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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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"

      1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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 sensehttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-pricelessness/ …

      1 reply 2 retweets 14 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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?

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 14 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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.

      2 replies 1 retweet 17 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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.

      1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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

      1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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

      1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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

      1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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      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.

      3:12 PM - 14 Feb 2020
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      • SUNSHINE ☀️ REVIVAL ian m hines Naika Nathaniel Eliot Which Way, Western World? Mike Abundo muddletoes
      1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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?

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          The problem isn't, and never was, technology taking away jobs. The problem is, and has always been, economies taking assaulting dignities.

          1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          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.

          5 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 14
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          @threadreaderapp unroll

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        21. End of conversation

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