The acceleration of turning people into objects

I teach my students a bit about second degree price discrimination, which is where buyers are of different types based on their willingness to pay for a product, and where the seller uses "menu pricing," in which the choice the buyer makes from the menu reveals the buyer type. Seating on airplanes provides a ready example.  There are two types of passengers - first class and coach.  First class seating is efficient, meaning it satisfies the usual (in an economics class) condition of marginal benefit equaling marginal cost.   Coach seating quality is less than efficient.  Quality deterioration occurs to facilitate sorting of the buyers.  If coach quality were decent, some of the first class buyers would opt to fly coach instead, saving money on their tickets in the process.  Everyone understands this, at least intuitively.

If first class is really good and coach is not too bad, nobody gets too worked up about the arrangement.  But what happens if coach quality starts to decline or if a third category of passenger emerges (sub-coach), with members in the third category getting even worse treatment, either because the demographics of who flies has changed (impacting the marginal benefit side of the equation) or because there have been changes in marginal cost (it's a long time ago where you recall what OPEC was doing impacting airline ticket prices, but it's that sort of thing I have in mind here)? One might then ask, how low will the airlines go quality-wise?  Are there any limits to this?

The hypothesis I want to advance in this piece is that as long as you regard others as people you have an obligation to treat them decently.  The ethics of the situation in this case limits the extent of second degree price discrimination.  But, if you start to regard others as objects, in this case the word "you" refers to sellers, then you've peeled away the ethical restraints and there is no limit to how low you will go.  This is one angle to keep in mind in considering the topic of this post.

Here is a different angle.  I started out trying to write a different post.  I hadn't yet settled on a title for it, but it would have been something like - the limits to gender equality.  (In March, I had written a post called Learning to argue with people where we disagree - what's possible and what isn't.  So I thought a piece in that vein might be doable.)    There have been a large volume of pieces written about sexual harassment as of late, and for the most part none of those moved me to write something on the subject.  An Op-Ed in the New York Times recently changed my mind on the matter.  It is called The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.  I had a strong negative reaction to that piece.  It was presenting ideas about violence and sex as if they were universal truths, which I thought was quite wrong.  So I wanted to write something that was more plausible (at least to me) and better explained the issues.  I got stuck however on two points.  The first is to address the question - why do I claim any expertise on the subject matter?  (If I don't, how can I write such a piece.)  The second is - how do I keep this from getting very personal?  (Sometimes I write pieces based on my own experience, relate that, and pose the question of whether any of it generalizes.)  I didn't really want to be very personal in writing on this subject.

So my solution, not perfect for sure but perhaps somewhat useful, was to make only a very quick sketch on the matter, take it is an example, and then tie it into the broader notion about turning people into objects.

When I was a kid, pre-adolescent, I began my education, though indoctrination a la The Manchurian Candidate might be a more accurate term, about sex and about women as sex objects.  For me it probably first started with the movies - James Bond was the superhero at the time.  Goldfinger came out in 1964 (I was 9 at the time) and was the first James Bond movie I saw.  Machismo and sex were overt themes in that movie.  A little later, the relationship between machismo and sex was complemented by near constant use of sex on TV, if not in the programming itself, then in the commercials.  To illustrate, in doing a little background checking for the post that I ended up not writing, I found on YouTube an old Farah Fawcett and Joe Namath commercial for Noxzema Shaving Cream where the tagline was, "Watch Joe Namath Get Creamed."  It was impossible not to get the message that sex sells.  And it was impossible not to get the reason that sex sells.  Boys have sex on their minds, quite frequently.   That message became amplified, more and more.   In high school, a friend subscribed to Playboy (or his older brother did but he had access to it).  In college, where Playboy was readily available in the dorm, it became something of a badge of a honor to say - I read the articles too.

The lesson, I will leave entirely the ethics of the matter as to whether it was the right one, and instead assert it was the invariable lesson learned, is that sex is about urges and about satisfying the urge.  For athletes, musicians, and very good looking guys, they may have figured how to reconcile this out in a reasonable time frame.  For the rest of us, we had what Bob Seger called "the awkward teenage blues."  If this was just one step in a long sequence of progress in the person's development, that would be one thing.  If, however, it is a giant chasm that many never successfully cross, it is quite another.  I really don't know how it is for most males, but one makes inferences from reading pieces, for example Frank Bruni's recent column on fraternities.  The excessive drinking is an indicator that I interpret as not getting across the chasm.  Whether these students mature later, who can say?  But the possibility that they do not and thus objectify women for the rest of their lives seems, at the least, plausible.  As in the previous example, once a person is regarded as an object, the ethical restraints are gone and bad things can happen.

