💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › william-gillis-revealed-preference-a-parable.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:43:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Revealed Preference: A Parable
Author: William Gillis
Date: March 20th, 2020
Language: en
Topics: fiction
Source: https://c4ss.org/content/52644

William Gillis

Revealed Preference: A Parable

Three close friends collectively inherit a house in the country from a

departed mutual friend who built it. It’s a dream come true for these

young friends, sick as they are of city life and longing to grow their

own food. The house is big, gorgeous, and well-maintained. It has a

large multifaceted kitchen, which is great because the friends prefer to

cook separately. There’s a large stash of supplies, much equipment, a

overrunning well, and acres for growing crops. To make matters better

there’s a small orchard of genesliced trees that provide a variation of

fruit and nuts throughout the year. Avocados, walnuts, peaches, figs,

etc. Not enough to get by on exclusively, but — divided three ways —

enough to provide a nice complement to whatever the friends grow with

more active labor.

But as the friends survey the house they come to a realization. There

are three bedrooms, but they are not of equal character. The upstairs

bedroom is generally perceived to be the superior room, while the two

downstairs bedrooms, although fine in their own right, are less

enticing. The upstairs room has a bit more space, expansive windows on

both sides, better sound insulation, and its own bathroom.

Who should have it?

The friends are nothing if not charitable and honest. Each explains why

they would prefer the upstairs room.

Amber is an artist and desires the additional floorspace for her

painting, she would feel crunched in the downstairs rooms by comparison.

Her art is deeply important to her and she prefers to work in her own

room.

Brandon is an introvert with slight depression and desires the silence

of its insulation from the common space on the ground floor, he also

finds the big windows on both ends incredible helpful — sunlight at all

times of day, without the risk of people looking in.

Chris can be something of an anxious mess and finds comfort and

spiritual reward in many hour long private baths; they would deeply

prefer to have their own bathroom, and it wouldn’t be fair to the other

person sharing the downstairs bathroom.

(Tag yourself.)

Each of the three friends feels their own need quite intensely, and each

indicates a cost to their mental health in being deprived of the

upstairs room.

These are, however, close friends, and so the problem doesn’t spiral out

into conflict or selfish positioning. Each is sincerely attentive of the

others’ desires/needs. Each is willing to sacrifice, but at the same

time feels their own desire for the room sharply. The friends talk and

talk, but it is hard to — by mere talking — figure out who’s desire is

stronger, or for whom the loss would be harder. What does it mean that

someone ‘very much’ desires the room? How does that compare to someone

else saying ‘very much’ as well? The friends are flummoxed.

Eventually one of them hits upon a possible solution:

“Right now we’re all assuming we’ll take equal shares of the fruit and

nuts produced in our orchard. What if we changed the percentages so that

the person who takes the upstairs room gets less?”

Immediate outrage follows.

“You can’t put a price on mental health! It’s offensive. It’s not

charitable! It’s not friendly! Surely being good friends means dividing

everything equally.”

“Okay, but we’re in a situation with an unavoidable imbalance. We can’t

take the house apart, at least not in any reasonable period of time and

with the energy and resources we have. I’m simply suggesting we create a

counter-balance.”

“But there’s surely someone who needs the room more strongly than the

others. And that need should be respected, we should be endeavoring to

repair the damage done to them by that need, not take something away

from them in exchange. That would make it transactional, and corrupt or

undermine the charity involved in giving the room to the person with the

greatest need. And how are we to establish what percentage difference

the upstairs room is ‘worth'”

“Okay, but taking the room away from the other two people still incurs

damage upon them, surely we should seek to repair that damage. Every

month they will feel some additional annoyance or pain at not having the

upstairs room, but to have that offset by additional nuts and fruits

might salve the damage. Two housemates get more fig spread and avocado

toast, the other housemate gets less. In this we restore balance. We can

go through possible percentages and see what people would be willing to

sacrifice the room at what percentage loss of the orchard bounty. A

fraction of fruits and nuts is a real, tangible thing; through

considering trades we get a glimpse of someone’s actual preferences, in

a way that talking in circles about “how intense” you desire something

will never truly reveal. And if this exchange rate is later felt to be

unfair we can revisit it, trading rooms again at possibly different

rates.”

