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.
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.