Let's give still a couple of more angles.  A friend was complaining a few days ago about receiving a cold call from somebody selling a TV service that he didn't want, and when my friend informed the caller to that effect the caller became rude.  We get tons of such calls on our home phone and use caller ID to screen them.  We won't pick up if we don't already know the number.  Once in a while it is actually a call that we want and they leave a message.  In most cases, the caller hangs up first.  Likewise, my university email inbox is inundated with messages from vendors whom I've never met and who don't seem to be aware that I've been retired for quite some time.  There is a humorous side to this, as I get a few such messages meant for my wife.  (She has the same first initial.)  The vendor isn't aware that they don't have the right email address.  I forward emails to my wife when they look to be about work.  I don't forward the ones from vendors.  And then there are those messages about completing a short survey after having some transaction - with the doctor, with Amazon, with somebody doing a research project, where in each case they seem to think it is their right to make such a request.

None of this communication is welcome.  But the volume of it surely seems to be on the rise.  It was making this observation that suggested to me writing the current post.  Something is amiss that explains this.  I will speculate on what that something is a bit further on in the piece.

A different angle I want to mention concerns the very well to do who back Republicans in Congress, and the demand by these very rich for large tax cuts.  I have been trying to wrap my head around this demand for a while.  (For example, see my post from the summer called Mattering Bias.)  The question is - how can a very rich person justify a tax cut for himself or herself if that means that ordinary folks will receive a tax increase and/or there will be a cut in government programs that benefit ordinary folks?  Doesn't this view demand that the very rich consider ordinary folks to be objects?  And, if this is the sentiment, doesn't it explain why Compassionate conservatism doesn't work?  Or is it that some rich folks don't disdain ordinary folks, but these rich folks are being drowned out by others who cling to Libertarian views?  I don't know.   But much of this makes no sense to me, even though I teach economics and when talking about consumer preferences we assert that more is preferred to less.  That more is preferred to less makes sense for most of us, but for the uber rich doesn't satiation eventually set in?

The last angle I want to mention is school (think about the Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall.) The very good students might be nurtured by the environment.  The rest, however, become objects and then casualties in some way.  Alienation results.  One recent bit of evidence on this is about polling information that says Republican voters don't endorse college education.  Some of this is explainable as antagonism to liberal bias and identity politics, which theses voters associate with universities.  But, as the article points out, much of it is resentment from voters who don't have a college education.   However, I think this sort of divide (college versus non-college) too simplistic.  I see the consequences of student objectification in my own class, where the vast majority of students will earn a college degree, and where attendance is encouraged but not required, but where I've been tracking it much of the semester.  Some students have stopped coming altogether.  This has been the pattern the last few years, where it wasn't happening much before that. After a while I lose any personal connection with such students.  They become objects to me.

There are surely other angles of turning people into objects that readers might come up with.  In some cases, I am quite aware of the situation but they were nonetheless omitted simply because I find them hard to discuss.  Please don't confound my inability to discuss these angles intelligently with their importance.  However, not all angles that I've omitted are in this category. For example, one might also want to consider overtly predatory behavior, such as phishing.  I am not taking on predatory behavior here only because it may be that the hackers are state actors, or state sponsored actors, in which case the motivation for the behavior might be quite different - war by other means.  Perhaps somebody else can link those to what I am considering here in a plausible way.  I am not arguing that there is no linkage, only that the connection is unclear, so I will not consider it here.

* * * * *

Now let me consider drivers for why turning others into objects might be accelerating.  But first, let's note that acceleration might not be happening at all.  Instead, what might be happening is that we are becoming more aware of objectification, which in reality is an ongoing phenomenon.  Social scientists perhaps can find ways of measurement that would distinguish one from the other.  Here, I will simply assert my perception that it is accelerating, and that acceleration is to the detriment of everyone.

The core idea is that interacting with people in a face to face setting, it is more likely to treat them as human beings and not objectify them.  Of course, objectification happens even then, but not as much.  So we should consider factors that keep us more apart.

One of these is the decline of social structures that brought us together as argued by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.  On a personal note I will observe that having kids in school meant you interacted with other parents. whose kids were in the same school.  Once the kids graduate, that sort of interaction is lost.  More broadly, those type of interactions are down and people become more isolated as a result.  Isolation, in turn, leads to the objectification of others.

A particular social structure that is noteworthy is the labor union.  As is well understood, labor unions in the private sector were much stronger in the 1970s then they are today.  The focus, when making that observation, has been on the consequences of wage income.  It has declined relative to capital income as a share of GDP.  Less noted but perhaps equally important is that unions played a role similar to schools in terms of bringing people together and in championing the education function.  An exception is this book Only One Thing Can Save Us, which considers unions in this light.  A particularly interesting question, which I haven't seen discussed much at all, is whether a union which has diversity in its membership can create tolerance that the members have for one another.  It is not the reason why members would join a union, for sure.  But it might be a very important consequence of a functioning union, if indeed the unions produces this sort of outcome.

A second reason for fewer face to face interactions is that more of our interactions are online.  I want to give a slight spin to how to interpret the consequence, trying to distinguish this for my own interactions from those of the students I teach.  The best class session I had this semester was on the Thursday before Thanksgiving break.  Attendance was light, so we got into discussion mode.  The focus was on how you learn to be a leader (we had discussed leadership in the previous session and considered that from the point of view of Argyris and Schon Models 1 and 2.  Model 2 is the template for being a leader.)   The question was how to do relevant education while in college so that the person is ready for leadership when in their mid 30s or early 40s, after they have risen to middle management positions (or higher).