“This is just making the situation worse, because surely we each value

nuts and fruit differently. Some of us may enjoy walnut butter strongly,

others not at all. One person may be totally fine to surrender their

percentage of the orchard’s bounty. This is to say nothing of the

differences that exist within the category of “fruits and nuts” — are

you going to have us trading fractions of our claims to avocados versus

figs?”

“Well I wasn’t going to get quite so fine-tuned over just a room, I

agree that at some level of detail an agreement becomes too legalistic

and too attention-consuming to be worth anyone’s time, but where’s the

harm in making some tradeoffs a little more explicitly with one another?

And of course the remuneration for the upstairs room doesn’t have to

come from a portion of the fruits and nuts harvest, it could simply take

the form of chores, or labor in the garden, any number of things.”

“Oh so you would have the person in the upstairs room pay RENT to the

rest of us??”

“Well again, this is to remunerate the cost inflicted upon the

downstairs housemates for their living situations. The point here is

that through considering possible trades we can find a situation where

everyone prefers their current particulars of room + benefits + chores.

Where each person looks at a trade and prefers opposite sides. A

positive-sum situation.”

“I flatly deny that ‘desire’ or ‘harm’ can be generalized. A stress from

not being able to take full-afternoon baths is not ‘repaired’ by extra

peach cobbler. Those are separate and incommensurate experiences.”

“Are they though? Sure, you’re right to some degree. But human

consciousness is a very real sense a single thread, whatever messy storm

of things happen inside our brains, they tend to congeal to a single

narrative, a single direction of action. Pleasure and irritation follow

this same path to unity in our conscious experience as individuals. We

are largely unitary. In every moment we experience many desires, but are

forced converge on a single one, or at least a single arrangement of

desires. We think ‘are we having a good day?’ and answer that by

aggregating all the delights and troubles of the day into a single

conclusion, a single direction to our emotion. Sure, sometimes we have

trouble reaching conclusions or even a single thread of consciousness,

the brain is a messy place. But we are individuals, practically

speaking. It may be interesting to examine the ways we diverge from

such, but a more interesting picture is not the same thing as a more

accurate picture, and we must not promote exceptions in our attention

until we confuse them with general trends. Generally speaking irritation

and delight are weighed against one another in our minds, can outweigh

one another.”

“This is a very mechanistic and mathematical way of thinking and it

risks running rampant. At first you said you wanted us to trade rooms

for fractions of our fruit and nut harvest, now I feel you’ve walked

into trading chores for fruits and nuts as well as to settle room

placements. Where does it stop? Should our every interaction as

roommates become a contractual affair?”

“Well, I have noted that I agree there can be diminishing returns to

fastidiousness. Much of friendship is being able to relax in our

attention to one another, or at least redirect it from the trivial, to

not keep close account of many of our interactions. But are explicit

contracts always that terrible? Consent is often something we endeavor

to make very explicit. In this case because the room placement seems to

matter quite strongly to everyone, will possibly have daily impacts upon

each of us, I’m merely suggesting that we work out a trade in this

instance so that each of us feels better off, preferring our housing

situation and chores or orchard shares so that we wouldn’t prefer the

bundle another person has.”

“And I’m saying that not only would such a ‘resolution’ do damage to us

all by expanding the overall number of situations of inequity from just

rooms to rooms as well as chores and the orchard, it would also make it

acceptable to solve other problems the same way. It’s an infectious way

of thinking. One day the space of things we explicitly trade is small,

the next day it might consume the entire house. Until there’s no more

space for the informal, where every interaction between us requires an

increased amount of attention. What if the downstairs housemates get

into a conflict over bathroom use? Should they likewise settle their

dispute by measuring usage and dividing up rights, trading them against

something else? And what happens if someone is simply better at

negotiation? What if one of us is revealed to have a more bureaucratic

soul and fixates on contract minutia. Sure both parties may benefit in

these trades, but what if one consistently benefits more? Lastly how is

any of this going to be enforced? What if we catch one of us stealing

more than their share of figs from the orchard? Or the downstairs

housemates time each others’ bathroom breaks and seek punitive damages

for contract violation? No, it’s better if we just take a loss from the

start. Accept that one person is going to benefit from the upstairs

room, and move on. Anything else risks starting a cascading nightmare of

trades.”

