Squaring Accounts with our Parents

Nature Writer Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill presented to him on his twenty-first birthday. It was a record kept by his father of all the expenses connected with young Ernest's childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor for delivering him. Even more oddly, Ernest is said to have paid it. I used to think that Mr. Seton Senior was a jerk, but now I'm wondering. Margaret Atwood, 'Payback'

Most of us wouldn't wonder much. Such behaviour seems monstrous, inhuman. Certainly Seton found it so: he paid the bill, but never spoke to his father again afterward. And in a way, this is precisely why the presentation of such a bill seems so outrageous. Squaring accounts means that the two parties have the ability to walk away from each other. By presenting it, his father suggested he'd just as soon have nothing further to do with him. David Graeber, Debt, p.92

討論逐字稿 Do friendship and money mix?

On friday we discussed, "Do Friendship and Money Mix?"

To start off the discussion we used the following situation: A friend drives you to Taoyuan Airport from Taipei. Is it cool or not cool to pay her or him 500NT for helping you out?

Reasons for paying 500 to a friend to take you to the airport:
Because you're not taking the friend for granted (they're not being used by you)
You may not have another chance to repay them. So giving it to them now is a good idea.
Because you've paid the friend, you keep this favor in mind.
Not feel guilty. Because you're causing them trouble to take you there.
Simplest way to pay them back.

Reasons against paying 500 to friend to take you to the airport:
This behavior will debase the friendship because we are good friends, we don't need to talk about money when helping each other.
Your friend will feel embarrassed to take the money because it puts a price on the help they give you.
We often pay money to buy something or some product or services, so it's like like you are superior to your friend, you hire them to do something for you. It creates a power imbalance. Some people will feel angry about that.
The friendship would become an obligation. I could just pay someone, and not care about their feelings, but as your friend, I care about your feelings. So paying you means I stop needing to care about your feelings.

Do friendship and money mix?

What's the difference between a friendship, or any human relationship, and an economic relationship? (for the transcript of this discussion, go here.)

In our discussion of Emotional Labor, from February, we talked about the intersection between emotional relationships and economic relationships, and it seemed that everyone drew a line at some point between a friendship and an economic relationship. Different people placed that line in different places, but there was always a line. So today I want to discuss a possible reason for why this line exists. I also wonder if the rationale for the line is the same, even if the conclusions about where exactly to draw it are different.

Let's use an example brought up during the emotional labor discussion. One person said that they wished that they could ask a friend to take them to the airport and just pay them 500NT instead of owing them a favor.

404: Relationship Error

"The 404 page is that. It's that broken experience on the Web. It's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can't find it. .... It's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it. And I just want you to think a little bit about, remember for yourself, it's annoying when you hit this thing. Because it's the feeling of a broken relationship."

The Market Society

What role should money and markets play in our society?




What's the difference between having a Market Economy and a Market Society?

Michael Sandel's answer: A Market Economy is 'a valuable and productive tool for organizing productive activity. A Market Society is a ... place where almost everything is up for sale, it's a way of life where market values seep into almost every domain of life.'

What makes somebody an asshole?

What kind of social behaviour do you normally complain about? Drivers? Pedestrians? People in the subway? People in a line, or people in a 7-11 or in a restaurant? Stories?
Think of someone whose behaviour really pissed you off, either in your personal life, or in the news. Stories?
What kind of social behaviour do you find irritating? Stories?

When you encounter behavior that upsets you, or irritates you, do you try to excuse the person? Does your forgiveness or not of the person depend on what kind of person it is?

What makes a person an asshole?
What's your definition of an asshole?

Is being an asshole mutually exclusive to being a good person? Can someone you consider an asshole also be a good person?

What makes something 'socially acceptible'?
What makes something 'standard behaviour'?
What is a 'social norm'?
Is a 'social norm' the same as a 'social good'?

The Art of Asking

Is College Necessary?

Last week, when discussing Emotional Labor, a question was brought up about choosing someone to do a job, when 'like 5 people have the exact same qualifications'. Because of this, I started thinking about what exactly is a 'qualification'. What standards are applied? Are they really the most useful ones to measure a person's capability? What might be a better way to determine if someone is good for a job?

