Among the various questions you have posed on your substack, this appears to be easiest at least in my perspective.
> Dinner date vs paying cash for romance
You are not buying the same thing in these cases. When you pursue romance through the complex mating rituals such as dinner at restaurants you are basically creating a barrier that keeps a certain type of women out. Also, the woman's willingness to engage in his behavior signals that other men are being removed from the competition. A woman that offers a rate card might be cheaper and quicker but she also will have more clients. I think most men are probably unhappy with that.
> Adoption
Another easy one for me. I have never seen either the biological mother nor the adopting parents having any issues with exchanging money for the baby. India has black markets for this and also very reputed and highly respected people in society working as arbitrators.
The only people who have problems appears to be those who do not have skin in the game. The politicians and busybodies. Also baptist and bootlegger effect where social works and attorneys also want those regulations.
> Surrogacy
Same as adoption.
> commercial but not altruistic surrogacy
This is same as "lets ban alcohol but let only government run stores selling it" effect. People still want kids. Create an exception and give government authority to decide if you quality for that exception through a paper trail. I think close examination will those that the altruism is nothing but exchange of money or favors.
> Hospitality
Same as first case of dinner date. It is not about food but rather the time the couple has put in to invite you over and spend time with you. It is also about which people the other couple does not spend their time with. If you offer them $40 as worth of the dinner it would be insulting as they think their time, decision to chose you over others etc. is worth lot more.
They however might be very happy to take other things such as reference letter for their children's college applications, recommending a good real estate agent or car mechanic etc. They probably want a small timeshare of your intelligence and life experiences rather than your $40.
In short these problems appear to be in two categories:
1. People with no skin in the game having an opinion about exchanging money for certain services. They have an incentive to virtue signal without losing anything for it.
2. Failure to see the real value goods/services being exchanged and just looking at the sticker price.
Another example is organ transplants. Everyone gets paid -- doctors, nurses, hospital, transport -- except the organ donor, who is arguably the most important one of them all.
As for explaining it ... as far as trading dinners or other hospitality, money suddenly sets an exact explicit value on the matter, where trading dinners doesn't. If the CEO of my employer invited me over for dinner (suppose it's a 10 man company and everyone is on a first name basis) and I reciprocated, I think there is an acceptance of my dinner not being as fancy, not as directly comparable. But if I pay him $40, that's me saying how much it was worth in a much more direct manner, and even it it were socially acceptable, it would almost certainly not match his own valuations. Or suppose the CEO invited me over for a sit down dinner and I reciprocated by inviting him to a BBQ -- the difference would almost be better because it makes a direct comparison impossible.
Suppose the CEO invites several people to dinner, from different pay grades -- receptionist, factory supervisor, VP. Everyone will expect different pay levels. Whoever pays first will set the tone for the others, and the receptionist is going to feel out of place no matter what.
I can't explain surrogacy or organ transplant prohibitions except as some very weak offshoot of not paying for hospitality. After all, if I take a taxi to the CEO's dinner, I have to pay him because he's not part of the "free" dinner. In that same way, the doctors, nurses, payroll clerks, and other hospital staff are going to get paid regardless, but the donor is the guest, and expecting the guest to pay would be really bad manners, so it just changes to not paying the guest to show up. It's a lousy explanation, but it's the best I have. FWIW, I think it's incredibly stupid to not pay surrogate mothers or organ donors.
Maybe it's as if a company has a tradition that the CEO always invited the employee of the month over to dinner. This could be seen as an imposition, and it would probably include a wife, but not kids, and now the guest has to pay for a babysitter. Should the CEO offer to pay for that?
I think you are pretty much nailing it with the dinner party examples. I might add to it that invitation to dinner implies subtly "I like you enough that I will spend time and money (food) to get you to come over and spend time with me," and accepting implies that you also like the person enough to spend time with them. Paying them for the food, however, puts the relationship back on the level of a restaurant and patron, where the guest is just there for the meal not the relationship; now the host wonders if the guest doesn't really like them much, or at least only as much as they might like an owner or waitress at a restaurant. Suddenly the nature of the relationship, and the relative status of the people in it, gets uncertain.
Plus it feels a bit of a negative judgement if you spend 300$ of time and supplies making a meal someone offers 40$ for :D
Rather reminds me of the story of the kindergarten that had troubles getting parents to pick their kids up on time, so they established a fine for failure, only to find that late pickups *increased* -- parents who would otherwise inconvenience themselves in order to get there on time would happily carry on with their day and pay the fine, once the price had been set.
Indeed. For most people, the feeling of being an inconsiderate ass is more costly to wellbeing than 20$. I think that is widely underrated as a form of social control, given that it is much more egalitarian than monetary expenditures for instance.
I hadn’t thought about it so starkly as converting dinner among friends to a restaurant meal, but that is the same as a friend paying for rides, which turns the rides more into taxi rides than friendship.
Indeed. Paying for gas seems to be an acceptable middle ground, but of course gas doesn't come close to covering the time to drive someone, so it seems more like a sharing a burden (like splitting a shared meal at a restaurant) than paying for the whole service I suspect.
I have also noticed that payment tends to come along with specific conditions, quality level, specific time of completion, etc. I used to do a lot of casting work for my friend who needed prototypes for parts, and he was absolutely punctilious about paying me, which made me extra keen to get things done quickly and well. (More so than my usual tendency.) It never came to it, but had he said "Look, I need these by this weekend, so please stop screwing around with other stuff and get these done now," I would have felt compelled to do so. That might have made it less friendly than me just doing him a favor so whenever it gets done it gets done. Likewise if I did a poor job and he wasn't happy he would be more upset to pay me for it.
That is an interesting distinction, but I think my examples are in your first category. You can pay a lawyer to arrange an adoption but the mother is not selling the lawyer the right to transfer her infant to someone else. The transaction is nominally being done for free. Similarly, I think, for my other examples. Prostitution doesn't become legal if the customer pays the madam and the prostitute is an employee; I didn't use that example in my final draft but it is obviously relevant.
