= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
knb comments on Open thread, August 19-25, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (325)
This article, written by Dreeve's wife has displaced Yvain's polyamory essay as the most interesting relationships article I've read this year. The basic idea is that instead of trying to split chores or common goods equally, you use auctions. For example, if the bathroom needs to be cleaned, each partner says how much they'd be willing to clean it for. The person with the higher bid pays the what the other person bid, and that person does the cleaning.
It's easy to see why commenters accused them of being libertarian. But I think egalitarians should examine this system too. Most couples agree that chores and common goods should be split equally. But what does "equally" mean? It's hard to quantify exactly how much each person contributes to a relationship. This allows the more powerful person to exaggerate their contributions and pressure the weaker person into doing more than their fair share. But auctions safeguard against this abuse requiring participants to quantify how much they value each task.
For example, feminists argue that women do more domestic chores than men, and that these chores go unnoticed by men. Men do a little bit, but because men don't see all the work women do, they end up thinking that they're doing their share when they aren't. Auctions safeguard against this abuse. Instead of the wife just cleaning the bathroom, she and her husbands bid for how much they'd be willing to clean the bathroom for. The lower bid is considered the fair market price of cleaning the bathroom. Then she and her husband engage in a joint-purchase auction to decide if the bathroom will be cleaned at all. Either the bathroom gets cleaned and the cleaner gets fairly compensated, or the bathroom doesn't get cleaned because the total utility of cleaning the bathroom is less than the disutility of cleaning the bathroom.
And that's it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.
Wow someone else thought of doing this too!
My roommate and I started doing this a year ago. It went pretty well for the first few months. Then our neighbor heard about how much we were paying eachother for chores and started outbidding us.
This is one of the features of this policy, actually- you can use this as a natural measure of what tasks you should outsource. If a maid would cost $20 to clean the apartment, and you and your roommates all want at least $50 to do it, then the efficient thing to do is to hire a maid.
The problem could be that they actually are willing to do it for $10, but it's a low-status thing to admit.
If we both lived in the same appartment, and we both pretended that our time is precious that we are only willing to clean the appartment for $1000... and I do it 50% of the time, and you do it 50% of the time, at the end none of us gets poor despite the unrealistic prices, because each of us gets all the money back.
Now when the third person comes and cares about money more than about status (which is easier for them, because they don't live in the same appartment with us), our pretending is exposed and we become either more honest or poor.