I surprised the students and simultaneously created a relaxed and humorous atmosphere, by saying the key was to learn how to schmooze.  Evidently, students don't consider schmoozing as the essence of leadership (and I might add that most people are biased toward an older notion of the leader as the person who commands the troops).  But I was able to convince the students that schmooze skills were key, because they lead into Model 2 so well.  Then we asked how one learns schmooze skills in college.  The obvious answer is to have lots of face to face conversation - with people who are different from you and whom you don't already know quite well.  Face to face conversation is key.  I dare say when I was in college it was the most important thing I got out of the experience, much more important than the classes.  I had some innate desire to have such conversations, for themselves, not for any benefit that might be produced down the road.  I believe the need is still there for the current crop of students, but many of them might not perceive it, thinking that texting and other online interactions sufficient alternatives.  So I would argue that online is quite different for those who have schmooze skills from those who don't.  It is the latter where online tends to make others seem like objects.

Then too, there is the related issue of us leading more sedentary lives (I am definitely guilty of this), which produces either too much multiprocessing from juggling so many balls at one time or becoming bored, when the activity level drops.  In either case, interactions with subject matter (not just with people) tend to be shallow.  Deep interactions are just too consuming to match the pace of current life.  Shallow interactions, however, make one prone toward generalization and objectification.  Deeper interactions, do the opposite.  If we had deep interactions with content, that would produce a sense of nuance, which in turn, I believe, encourages interactions with people to require a sense of human decency.

Add to this the factors coming from our national politics and how the media treats this politics.  I'm afraid that turning the other side into objects is a way to command viewer attention, hence a way to bring profitability to the news organization.  The nuanced argument considered in the previous paragraph would likely be found boring and too slow by much of the audience.  So the exposure is to something that reinforces objectification, particularly of those people who disagree with us.  Essentially the same argument applies to politicians, who give red meat to their base by demonizing the other side.  It may be a successful electoral strategy, but it is ultimately damaging to all of us.

Let me now segue to economic causes.  There are many of these.  I will focus on two.  One is the increasing inequality in the society as a whole.  Many authors have pointed out that members of the meritocracy subscribe to The Just World Theory, even as they game the system to their own personal advantage.  Richard Reeves had a scathing Op-Ed on this in June, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich.  Less commented on, but surely it accompanies the ideas in this piece, is the fear of the meritocracy of falling in the income distribution, which is accompanied by disdain for those in the lower quintiles.  That disdain leads to treating the people in those lower quintiles as objects.  And to the extent that there is income segregation in our society, as to where we live and where we work, the objectification is enhanced by WYSIATI.  For example, if those in the meritocracy don't see the homeless much, if at all, it is much easier to consider homeless people as object, perhaps deserving pity, but not worthy of human decency.

The other economics cause I want to mention is the vast distortion of relative prices, health care and higher education are most notable here, housing also fits in certain urban areas, that distorts the motivation of the participants, both providers and consumers of these services.  My students now, for example, are far more instrumental about their education than students 20 years ago.  Tuition is much higher now, while the job market for new grads is more challenging.  This double whammy gets into the heads of the students, and they start seeing everything they do as an instrument for what will come next.  Being so instrumental in approach, one naturally objectifies things along the path.

I want to wrap up this section by putting the various factors together in a vicious cycle, a negative feedback loop if you will.  (If such a dynamic is present, it would explain the acceleration of turning people into objects.)  So the economics factors, in particular, exacerbate the other factors.  The objectification of women, in particular, is said to be an expression of power.   But the power itself is a byproduct of a meritocratic competition steeped in the Just World Theory.  Power is part of the spoils that goes to the victor. If we saw ourselves as all part of a sprawling middle class, we wouldn't be victors.  We'd be ordinary, good people.  It makes you wonder how that should become the aspiration.  I am convinced we'd all be better off if it was.


* * * * *

How do we reverse the acceleration of turning people into objects?  I wish I new.  Clearly the first step is recognizing that it is happening.  A second step that I have been trying myself is to, in a small way, treat people like human beings where beforehand I would have been much more arm's length with them.  Some of this is a belated recognition that I need help in doing those things I want to do, even while I cling to the notion that I can do it all on my own. (I'm an exemplar of the men-don't-ask-for-directions bit.)  These interactions where I ask for help feel more human and give a certain glow after they've concluded.  The feeling encourages doing something similar again in the future.  If others experienced something similar, it would be a way toward greater recognition of the issue.

How to get beyond that is the open question.  If coercion tends to backfire, then the underlying question is how to get people to want to schmooze, with other than the "usual suspects." I leave it to those reading this piece to kick the can a little further on this one.  And I would welcome a real solution, or even some suggested experiments we might try to help get us there.