For all of the situations posed in this article, I see a simple argument based on second-order effects -- once something can be sold, it becomes a target for exploitation.
Consider your adoption example. If we allowed a mother to financially benefit from giving their children up for adoption, that would create a market for mothers to birth children specifically to sell them. Eventually, perhaps, this would lead to "puppy mills" for human children, which I hope we can agree would not be moral. By insisting the money goes only to the adoption agencies and lawyers, who do not have much control in the production of adoptable children, we prevent this.
The other examples are similar; in all cases, it is easy to see how transaction gives an opportunity for an enterprising individual to exploit the situation. The markets that emerge are less morally fraught in the other examples than the adoption one but it is still easy to see how real damage could be done to the social fabric (e.g. every time you are invited for dinner, you have to be suspicious of whether the inviter is a sincere friend, or just a full-time dinner-hoster hoping to charge you a big bill at the end).
I do not see the immorality of women having babies just to sell them on for adoption. People would not buy infants just to do them evil. Child rapists are unlikely to have the money to buy their prey. They are going to steal them.
I also do not see it being common. For one thing, the buyers will want some day in who the father is. For another, there will be very little control over the nine month production process, and few women will want to have anything to do with such a complicated intrusive process. And for a third thing, the resultant product is unlikely to match what the buyers really want.
If you throw in gene editing to give the buyers more control over the finished product, that raises the price considerably and probably requires a lot more intrusive quality control of the manufacturing process.
> Child rapists are unlikely to have the money to buy their prey. They are going to steal them.
Why not?
> I also do not see it being common. For one thing, the buyers will want some day in who the father is. For another, there will be very little control over the nine month production process, and few women will want to have anything to do with such a complicated intrusive process. And for a third thing, the resultant product is unlikely to match what the buyers really want.
You've just described the surrogacy industry, which for the record I think should be banned.
You could make all those arguments about puppies. And yet, incentives being what they are, and we got puppy mills. I'm really not interested in discussing whether puppy mills for human children are moral.
Feynman infamously wrote about his trials and tribulations with women. He would meet many pretty women at the bar he frequented but seldom got “rewarded” for his generosity by any of the women. He shared this frustration with a good friend who was very successful with obtaining the “favors” of women. This friend explained that he made it clear to the women that he was making a trade, he would buy them drinks in exchange for their willingness to spend the night with him. Feynman followed his friend’s advice and likewise found success.
The legal status in the US varies by state. I am pretty sure there are states where commercial surrogacy with an enforceable contract is legal.
What is the legal label for what you are calling "reckless?" It sounds like soliciting for prostitution which I believe is a misdemeanor in most states.
I subscribe to the teachings of Lysander Spooner: one man’s vice is another man’s virtue—as long as it is voluntary between adults. I also don’t subscribe to victimless crimes.
You were very clear and well understood. But our discourse is public so I try to define my terms just in case someone lifts my words from their context.
Isn't the point of commercial transactions supposed to be that they're not personal? I understood that to be one classical benefit of markets, that they allow peaceable business interactions from from pure enlightened self-interest unencumbered by the messiness of relationship and ideology.
But if the marketplace by design strips away spirituality, sentiment and affiliation, then you can naturally expect dissonance if you try to force sentimental and relational things into the marketplace.
I don't think the "point" of commercial transactions is that they are not personal, more that they do not require personal relationships. The goal, or even requirement, isn't to strip away all the nice things you describe.
Chartertopia notes the small scale trade, but on the sentiment side it is notable that people prefer to buy from people and businesses they like. Whether it is brand affiliation, friendly staff, or just liking the owner, people seem to have pretty strong preferences for sentimental aspects of a purchase. Most small businesses live or die based on how much their clientele just like the owner and store, usually described as a focus on customer service.
To the extent that personal relationships creep into the market, though, don't they spoil the efficiency of commercial transactions? Shopping at your favorite Mom n' Pop store is nice even if it's slightly more expensive, because it feels a little bit like giving a tiny gift to someone you like, and they may literally gift you occasional free merchandise in return. But meanwhile, it's hard not to argue that those interactions are distorting the price signals about the actual utility of the items themselves to each of you. And if they comp you something you don't actually enjoy that much, then wouldn't classical economics say it's more efficient for them to keep their gift and let you just pay market value for an item you'd prefer?
Well, some classical economists might say something like that, but none of the good ones. All aspects of a transaction are part of the transaction, not just the money and the item. If people are willing to pay more for a nicer store, friendly staff, or just a cat sitting on the counter, that isn't inefficient, quite the opposite. Likewise, if people want to pay the absolute minimum price for an item because they do not value all the frippery of a local store and just want the damned thing itself, that is fine too.
Efficiency isn't just a question of getting some thing X for the lowest price Y. All the other aspects of transaction, from driving to the store or not, standing in line, chatting with the clerk or not, whatever, is part of the transaction and needs to be included. People want lots of things, and any given transaction is a bundle of things people want (or don't want).
Yeah, the farmer's market is a really great example of a place where people want just a wee bit of sentiment/ spirit mixed into their commerce.
But I think that people recognize that there's not really a stable equilibrium between the two modes of interacting: one tends to drive out the other. Consequently there are legal restrictions around gifts, nepotism, transparency/disclosure, etc. to keep the public markets neutral and non-relational, and people instinctively also want restrictions to keep some purely sentimental relations (parents to children, romantic partner to romantic partner, bodies to souls) free from market dynamics.
Why would one drive out the other? They serve different functions.
What do you mean by "legal restrictions around gifts"? As far as I know I can give as much as I want to anyone I want to give things to.
