Dignity respecting kinda non-joke (modulo your absolute moral view of prostitution)
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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
Conversation
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
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Replying to
good point about the interchangeability. A key need for sustaining personal dignity is to be seen as a unique human 90% of the time.
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At one point @JamesVanie made a very clever argument that tech creates a literal kind of faceless interchangeability (uber app as face of driver, mturk, "George" as standard name for Pullman conductors) that totally obscures the human behind the service technology (UI/uniform)
