My guess is that “people want a plausible excuse for their signal” commonly cashes out as “people sincerely believe that the plausible excuse is the real reason”. If so, then few will choose to have their wealth made visible to all, because the only advantage it brings is signalling, a thing they won’t admit even to themselves that they care about much. Further, because it’s obvious that the only advantage it brings is signalling, making that choice itself looks like bragging, which will discourage people from doing it.
To be successful this would need some sort of mechanism making wealth-visibility the default. But that might not be enough, because probably rich people would be most likely to opt out, making opting out itself a signal of wealth.
(A couple of other issues: 1. Not all wealth is in the form of things with an immediately available price. What is the wealth-looking-up system going to do with houses, privately-held companies, artworks that were last traded 50 years ago, etc.? 2. The privacy implications are worse than you may think: if the system gives a snapshot of a person’s wealth, then you can track how that changes from day to day. You can work around that to some extent by reporting some sort of smoothed and/or deliberately noise-corrupted value, but doing that in a way that genuinely doesn’t leak more information than you want it to is tricky.)
To be successful this would need some sort of mechanism making wealth-visibility the default. But that might not be enough, because probably rich people would be most likely to opt out, making opting out itself a signal of wealth.
Yeah, that does seem tricky. My guess is that you might be right that rich people would be the most likely to opt out. But I’m not so sure. Opting out might be more akin to countersignaling in that the only people who are doing it are either people who are actually poor and therefore don’t want to be embarrassed, or very wealthy people who want to signal that they’re above it all. If that’s the case, then being in the system still serves some purpose for people in the middle of the distribution.
few will choose to have their wealth made visible to all, because the only advantage it brings is signalling, a thing they won’t admit even to themselves that they care about much
“Accountability” is the word normal people use when referring to pursuing success though conspicuous signaling. People already do opt in to “accountability” for different goals they have. I think the main reason they won’t do it with wealth is for privacy.
A couple of other issues: 1. Not all wealth is in the form of things with an immediately available price. What is the wealth-looking-up system going to do with houses, privately-held companies, artworks that were last traded 50 years ago, etc.?
Of course, the database wouldn’t have to be perfect. It’s perfectly fine for people to have other goods that aren’t represented in the database, since the operating assumption of the database is just that people should more readily signal wealth that they’ve saved—not that they should perfectly signal their wealth.
The privacy implications are worse than you may think: if the system gives a snapshot of a person’s wealth, then you can track how that changes from day to day. You can work around that to some extent by reporting some sort of smoothed and/or deliberately noise-corrupted value, but doing that in a way that genuinely doesn’t leak more information than you want it to is tricky.
Yeah that makes sense. Another possibility is that you show low resolution information, such as the amount in their account rounded to the nearest $10,000. I think that something like that would have the same problem as current conspicuous behavior, which allows people to estimate someone’s economic status via noisy variables like, “how many cars they bought recently” and “how big their house is.” Ultimately, I think that being able to opt-out is the crucial part here that makes these concerns less pressing.
My guess is that “people want a plausible excuse for their signal” commonly cashes out as “people sincerely believe that the plausible excuse is the real reason”. If so, then few will choose to have their wealth made visible to all, because the only advantage it brings is signalling, a thing they won’t admit even to themselves that they care about much. Further, because it’s obvious that the only advantage it brings is signalling, making that choice itself looks like bragging, which will discourage people from doing it.
To be successful this would need some sort of mechanism making wealth-visibility the default. But that might not be enough, because probably rich people would be most likely to opt out, making opting out itself a signal of wealth.
(A couple of other issues: 1. Not all wealth is in the form of things with an immediately available price. What is the wealth-looking-up system going to do with houses, privately-held companies, artworks that were last traded 50 years ago, etc.? 2. The privacy implications are worse than you may think: if the system gives a snapshot of a person’s wealth, then you can track how that changes from day to day. You can work around that to some extent by reporting some sort of smoothed and/or deliberately noise-corrupted value, but doing that in a way that genuinely doesn’t leak more information than you want it to is tricky.)
Yeah, that does seem tricky. My guess is that you might be right that rich people would be the most likely to opt out. But I’m not so sure. Opting out might be more akin to countersignaling in that the only people who are doing it are either people who are actually poor and therefore don’t want to be embarrassed, or very wealthy people who want to signal that they’re above it all. If that’s the case, then being in the system still serves some purpose for people in the middle of the distribution.
“Accountability” is the word normal people use when referring to pursuing success though conspicuous signaling. People already do opt in to “accountability” for different goals they have. I think the main reason they won’t do it with wealth is for privacy.
Of course, the database wouldn’t have to be perfect. It’s perfectly fine for people to have other goods that aren’t represented in the database, since the operating assumption of the database is just that people should more readily signal wealth that they’ve saved—not that they should perfectly signal their wealth.
Yeah that makes sense. Another possibility is that you show low resolution information, such as the amount in their account rounded to the nearest $10,000. I think that something like that would have the same problem as current conspicuous behavior, which allows people to estimate someone’s economic status via noisy variables like, “how many cars they bought recently” and “how big their house is.” Ultimately, I think that being able to opt-out is the crucial part here that makes these concerns less pressing.