Farmer's markets, in my experience — I was in one last Sunday — are providing not sentiment but a different product, sometimes higher quality. That includes fresher fruit and an opportunity to taste free samples. Costco and some other stores offer that too but usually in a much more limited form.
“I have long suspected that part of the reason is many Europeans seeing tipping as signaling the class superiority of the tipper…”
No need to suspect, just look in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) defines a tip as “A small present of money given to an inferior, esp. to a servant or employee of another for a service rendered or expected…”
As an Englishman living in Spain, I regard tipping as an archaic custom that should be abolished. I don’t get tipped for doing my job, however well I do it, and neither do most other people. Around here, it’s mostly waiters that get tips, and local people typically tip about two or three percent of the bill (tourists may tip more). It’s unnecessary and a nuisance.
Money makes people act weird. This has been known for a long time, I think.
Maybe because money is such a potent communication tool?
Maybe because there is tension in our culture—in many cultures—between the relative value of the material and the immaterial? Between things that have a price and things that we like to consider priceless?
I was recently having a discussion about something similar with a friend.
He can't drive and asked 'how would you feel about giving me a lift if I was stuck, I'd pay if course?'
The idea of helping out a friend in need is fine with me. The addition of money makes me uncomfortable.
Pragmatically, the addition of money should improve the situation, getting paid for something I'd do for free is not usually something I'd complain about.
But the addition of money introduces some complications. How much does he pay?
Too little and I'd think it was disrespectful, too much and I'd feel like an employee and not a friend.
Even though it seems completely irrational, I think I'd rather recieve nothing.
(Paying for fuel might be a shelling point we could agree on, although, for me at least, it only avoids discomfort if we end up at a filling station and he pays the bill. A direct transfer still feels wrong)
One possible explanation for some of it is that friendship is a blanket contract designed to reduce transaction costs. Friends agree to do anything for each other where the benefit is clearly much more than the cost. There is an implicit qualification — as long as it doesn't get too far out of balance. If you are always doing me favors and I never have an opportunity to reciprocate I find some way to create one.
There is a relevant bit in _Street-Corner Society_, about lower class black society in, I think, Baltimore. People who are friends claim not to keep track of the balance but if the friendship ends it turns out that both of them have been keeping a mental scorecard of favors done and received.
I read long ago that pre-Civil War, New Englanders kept little notebooks of all the favors given and received to remove any doubt from fragile memories, and not doing so was an insult for implying the favor was insignificant. Southerners saw things just the opposite. It would be interesting to see some historical examples. I don't remember any indication of how common the notebooks were.
That matter of feeling like an employee rather than a friend also brings a sense of obligation, like you'd have to drive him wherever and whenever he wants, instead of asking "pretty please" and keeping it rare.
I agree that it does not make sense that one has to pay an adoption agency and a lawyer and that one cannot pay the mother. But I suggest that the problem is that we have to pay a lawyer and adoption agancy. Why? Society has an interest in seeing that kids get adopted. Why can we not have public institutions which do this? The government is already regulating the safety of the child, but in a way that creates problems for everyone. Why can it not do the job properly and help people determine whether they should adopt or not?
Also, as for things that one cannot sell. It used to be illegal to be so crass as to say "pay me and I will go to Washington DC for you and try to get the legislators to do what you want." You, yourself, could communicate with your representatives, as a citizen. But paying someone to do that was considered bad. Would that it were so and we had no lobbysists. Things would, I suggest, be better for more of us if lobbying were illegal.
I also love the term "derogeance". I mean, imagine if we had a president who had some sense of nobility and honor and felt that his job was to be the president and not to just sell himself and this country to the highest bidder. Can you imagine it? Is this just too crazy? Too radical? I dont know...
> Society has an interest in seeing that kids get adopted.
So are you saying pay the adoptive parent to adopt the kid, or let the adoptive parent pay the biological mother?
The idea was to avoid a system where kids are being specifically produced for the adoption industry. Of course, then we allowed the surrogacy industry which does just that to spring up.
> The government is already regulating the safety of the child, but in a way that creates problems for everyone. Why can it not do the job properly and help people determine whether they should adopt or not?
For the same reason most government actions turn out badly.
> Also, as for things that one cannot sell. It used to be illegal to be so crass as to say "pay me and I will go to Washington DC for you and try to get the legislators to do what you want." You, yourself, could communicate with your representatives, as a citizen. But paying someone to do that was considered bad.
What about donating to an advocacy organization like the ACLU or NRA? And how is that different from "lobbying" which is bad? If you look at people's intuitions they tend to boil down to "groups I agree with are doing public interest advocacy, groups I disagree with are doing evil lobbying".
Why are you opposed to surrogacy? If a woman's body belongs to her why should she not be free to rent out its use? Lots of people rent out the use of their brain or their arms — that is what employment is — why is renting out the use of her womb not equally legitimate?
You have a curious inconsistency with regards to your attitude towards children.
One moment implying that they ought to be treated as full citizens with full rights, the next treating them as mere goods to be sold on the open market.
Parents have certain rights and obligations with regard to their children. The question of what those are and how it is prudent to exercise them is separate from how they are obtained, what adult is in that relation to what child.
A child is no more free if parental rights are allocated by the state than if they are allocated by the market and, since agents of the state are less likely to value the child's welfare than either his natural mother or a couple who want to adopt him, less likely to have choices made for him in his interest.
> A child is no more free if parental rights are allocated by the state than if they are allocated by the market and, since agents of the state are less likely to value the child's welfare than either his natural mother or a couple who want to adopt him, less likely to have choices made for him in his interest.
This is true. However, someone who wants to buy the child is in a somewhat dubious position.
Why is someone who wants to pay the infant’s mother for her consent to the adoption in a dubious position, relative to someone who wants to pay an adoption agency to arrange it?
You do realize that we are talking about adopting infants, typically newborns? That is what adoptive parents want, for obvious reasons.
