of. The state keeps 'em breathing, you suck out what life remains in them.

There's an argument to be made here that this is the main problem with inequality. It is a condition stabilized by an accumulating dignity deficit problem that will blow up in our faces at some point and destroy wealth.

Now of course, there is such a thing as a reasonable expectation of respect for dignity that can get very unreasonable indeed. Here the US actually has good priors: nobody is any better or worse than anyone else.

Explicitly classist societies like India have historically had dignity levels and you only have a right to the dignity default of your level. This creates a sclerotic, compartmentalized economy, effectively regulated by dignity boundaries. Economies of scale are lost.

But a reasonable response here is to let the market handle it. You can choose whatever dignity ideal you like, and jobs will be designed not to knowingly assault or drain your dignity. By not demanding pieces of flair etc.

But you don't have the right to be employed at your chosen arbitrary dignity level far out of the 3-sigma bounds of humanity. You only have the right not to have it callously assaulted by work that is structurally blind to the fact that you are maintaining a dignity state at all.

I suppose I should write this up as a sequel to my economics of pricelessness post. Economics of Dignity. I'm guessing this will languish on twitter for a year, then in a draft for another year, before I finally write it long after it could be useful.