7 ms·

Fascinating. There are rules of the social game that people usually follow, but can be subverted in a move that cashes in reputation or "social capital" for a s

by 0xfae 3y ago

Fascinating. There are rules of the social game that people usually follow, but can be subverted in a move that cashes in reputation or "social capital" for a short term gain. If you do it too often, you lose favor and people will stop offering you things repeatedly, and you are expected to pick up on the social cues. I can see how that creates more social wiggle room than a strict set of rules that everyone is expected to always follow.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Reputation (or "Gift") economies are fascinating things, and a neat look into pre-(and maybe post-?)money society. In some ways, the analogy to currency holds: If you do a favor for me, I'm more likely to do a favor for you, there's a baked in "inflation" in that reputation decays over time. But in a lot of important ways, it differs: Me doing a favor for someone actually can make me more likely to do a future favor for them, versus no exchange taking place at all, depending on our level of rapport and the size of the favor. Reputation also rewards things that no-one would bother to quantify under currency economies: small favors, being enjoyable company, loyalty. Reputation is also aggressively local: just because Alice thinks very highly of me, it doesn't mean that Bob is more likely to help me, unless he and Alice have some kind of relationship, in which case I'd be leveraging not only what little rapport I have with Bob, but also my rapport with Alice, and Alice's rapport with Bob. This is a main weakness of such systems, because currency lets you deal with people you've never met before just as easily as your local barber. That leads to the necessity of strong hospitality cultures, because outsiders otherwise have no access to resources at all. From a modeling perspective, currency lives in the nodes of a graph: Alice has some money, Bob has some money, I have some money. Reputation, in contrast, lives on the edges: I have rapport with Bob and Alice, Bob has rapport with Alice and I, etc. On tangentially related note, it's been a bug-bear of mine that primary education history lessons always present barter as the premonetary economic system. This is absurd on its face: if Bob is a brilliant cobbler, and I'm a farmer with shoes that regularly need repairs, I'm not going to break down into whole negotiation of how many bushels of wheat or worse yet something more perishable like vegetables from my garden a new shoe sole costs, and how I'm going to save up and store enough for when my shoes need a fix. I'm going to build a reputation with Bob, by sharing with him excess from my garden, and in exchange he'll be willing to fix up my shoes when needed. Straight-up "I'll give you 4 chickens for a coat" barter is very rarely observed in societies before the introduction of currency.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  Yeah the main reason why our systems are getting increasingly depersonalized is because we have to deal with more and more complete strangers than before. Marvel of modern interactions is that we can trust (somewhat) this current trading partner despite never meeting this person and will never again. At the cost of distancing ourselves from people close to us.
- mr_toad 3y ago
  Direct barter of the thing you produce for the thing they produce is of course difficult and inefficient. But barter in pre monetary cultures often involved the exchange of a third commodity that was commonly traded - things like salt, spices, alcohol, oil, copper and silver. Things that were in high demand and were non-perishable. Coins developed as standardised units of the precious metals that were already being exchanged.

by 0xfae 3y ago

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

Reputation (or "Gift") economies are fascinating things, and a neat look into pre-(and maybe post-?)money society. In some ways, the analogy to currency holds: If you do a favor for me, I'm more likely to do a favor for you, there's a baked in "inflation" in that reputation decays over time. But in a lot of important ways, it differs: Me doing a favor for someone actually can make me more likely to do a future favor for them, versus no exchange taking place at all, depending on our level of rapport and the size of the favor. Reputation also rewards things that no-one would bother to quantify under currency economies: small favors, being enjoyable company, loyalty. Reputation is also aggressively local: just because Alice thinks very highly of me, it doesn't mean that Bob is more likely to help me, unless he and Alice have some kind of relationship, in which case I'd be leveraging not only what little rapport I have with Bob, but also my rapport with Alice, and Alice's rapport with Bob. This is a main weakness of such systems, because currency lets you deal with people you've never met before just as easily as your local barber. That leads to the necessity of strong hospitality cultures, because outsiders otherwise have no access to resources at all. From a modeling perspective, currency lives in the nodes of a graph: Alice has some money, Bob has some money, I have some money. Reputation, in contrast, lives on the edges: I have rapport with Bob and Alice, Bob has rapport with Alice and I, etc. On tangentially related note, it's been a bug-bear of mine that primary education history lessons always present barter as the premonetary economic system. This is absurd on its face: if Bob is a brilliant cobbler, and I'm a farmer with shoes that regularly need repairs, I'm not going to break down into whole negotiation of how many bushels of wheat or worse yet something more perishable like vegetables from my garden a new shoe sole costs, and how I'm going to save up and store enough for when my shoes need a fix. I'm going to build a reputation with Bob, by sharing with him excess from my garden, and in exchange he'll be willing to fix up my shoes when needed. Straight-up "I'll give you 4 chickens for a coat" barter is very rarely observed in societies before the introduction of currency.

mcmoor 3y ago
Yeah the main reason why our systems are getting increasingly depersonalized is because we have to deal with more and more complete strangers than before. Marvel of modern interactions is that we can trust (somewhat) this current trading partner despite never meeting this person and will never again. At the cost of distancing ourselves from people close to us.
mr_toad 3y ago
Direct barter of the thing you produce for the thing they produce is of course difficult and inefficient. But barter in pre monetary cultures often involved the exchange of a third commodity that was commonly traded - things like salt, spices, alcohol, oil, copper and silver. Things that were in high demand and were non-perishable. Coins developed as standardised units of the precious metals that were already being exchanged.