What about someone who unquestioningly pays ALL the expenses of their surrogate?
I'm aware of a couple who effectively hired their surrogate fulltime though the fiction of "paying the expenses associated with the pregnancy", i.e. "supporting them 100% plus adding certain "other expenses" that amounted to a considerable cash payment.
All through their attorneys, so I'll bet nontrivial money it was legal in the relevant jurisdictions.
It seems like money serves the function of a purification rite to alienate transactions that might otherwise impose illegible social obligations. If you pay for something, then you might be trying to invoke mercantile norms in which the transaction is impersonal, just business.
Taken another way, if the US economy weren't dominated by fixed-income obligations by design, there would be no clear reason to denominate contracts in US dollars rather than other freely floating currencies, or transaction-appropriate commodities. For instance, currently airline tickets are implicitly bundled with oil futures. It might be more logical to denominate ticket prices in terms of barrels of oil (or a bundle of other related costs), to separate the flights business from the oil speculation business, and let consumers decide whether to pay with futures or pay a reservation fee equal to the time-discounted expected profits for that ticket and owe the balance in terms of spot prices upon boarding. If that seems too complicated, that's because our system is currently not set up to handle it; it if were, the message length of that transaction might well be very low, and the trades needed to approximate the arrangement in our world might be very complex. (Marriage is a good example - if it were unknown, it would take quite a while to explain all the transactions involved, but many people seem to have good-enough intuitions for it, and in fact most people transact marriages.)
In one of my fantasy roleplaying campaigns, ended a few years back, I had seven humanoid races. One of these, the nixies, favored freshwater habitats such as rivers, lakes, and swamps, and as an outgrowth of this were actively involved in trade and commerce. They had a very definite idea that trade was an honorable activity. As a reflection of this, when the player characters were ready to send their recently acquired ship out on its first intercontinental voyage of trade and exploration, a young nixie woman, Elissa, showed up and offered to hire on as the "ship's girl"—a subcontractor provided sexual services and incidental entertainment to the crew. I portrayed her as regarding herself as an honorable professional and expecting to be treated with respect, because among nixies, commercial sex was simply an occupational and lifestyle choice, not stigmatized as such. (Other races had other attitudes.)
This was, if you like, a bit of heterotopia. I was intentionally contrasting it with human attitudes, which on one hand tend to denigrate courtesans, and on another also view trade with suspicion. There's a pattern of gods of merchants also being gods of thieves, because making a profit from trade is clearly stealing on the part of the middleman, from one or both of the people they trade with—if you view value as an intrinsic quality and not a relative one. I had races that thought that way, included men; but nixies had been mercantile for so long that they didn't have that attitude.
I wonder if one of the ingredients here is third party recognition. Adoption "on the frontier" could be simply a matter of mother and adopters agreeing, money goes one way, child goes the other. But in a non-frontier society, with more people, perhaps the potential for extortion goes up. Adopters pay too little for a kid from an unknowing mother; mother charges too much to unknowing adopters; either party threatens the other into accepting a deal they wouldn't. A third party reduces the chance of swindling or extortion, since either of the first two must collude with the third, and the third presumably has equal incentive to side with both, especially if the third party is registered with government (i.e. credentialed adoption lawyer).
This could similarly explain the weirdness around seeking dates. In the cases listed above, the setting is a restaurant or a bar. An alley, say, with just the two of them, is presented as disapproved of except by the two direct parties - just as in the adoption case. It doesn't explain how it's still possible for dinner to happen but end there. OTOH, it might explain double dates and arranged matings.
Reading the exchange between David Friedman and Eugene Nier about adoption reminds me again of this point.
David asks why someone who wants to pay an infant’s mother for her consent to adopt that infant should be considered to be in a more dubious position than someone who wants to go through an adoption agency. AIUI, the fear here is at least twofold. One is that if it's between the mother and the adopter, then the adopter could intimidate the mother into accepting a lower price (or perhaps less likely but still possibly, the mother could intimidate the adopter into accepting a higher one). Another is that in such a regime, an adopter could make a business model of contacting lots of mothers with offers to adopt, acquiring lots of infants. If it's possible to raise infants more economically in bulk than singly, this adopter could then apply the infants to immoral but profitable services, such as trafficking. It could also increase the chance of abuse. In some cases, women might feel childbirth risks to be worth bearing in return for whatever the adopter pays them, which increases the number of infants exchanged this way. For mothers who truly want a better home for their infant, the adopter masks the fact that they do this at scale.
Requiring an adoption agency increases the number of people involved in such transactions, which increases the chance that someone will be involved who has an incentive to protect the welfare of the infant. This assumes that the agency does not get a cut of the adopter's profit margin, of course. In most cases, this will be presumably moot, since the adopter and mother are one-time customers. They cannot be repeat customers without the agency knowing about it, and the agency can't easily allow repeat business to go without closer scrutiny if they know the state will imprison them if it finds out.
Interesting thing about tipping, my impression is that it used to be more common in Europe than America. For example, if you go back 100+ years, if a “commoner” did a favor for a member of the upper class (for example opening a door, or giving directions), he would expect to receive a tip for his trouble. Whereas European visitors to America commented on how people there would help you out without expecting recompense.
Among the various questions you have posed on your substack, this appears to be easiest at least in my perspective.
> Dinner date vs paying cash for romance
You are not buying the same thing in these cases. When you pursue romance through the complex mating rituals such as dinner at restaurants you are basically creating a barrier that keeps a certain type of women out. Also, the woman's willingness to engage in his behavior signals that other men are being removed from the competition. A woman that offers a rate card might be cheaper and quicker but she also will have more clients. I think most men are probably unhappy with that.
> Adoption
Another easy one for me. I have never seen either the biological mother nor the adopting parents having any issues with exchanging money for the baby. India has black markets for this and also very reputed and highly respected people in society working as arbitrators.