Also, how do you show people you're capable of a job, before they know who you are, and in spite of biases they may have about you based on what you look like or your reported personal history?

When people seem to have the same qualifications, how do you choose which is the right person? What becomes the determining factor?



Is a college degree the best indicator of someone's ability to perform a job?
If you're an employer, there are lots of signals about a young person's suitability for the job you're offering. If you're looking for someone who can write, do they have a blog, or are they a prolific Wikipedia editor? For programmers, what are their TopCoder or GitHub scores? For salespeople, what have they sold before? If you want general hustle, do they have a track record of entrepreneurship, or at least holding a series of jobs?
You've noticed by now that 'a college degree' is not in this list of signals. That's because I think it's a pretty lousy one, and getting worse all the time. In fact, I think one of the most productive things an employer could do, both for themselves and for society at large, is to stop placing so much emphasis on standard undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Emotional Labor

Last fall we discussed in 'Professional or Human Being?' the ethics of being required to use your emotions and personhood to perform a job. This time through an article talking about various kinds of work involving caring for people, I've found there's a concept called Emotional Labor. I'd like to explore this idea a little bit.


When you perform your job are you actually 'performing' at your job?
To what extent are we performing a role when we go to work? Does it change over time? How much of your 'real' you is put into your work?
In the ideal, how much separation should there be between you and your job. Should your work be a part of you or something separate from you?

Are emotions a part of work? Are they supposed to be?
Are you emotionally invested in your job? Always, or just some parts?
Do emotions detract from doing a job well? When is this true?
Do they enhance the ability to do a job well? When is this true?

Should our emotions be the commodity? Should our emotions be part of the skillset we're offering to a job? Should our emotions be part of the job, be for sale?

The Tide Economy

Let's look at a different kind of alternative economy. There's a lot to talk about: poverty, marketing, branding. Here are the main points of the article. (As always click the heading to go to the actual article, in this case, from New York Magazine.)

Suds for Drugs
The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team.
What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. “We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,” Thompson says. “I guess they were bragging.” It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.

Getting Old

First, here are some related facts and statements to start our brains on the topic.

“Later life seems to be a season in search of its purposes. Aging is an art. It’s not a scientific problem to be solved,” Dr. Thomas Cole, 58, told the crowd. “Being old is filled with unexpected possibilities for creativity,”
Esther Liwazer, 72, stood up and said, “Look! This is very important. What he’s saying is that society needs an attitude adjustment.”
Karen Jackson, 58, a dietician from Detroit, called Cole’s message “absolutely remarkable.” She said, “Our society is in the middle of a revolution because of aging and the overarching idea is that we need to be positive about this.”

Three British ideas for caring for elders:
A kind of timebanking scheme. Care4Care invites volunteers to help care for older people. The cost of care consumes many elderly peoples' life savings
For every hour's care they put in, the volunteers build up an hour's worth of care credit that they can keep in a timebank. They can then use it for their own care later in life.
Rent-free living for carers. People who do the caring live rent-free with the elderly person, and perfomr 10 or so hours of service a month for them. Companionship, constant care, mutually beneficial. Definitely a plan that also needs supervision.

Implementing an Interest-free economy: Currency reform

Money, unlike all other goods and services, can be kept without costs. If one person has a bag of apples and another person has the money to buy those apples, the person with the apples is obliged to sell them whithin a relatively short time period to avoid the loss of his assets. Money owners, however, can wait until the price is right for them, their money does not necessarily create 'holding costs'.

If we could create a monetary system which put money on an equal footing with all other goods and services (charging, on averate, a 5% annual maintenance cost, which is exactly what has been paid in the form of interest for money thorught history) then we could have an economy free of the ups and downs of monetary speculation. Money should be made to 'rust', that is, be subjected to a 'use fee'.

Instead of paying interest to those who have more money than they need and in order to keep money IN circulation, people should pay a small fee if they keep the money OUT of circulation.
--Excerpted from Margrit Kennedy, Interest and Inflation Free Money p. 13

Okay, so how should we best go about doing this? Here are some ideas, I want to talk about the feasibility, obstacles, whether or not you think they're a good idea.


Idea 1: Charge people to store their money. (Margrit Kennedy p.27)
For several years in Switzerland, investors ... had to pay interest in order to leave their money in a bank account.