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.
Conversation
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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