The only people who have problems appears to be those who do not have skin in the game. The politicians and busybodies. Also baptist and bootlegger effect where social works and attorneys also want those regulations.
> Surrogacy
Same as adoption.
> commercial but not altruistic surrogacy
This is same as "lets ban alcohol but let only government run stores selling it" effect. People still want kids. Create an exception and give government authority to decide if you quality for that exception through a paper trail. I think close examination will those that the altruism is nothing but exchange of money or favors.
> Hospitality
Same as first case of dinner date. It is not about food but rather the time the couple has put in to invite you over and spend time with you. It is also about which people the other couple does not spend their time with. If you offer them $40 as worth of the dinner it would be insulting as they think their time, decision to chose you over others etc. is worth lot more.
They however might be very happy to take other things such as reference letter for their children's college applications, recommending a good real estate agent or car mechanic etc. They probably want a small timeshare of your intelligence and life experiences rather than your $40.
In short these problems appear to be in two categories:
1. People with no skin in the game having an opinion about exchanging money for certain services. They have an incentive to virtue signal without losing anything for it.
2. Failure to see the real value goods/services being exchanged and just looking at the sticker price.
Another example is organ transplants. Everyone gets paid -- doctors, nurses, hospital, transport -- except the organ donor, who is arguably the most important one of them all.
I should have used that.
I have to know... who is this commenter quoted in the post who has "deep and meaningful" conversations in crack houses?! :)
As for explaining it ... as far as trading dinners or other hospitality, money suddenly sets an exact explicit value on the matter, where trading dinners doesn't. If the CEO of my employer invited me over for dinner (suppose it's a 10 man company and everyone is on a first name basis) and I reciprocated, I think there is an acceptance of my dinner not being as fancy, not as directly comparable. But if I pay him $40, that's me saying how much it was worth in a much more direct manner, and even it it were socially acceptable, it would almost certainly not match his own valuations. Or suppose the CEO invited me over for a sit down dinner and I reciprocated by inviting him to a BBQ -- the difference would almost be better because it makes a direct comparison impossible.
Suppose the CEO invites several people to dinner, from different pay grades -- receptionist, factory supervisor, VP. Everyone will expect different pay levels. Whoever pays first will set the tone for the others, and the receptionist is going to feel out of place no matter what.
I can't explain surrogacy or organ transplant prohibitions except as some very weak offshoot of not paying for hospitality. After all, if I take a taxi to the CEO's dinner, I have to pay him because he's not part of the "free" dinner. In that same way, the doctors, nurses, payroll clerks, and other hospital staff are going to get paid regardless, but the donor is the guest, and expecting the guest to pay would be really bad manners, so it just changes to not paying the guest to show up. It's a lousy explanation, but it's the best I have. FWIW, I think it's incredibly stupid to not pay surrogate mothers or organ donors.
Maybe it's as if a company has a tradition that the CEO always invited the employee of the month over to dinner. This could be seen as an imposition, and it would probably include a wife, but not kids, and now the guest has to pay for a babysitter. Should the CEO offer to pay for that?
I think you are pretty much nailing it with the dinner party examples. I might add to it that invitation to dinner implies subtly "I like you enough that I will spend time and money (food) to get you to come over and spend time with me," and accepting implies that you also like the person enough to spend time with them. Paying them for the food, however, puts the relationship back on the level of a restaurant and patron, where the guest is just there for the meal not the relationship; now the host wonders if the guest doesn't really like them much, or at least only as much as they might like an owner or waitress at a restaurant. Suddenly the nature of the relationship, and the relative status of the people in it, gets uncertain.
Plus it feels a bit of a negative judgement if you spend 300$ of time and supplies making a meal someone offers 40$ for :D
Rather reminds me of the story of the kindergarten that had troubles getting parents to pick their kids up on time, so they established a fine for failure, only to find that late pickups *increased* -- parents who would otherwise inconvenience themselves in order to get there on time would happily carry on with their day and pay the fine, once the price had been set.
Indeed. For most people, the feeling of being an inconsiderate ass is more costly to wellbeing than 20$. I think that is widely underrated as a form of social control, given that it is much more egalitarian than monetary expenditures for instance.
I hadn’t thought about it so starkly as converting dinner among friends to a restaurant meal, but that is the same as a friend paying for rides, which turns the rides more into taxi rides than friendship.
Indeed. Paying for gas seems to be an acceptable middle ground, but of course gas doesn't come close to covering the time to drive someone, so it seems more like a sharing a burden (like splitting a shared meal at a restaurant) than paying for the whole service I suspect.
I have also noticed that payment tends to come along with specific conditions, quality level, specific time of completion, etc. I used to do a lot of casting work for my friend who needed prototypes for parts, and he was absolutely punctilious about paying me, which made me extra keen to get things done quickly and well. (More so than my usual tendency.) It never came to it, but had he said "Look, I need these by this weekend, so please stop screwing around with other stuff and get these done now," I would have felt compelled to do so. That might have made it less friendly than me just doing him a favor so whenever it gets done it gets done. Likewise if I did a poor job and he wasn't happy he would be more upset to pay me for it.
Repugnant markets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market
Thanks. I wasn't aware of the term.
That is an interesting distinction, but I think my examples are in your first category. You can pay a lawyer to arrange an adoption but the mother is not selling the lawyer the right to transfer her infant to someone else. The transaction is nominally being done for free. Similarly, I think, for my other examples. Prostitution doesn't become legal if the customer pays the madam and the prostitute is an employee; I didn't use that example in my final draft but it is obviously relevant.
For all of the situations posed in this article, I see a simple argument based on second-order effects -- once something can be sold, it becomes a target for exploitation.