“What holds any of us accountable to anything? Some more explicit

negotiations to correct a room imbalance don’t have to change our

character. If one of us turns into a greedy and legalistic little ass we

can deal with that the same way we’d deal with any other misbehavior.

I’m not proposing we all fall prostrate before some new god, some new

absolute set of rules and heed to them forever and absolutely — ignoring

or losing track of the motivation we have for embracing this solution to

the rooms — I’m just saying that considering trades for the upstairs

room is a useful tool here to reduce the damage done to a few folks and

equalize the situation. But note what course of action your fear of

trade resolves to in this situation: accepting a decidedly unequal

status quo. Sure we could go overboard with explicit agreements — every

household knows the risk of too much explicitness, something like a

giant hyper-detailed chore board with passive aggressive notes — but

some degree of explicitness is useful, it helps clear the air and settle

problems. And if you’re going to assume malintent among the three of us,

why not consider how leaving things up to who argues more persuasively

for the upstairs room in a collective conversation is its own can of

worms? I could spin another tale here, mirroring yours, about potential

runaway situations where a lack of explicitness in agreements provides

space for someone to seek and gain power. I’m merely saying that

proposing trades allows us to have the rubber meet the road in a way

that disconnected conversation about our feelings and preferences

doesn’t. What trade you’ll accept because you feel like you’d benefit

from it is a powerful way to reveal to everyone your actual preferences.

And those trades have to actually be real — concretely actualizable in a

change of what the rest of us recognize as “yours” — or else you could

lie and we’d never really have comparable knowledge of your actual

preferences.”

“I’ve caught you outright! You’re really talking about property and

trade. Titles and markets. Never mind the rotten pedigree of that

argument, never mind the horrible people who usually trot out defenses

of those, the fact of the matter is we’ve done this experiment. One need

only look at the world capitalism built to see where markets get

everyone. Thousands of years of history are in: markets enslave and

pillage. Once you allow people to claim things and trade their claims to

them with one another you get runaway competition, with all the brutal

violence that implies, ever growing spoils to the few victors, and a

ravaged world.”

“Oh come on, that’s just historically inaccurate as fuck. Markets have

existed throughout human history because humans in virtually every

society have recognized and respected people’s exclusive title to some

things — like a bedroom — and also let them exchange these titles with

one another. Sure, different societies varied strongly in what they

embraced markets in — the scope, norms, and mechanisms of those markets

— but they virtually all embraced markets. Trade is a useful tool for

resolving what people’s actual preferences are and the creation of

mutually beneficial resolutions. Trade can take place in all sorts of

ways, trade can be very informal or highly formalized, it can happen in

a moment between strangers directly handing goods between one another,

or over a period in the form of loans or favors between established

community members. The benefit of trade is both the clarity beyond

language provided by revealed preference and the mutual flourishing of

positive sum relationships. Markets can be deformed and enslaved into

sites of brutality, certainly. Any tool can be captured and used by

hierarchies and tyrants, science and art included. But the brutalities

of capitalism did not arise from markets. No gaggle of women trading

vegetables in the town marketplace schemed the enclosures into

existence. No guild artisan built runaway wealth from his own hand and

hired strike breakers. The horrors of capitalism had many mechanisms,

its power was built from many invested parties, it often flowed through

and was expressed in the marketplace, just as systems of power can flow

through and be expressed in literature or engineering, but its power

originated always in systemic institutions of violence. Institutions not

predicated on the positive sum transaction, but the reverse.”

“I dunno, sounds like what a capitalist would say.”

I will leave it to the reader’s biases to judge which housemate in this

parable was which interlocutor.

Suffice to say that obviously the friends did not decide to trade chores

or orchard shares for the upstairs room. The friend who got the upstairs

room did not convince the others cleanly, as that was impossible without

a trade to test everyone’s strength of preference, the others ceded it

mostly to avoid conflict and further discussion. But the lack of clarity

around the decision meant that those stuck with the downstairs room

would every so often fester a little. Mostly though, two of the friends

were suspicious of the roommate who had proposed a trade as a

resolution. Because every good leftist or young person knows there’s

nothing more insidious than trade.