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Multiheaded comments on Open thread, August 19-25, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
P.S.: those last two sentences ("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.") also remind me of "If those women were really oppressed, someone would have tended to have freed them by then."
The polyamory and BDSM subcultures prove that nerds can create new social rules that improve sex. Of course, you can't just theorize about what the best social rules would be and then declare that you've "solved the problem." But when you see people living happier lives as a result of changing their social rules, there's nothing wrong with inviting other people to take a look.
I don't understand your postscript. I didn't say there is no inequality in chore division because if there were a chore market would have removed it. I said a chore market would have more equality than the standard each-person-does-what-they-think-is-fair system. Your response seems like fully generalized counterargument: anyone who proposes a way to reduce inequality can be accused of denying that the inequality exists.
The modern BDSM culture's origins are somewhat obscure, but I don't think I'd be comfortable saying it was created by nerds despite its present demographics. The leather scene is only one of its cultural poles, but that's generally thought to have grown out of the post-WWII gay biker scene: not the nerdiest of subcultures, to say the least.
I don't know as much about the origins of poly, but I suspect the same would likely be true there.
Hmm, I don't know that I would consider those rules overall to be clearly superior for everyone, although they do reasonably well for me. Rather, I value the existence of different subcultures with different norms, so that people can choose those that suit their predilections and needs.
(More politically: A "liberal" society composed of overlapping subcultures with different norms, in a context of individual rights and social support, seems to be almost certain to meet more people's needs than a "totalizing" society with a single set of norms.)
There are certain of those social rules that seem to be pretty clear improvements to me, though — chiefly the increased care on the subject of consent. That's an improvement in a vanilla-monogamous-heteronormative subculture as well as a kink-poly-genderqueer one.
This works best if none of the "subcultures with different norms" creates huge negative externatilies for the rest of the society. Otherwise, some people get angry. -- And then we need to go meta and create some global rules that either prevent the former from creating the externalities, or the latter from expressing their anger.
I guess in case of BDSM subculture this works without problems. And I guess the test of the polyamorous community will be how well they will treat their children (hopefully better than polygamous mormons treat their sons), or perhaps how will they handle the poly- equivalents of divorce, especially the economical aspects of it (if there is a significant shared property).