Consider your adoption example. If we allowed a mother to financially benefit from giving their children up for adoption, that would create a market for mothers to birth children specifically to sell them. Eventually, perhaps, this would lead to "puppy mills" for human children, which I hope we can agree would not be moral. By insisting the money goes only to the adoption agencies and lawyers, who do not have much control in the production of adoptable children, we prevent this.
The other examples are similar; in all cases, it is easy to see how transaction gives an opportunity for an enterprising individual to exploit the situation. The markets that emerge are less morally fraught in the other examples than the adoption one but it is still easy to see how real damage could be done to the social fabric (e.g. every time you are invited for dinner, you have to be suspicious of whether the inviter is a sincere friend, or just a full-time dinner-hoster hoping to charge you a big bill at the end).
I do not see the immorality of women having babies just to sell them on for adoption. People would not buy infants just to do them evil. Child rapists are unlikely to have the money to buy their prey. They are going to steal them.
I also do not see it being common. For one thing, the buyers will want some day in who the father is. For another, there will be very little control over the nine month production process, and few women will want to have anything to do with such a complicated intrusive process. And for a third thing, the resultant product is unlikely to match what the buyers really want.
If you throw in gene editing to give the buyers more control over the finished product, that raises the price considerably and probably requires a lot more intrusive quality control of the manufacturing process.
> Child rapists are unlikely to have the money to buy their prey. They are going to steal them.
Why not?
> I also do not see it being common. For one thing, the buyers will want some day in who the father is. For another, there will be very little control over the nine month production process, and few women will want to have anything to do with such a complicated intrusive process. And for a third thing, the resultant product is unlikely to match what the buyers really want.
You've just described the surrogacy industry, which for the record I think should be banned.
Try describing any “why not” scenario which sounds plausible. I did, and couldn’t, which is why I wrote that.
> Try describing any “why not” scenario which sounds plausible.
Some pedophiles are rich. There have in fact been instances of adoptive parents sexually abusing their adoptive children.
I said “plausible”. How common are rich pedophiles who risk their fortune by raping adopted children?
Don’t echo that nonsensical “If it saves one child …”.
Laws aren’t magic. Statists might like to think “So let it be written, so let it be done” but that’s not how laws work.
> I said “plausible”. How common are rich pedophiles who risk their fortune by raping adopted children?
It's less risky than kidnapping random children and you don't have to be that rich to adopt.
You could make all those arguments about puppies. And yet, incentives being what they are, and we got puppy mills. I'm really not interested in discussing whether puppy mills for human children are moral.
Big difference in expense and time.
We have a winner!
Your post made me think of Richard Feynman.
Feynman infamously wrote about his trials and tribulations with women. He would meet many pretty women at the bar he frequented but seldom got “rewarded” for his generosity by any of the women. He shared this frustration with a good friend who was very successful with obtaining the “favors” of women. This friend explained that he made it clear to the women that he was making a trade, he would buy them drinks in exchange for their willingness to spend the night with him. Feynman followed his friend’s advice and likewise found success.
The legal status in the US varies by state. I am pretty sure there are states where commercial surrogacy with an enforceable contract is legal.
What is the legal label for what you are calling "reckless?" It sounds like soliciting for prostitution which I believe is a misdemeanor in most states.
I subscribe to the teachings of Lysander Spooner: one man’s vice is another man’s virtue—as long as it is voluntary between adults. I also don’t subscribe to victimless crimes.
You were very clear and well understood. But our discourse is public so I try to define my terms just in case someone lifts my words from their context.
Isn't the point of commercial transactions supposed to be that they're not personal? I understood that to be one classical benefit of markets, that they allow peaceable business interactions from from pure enlightened self-interest unencumbered by the messiness of relationship and ideology.
But if the marketplace by design strips away spirituality, sentiment and affiliation, then you can naturally expect dissonance if you try to force sentimental and relational things into the marketplace.
I don't think the "point" of commercial transactions is that they are not personal, more that they do not require personal relationships. The goal, or even requirement, isn't to strip away all the nice things you describe.
Chartertopia notes the small scale trade, but on the sentiment side it is notable that people prefer to buy from people and businesses they like. Whether it is brand affiliation, friendly staff, or just liking the owner, people seem to have pretty strong preferences for sentimental aspects of a purchase. Most small businesses live or die based on how much their clientele just like the owner and store, usually described as a focus on customer service.
To the extent that personal relationships creep into the market, though, don't they spoil the efficiency of commercial transactions? Shopping at your favorite Mom n' Pop store is nice even if it's slightly more expensive, because it feels a little bit like giving a tiny gift to someone you like, and they may literally gift you occasional free merchandise in return. But meanwhile, it's hard not to argue that those interactions are distorting the price signals about the actual utility of the items themselves to each of you. And if they comp you something you don't actually enjoy that much, then wouldn't classical economics say it's more efficient for them to keep their gift and let you just pay market value for an item you'd prefer?
Well, some classical economists might say something like that, but none of the good ones. All aspects of a transaction are part of the transaction, not just the money and the item. If people are willing to pay more for a nicer store, friendly staff, or just a cat sitting on the counter, that isn't inefficient, quite the opposite. Likewise, if people want to pay the absolute minimum price for an item because they do not value all the frippery of a local store and just want the damned thing itself, that is fine too.
Efficiency isn't just a question of getting some thing X for the lowest price Y. All the other aspects of transaction, from driving to the store or not, standing in line, chatting with the clerk or not, whatever, is part of the transaction and needs to be included. People want lots of things, and any given transaction is a bundle of things people want (or don't want).
But governments allow farmers' markets when grocery stores provide the unencumbered transactions. Same for yard sales, flea markets, eBay, and so on.
Yeah, the farmer's market is a really great example of a place where people want just a wee bit of sentiment/ spirit mixed into their commerce.
But I think that people recognize that there's not really a stable equilibrium between the two modes of interacting: one tends to drive out the other. Consequently there are legal restrictions around gifts, nepotism, transparency/disclosure, etc. to keep the public markets neutral and non-relational, and people instinctively also want restrictions to keep some purely sentimental relations (parents to children, romantic partner to romantic partner, bodies to souls) free from market dynamics.
Why would one drive out the other? They serve different functions.
What do you mean by "legal restrictions around gifts"? As far as I know I can give as much as I want to anyone I want to give things to.
Farmer's markets, in my experience — I was in one last Sunday — are providing not sentiment but a different product, sometimes higher quality. That includes fresher fruit and an opportunity to taste free samples. Costco and some other stores offer that too but usually in a much more limited form.
“I have long suspected that part of the reason is many Europeans seeing tipping as signaling the class superiority of the tipper…”
No need to suspect, just look in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) defines a tip as “A small present of money given to an inferior, esp. to a servant or employee of another for a service rendered or expected…”
As an Englishman living in Spain, I regard tipping as an archaic custom that should be abolished. I don’t get tipped for doing my job, however well I do it, and neither do most other people. Around here, it’s mostly waiters that get tips, and local people typically tip about two or three percent of the bill (tourists may tip more). It’s unnecessary and a nuisance.
Money makes people act weird. This has been known for a long time, I think.
Maybe because money is such a potent communication tool?
Maybe because there is tension in our culture—in many cultures—between the relative value of the material and the immaterial? Between things that have a price and things that we like to consider priceless?
I was recently having a discussion about something similar with a friend.
He can't drive and asked 'how would you feel about giving me a lift if I was stuck, I'd pay if course?'
The idea of helping out a friend in need is fine with me. The addition of money makes me uncomfortable.
Pragmatically, the addition of money should improve the situation, getting paid for something I'd do for free is not usually something I'd complain about.
But the addition of money introduces some complications. How much does he pay?
Too little and I'd think it was disrespectful, too much and I'd feel like an employee and not a friend.
Even though it seems completely irrational, I think I'd rather recieve nothing.
(Paying for fuel might be a shelling point we could agree on, although, for me at least, it only avoids discomfort if we end up at a filling station and he pays the bill. A direct transfer still feels wrong)
One possible explanation for some of it is that friendship is a blanket contract designed to reduce transaction costs. Friends agree to do anything for each other where the benefit is clearly much more than the cost. There is an implicit qualification — as long as it doesn't get too far out of balance. If you are always doing me favors and I never have an opportunity to reciprocate I find some way to create one.
There is a relevant bit in _Street-Corner Society_, about lower class black society in, I think, Baltimore. People who are friends claim not to keep track of the balance but if the friendship ends it turns out that both of them have been keeping a mental scorecard of favors done and received.
I read long ago that pre-Civil War, New Englanders kept little notebooks of all the favors given and received to remove any doubt from fragile memories, and not doing so was an insult for implying the favor was insignificant. Southerners saw things just the opposite. It would be interesting to see some historical examples. I don't remember any indication of how common the notebooks were.
That matter of feeling like an employee rather than a friend also brings a sense of obligation, like you'd have to drive him wherever and whenever he wants, instead of asking "pretty please" and keeping it rare.
I agree that it does not make sense that one has to pay an adoption agency and a lawyer and that one cannot pay the mother. But I suggest that the problem is that we have to pay a lawyer and adoption agancy. Why? Society has an interest in seeing that kids get adopted. Why can we not have public institutions which do this? The government is already regulating the safety of the child, but in a way that creates problems for everyone. Why can it not do the job properly and help people determine whether they should adopt or not?
Also, as for things that one cannot sell. It used to be illegal to be so crass as to say "pay me and I will go to Washington DC for you and try to get the legislators to do what you want." You, yourself, could communicate with your representatives, as a citizen. But paying someone to do that was considered bad. Would that it were so and we had no lobbysists. Things would, I suggest, be better for more of us if lobbying were illegal.
I also love the term "derogeance". I mean, imagine if we had a president who had some sense of nobility and honor and felt that his job was to be the president and not to just sell himself and this country to the highest bidder. Can you imagine it? Is this just too crazy? Too radical? I dont know...
> Society has an interest in seeing that kids get adopted.
So are you saying pay the adoptive parent to adopt the kid, or let the adoptive parent pay the biological mother?
The idea was to avoid a system where kids are being specifically produced for the adoption industry. Of course, then we allowed the surrogacy industry which does just that to spring up.
> The government is already regulating the safety of the child, but in a way that creates problems for everyone. Why can it not do the job properly and help people determine whether they should adopt or not?
For the same reason most government actions turn out badly.
> Also, as for things that one cannot sell. It used to be illegal to be so crass as to say "pay me and I will go to Washington DC for you and try to get the legislators to do what you want." You, yourself, could communicate with your representatives, as a citizen. But paying someone to do that was considered bad.
What about donating to an advocacy organization like the ACLU or NRA? And how is that different from "lobbying" which is bad? If you look at people's intuitions they tend to boil down to "groups I agree with are doing public interest advocacy, groups I disagree with are doing evil lobbying".
Why are you opposed to surrogacy? If a woman's body belongs to her why should she not be free to rent out its use? Lots of people rent out the use of their brain or their arms — that is what employment is — why is renting out the use of her womb not equally legitimate?
You have a curious inconsistency with regards to your attitude towards children.
One moment implying that they ought to be treated as full citizens with full rights, the next treating them as mere goods to be sold on the open market.
Parents have certain rights and obligations with regard to their children. The question of what those are and how it is prudent to exercise them is separate from how they are obtained, what adult is in that relation to what child.
A child is no more free if parental rights are allocated by the state than if they are allocated by the market and, since agents of the state are less likely to value the child's welfare than either his natural mother or a couple who want to adopt him, less likely to have choices made for him in his interest.
> A child is no more free if parental rights are allocated by the state than if they are allocated by the market and, since agents of the state are less likely to value the child's welfare than either his natural mother or a couple who want to adopt him, less likely to have choices made for him in his interest.
This is true. However, someone who wants to buy the child is in a somewhat dubious position.
Why is someone who wants to pay the infant’s mother for her consent to the adoption in a dubious position, relative to someone who wants to pay an adoption agency to arrange it?
You do realize that we are talking about adopting infants, typically newborns? That is what adoptive parents want, for obvious reasons.
What about someone who unquestioningly pays ALL the expenses of their surrogate?
I'm aware of a couple who effectively hired their surrogate fulltime though the fiction of "paying the expenses associated with the pregnancy", i.e. "supporting them 100% plus adding certain "other expenses" that amounted to a considerable cash payment.
All through their attorneys, so I'll bet nontrivial money it was legal in the relevant jurisdictions.
To explain why some people dislike money more than seems economically rational, we might well look at why others like money more than seems economically rational, e.g. in Ayn Rand's fictional depiction of Galt's Gulch: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/on-the-fetishization-of-money-in-galts-gulch/
It seems like money serves the function of a purification rite to alienate transactions that might otherwise impose illegible social obligations. If you pay for something, then you might be trying to invoke mercantile norms in which the transaction is impersonal, just business.
Taken another way, if the US economy weren't dominated by fixed-income obligations by design, there would be no clear reason to denominate contracts in US dollars rather than other freely floating currencies, or transaction-appropriate commodities. For instance, currently airline tickets are implicitly bundled with oil futures. It might be more logical to denominate ticket prices in terms of barrels of oil (or a bundle of other related costs), to separate the flights business from the oil speculation business, and let consumers decide whether to pay with futures or pay a reservation fee equal to the time-discounted expected profits for that ticket and owe the balance in terms of spot prices upon boarding. If that seems too complicated, that's because our system is currently not set up to handle it; it if were, the message length of that transaction might well be very low, and the trades needed to approximate the arrangement in our world might be very complex. (Marriage is a good example - if it were unknown, it would take quite a while to explain all the transactions involved, but many people seem to have good-enough intuitions for it, and in fact most people transact marriages.)
In one of my fantasy roleplaying campaigns, ended a few years back, I had seven humanoid races. One of these, the nixies, favored freshwater habitats such as rivers, lakes, and swamps, and as an outgrowth of this were actively involved in trade and commerce. They had a very definite idea that trade was an honorable activity. As a reflection of this, when the player characters were ready to send their recently acquired ship out on its first intercontinental voyage of trade and exploration, a young nixie woman, Elissa, showed up and offered to hire on as the "ship's girl"—a subcontractor provided sexual services and incidental entertainment to the crew. I portrayed her as regarding herself as an honorable professional and expecting to be treated with respect, because among nixies, commercial sex was simply an occupational and lifestyle choice, not stigmatized as such. (Other races had other attitudes.)
This was, if you like, a bit of heterotopia. I was intentionally contrasting it with human attitudes, which on one hand tend to denigrate courtesans, and on another also view trade with suspicion. There's a pattern of gods of merchants also being gods of thieves, because making a profit from trade is clearly stealing on the part of the middleman, from one or both of the people they trade with—if you view value as an intrinsic quality and not a relative one. I had races that thought that way, included men; but nixies had been mercantile for so long that they didn't have that attitude.
I wonder if one of the ingredients here is third party recognition. Adoption "on the frontier" could be simply a matter of mother and adopters agreeing, money goes one way, child goes the other. But in a non-frontier society, with more people, perhaps the potential for extortion goes up. Adopters pay too little for a kid from an unknowing mother; mother charges too much to unknowing adopters; either party threatens the other into accepting a deal they wouldn't. A third party reduces the chance of swindling or extortion, since either of the first two must collude with the third, and the third presumably has equal incentive to side with both, especially if the third party is registered with government (i.e. credentialed adoption lawyer).
This could similarly explain the weirdness around seeking dates. In the cases listed above, the setting is a restaurant or a bar. An alley, say, with just the two of them, is presented as disapproved of except by the two direct parties - just as in the adoption case. It doesn't explain how it's still possible for dinner to happen but end there. OTOH, it might explain double dates and arranged matings.
Reading the exchange between David Friedman and Eugene Nier about adoption reminds me again of this point.
David asks why someone who wants to pay an infant’s mother for her consent to adopt that infant should be considered to be in a more dubious position than someone who wants to go through an adoption agency. AIUI, the fear here is at least twofold. One is that if it's between the mother and the adopter, then the adopter could intimidate the mother into accepting a lower price (or perhaps less likely but still possibly, the mother could intimidate the adopter into accepting a higher one). Another is that in such a regime, an adopter could make a business model of contacting lots of mothers with offers to adopt, acquiring lots of infants. If it's possible to raise infants more economically in bulk than singly, this adopter could then apply the infants to immoral but profitable services, such as trafficking. It could also increase the chance of abuse. In some cases, women might feel childbirth risks to be worth bearing in return for whatever the adopter pays them, which increases the number of infants exchanged this way. For mothers who truly want a better home for their infant, the adopter masks the fact that they do this at scale.
Requiring an adoption agency increases the number of people involved in such transactions, which increases the chance that someone will be involved who has an incentive to protect the welfare of the infant. This assumes that the agency does not get a cut of the adopter's profit margin, of course. In most cases, this will be presumably moot, since the adopter and mother are one-time customers. They cannot be repeat customers without the agency knowing about it, and the agency can't easily allow repeat business to go without closer scrutiny if they know the state will imprison them if it finds out.
Interesting thing about tipping, my impression is that it used to be more common in Europe than America. For example, if you go back 100+ years, if a “commoner” did a favor for a member of the upper class (for example opening a door, or giving directions), he would expect to receive a tip for his trouble. Whereas European visitors to America commented on how people there would help you out without expecting recompense.
That fits my explanation, I think.