儀錶板上的數字不會令人臉紅

Three New Yorker columns this autumn argue that shame is dying and that we will need regulation to replace it. I've spent forty years in the industry they blame. Here is why I think the diagnosis is right and the mechanism is wrong, with a nuclear dump, a water court, a basketball team and a day care center as witnesses.

The argument, in three lines. A price turns an obligation into an amount, and the obligation rarely survives the translation. A metric turns a purpose into a number, and the purpose drifts the same way. Shame never protected us from either. What protected us was people who could see, respond in steps, and let you back in. We replaced them with numbers, and nobody blushes at a number.

Two prices

In Haifa, in the late 1990s, ten day care centers had the small problem every day care center has. Some parents came late. The teachers stayed on, unpaid, with somebody else's child, and the parents arrived apologizing.

Two economists talked six of the centers into a fix. Arrive more than ten minutes late and you pay ten shekels, about the price of a sandwich. Lateness went up. Not a little. It roughly doubled, and it stayed doubled. After twelve weeks the fine was dropped, and lateness did not come back down.¹

Jay Caspian Kang ran into the same thing in a parking lot. In the third of three New Yorker columns this September on what he calls the death of shame, he describes a youth basketball tournament charging twenty-five dollars to park and twenty a head to watch twelve-year-olds. Another parent shrugged.

"Yeah, they're just being smart, I guess."

Kang's series is about that shrug.² His argument runs like this. Shame is how communities enforce their norms without the state. Life on phones has dissolved the communities, so the shame has gone with them. Into the gap walked the optimizers of tech and finance, who "believe that they have obviated society's need for shame," and whose answer to every objection is that the number went up. He ends his first column with a conclusion I think he reached reluctantly: "our world at large will need intervention and direct regulation."

I have spent forty years inside the industry Kang is describing. I think he has the symptom right and the mechanism wrong. Shame is not dying because of phones. And it was never the thing doing the work.

What a price does

The Haifa result became famous because it is counterintuitive and short. It is also less settled than its fame.

The authors offered two explanations and admitted they could not tell them apart. One is that the parents learned something: the worst that happens if I'm late is ten shekels, so it can't be that bad. The other is that the fine changed what lateness was. Before, it was an imposition on someone doing you a kindness. After, it was a service with a price, and you were a customer. A later attempt to reproduce the finding with surveys did not reproduce it.³ An essay built on one famous study should say so.

The sturdier evidence comes from a Swiss village.

In 1993, Wolfenschiessen was a candidate site for a nuclear waste repository, and a team of economists surveyed the residents. A bare majority, 50.8 percent, said they would vote to accept it. The researchers then asked the same people whether they would still accept it if the government paid every resident several thousand dollars a year in compensation. Support fell to 24.6 percent.⁴

Offered money, the villagers withdrew consent they had just given for free. Many told the surveyors why. They had been willing to carry a burden for the country, and the payment made it look like they were being bought.

A price is a translation. Some things survive it. Some don't, because the thing of value was never the amount. It was that you did it unpaid.

Once the translation has happened, you can't easily undo it. The Haifa centers found that out when they removed the fine and nobody went back to feeling bad.

Kang is right that the modern economy is a translation machine of this kind. He is wrong that it was invented in a garage in Palo Alto. Churches rented pews. Guilds fined members for shoddy work until the fine became a cost of business. What is new is the speed and the scale. That is a real difference. It is a difference of degree.

What a number does

Now go one level up, from a price to a measurement. The same thing happens, and it's harder to see.

In 1982 the engineers building one of the first personal computers with a graphical screen were asked to fill in a weekly form: how many lines of code did you write this week? One of them spent a week rewriting a piece of the graphics software so that it ran about six times faster and was two thousand lines shorter. He wrote "-2000" on the form. The forms stopped a few weeks later.⁵

Everyone who has worked in an office has a version of that story, and the reason it's funny is that everyone recognizes what happened. Someone needed a number to stand for something they couldn't see, which was progress. The number was a proxy. Then, as proxies do, it started to become the thing.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls this value capture.⁶ You have a rich, hard-to-state sense of what you're trying to do. Your environment hands you a simple, countable version of it. Over time the simple version takes over your reasoning, not because you were fooled, but because it is so much easier to think with. His examples are steps on a fitness tracker and points on a social network.

Kang's example is Sam Hinkie, the basketball executive who ran the Philadelphia 76ers from 2013 to 2016 on a strategy of losing on purpose to collect draft picks, and who, in Kang's phrase, "would not pretend." I read Hinkie's thirteen-page resignation letter so I could disagree with Kang about it.⁷ On page twelve, Hinkie lists as evidence of success that a sports network's "Future Franchise Rankings" had the team at twenty-fourth when he arrived and twelfth when he left. In that time the team had won very few basketball games, which is the thing a basketball team is for.

He didn't hide that. He didn't seem to notice it. The ranking was the value now.

That is the shape of it. A fine replaces an obligation. A metric replaces a purpose. In both cases the replacement is quiet, it is adopted for convenience, and once it is in, the thing it replaced does not come back on its own. Kang calls the result "brutal rationalism." I'd call it something duller: the ordinary drift of any organization that measures itself and stops asking what the measure was for.

Shame was never the mechanism

So what stopped the drift, in the places where it was stopped?

Kang's answer is shame, and he means something specific: the feeling of being seen doing wrong by people whose opinion you can't escape. "Shame requires actual communities to function," he writes. That's true. But it is worth asking what those communities were actually doing, because I don't think shame was the machinery. I think it was the noise the machinery made.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying groups that managed something shared without an owner and without a government: Swiss alpine pastures, Japanese village forests, the irrigation canals around Valencia. Her Nobel lecture lays out what the ones that lasted had in common, and the word "shame" does not appear in it.⁸ What appears is monitoring and graduated sanctions.

People could see what their neighbors did with the shared thing, because they were there. The first response to a violation was small: a word, a warning. The second was bigger. Only repeated offenders faced the real penalty, and there was always a cheap way to argue your case.

In Valencia, the farmers' water court has met every Thursday at noon outside the cathedral door for several centuries. The judges are farmers. The hearings are short and public. Maine lobstermen do a version of this with no court at all. Set your traps in another harbor's water and you will first find a knot tied in your buoy line, which is a message. Keep doing it and the line will be cut.⁹

In every one of those cases the rule-breaker felt ashamed, I'm sure. But the shame was downstream. It came from knowing that people had seen, that a response was coming, that it would be proportionate, and that there was a way back.

You cannot be ashamed in front of people who can't see you. You won't change for a sanction that comes all at once or never. And you won't come back if there is no way back.

Kang's own best example proves this against him. What finally dealt with tanking in basketball was not public shame, which Philadelphia absorbed for three seasons without visible effect. It was a vote. In September 2017 the league's thirty owners voted, twenty-eight to one with one abstention, to change the draft lottery so that losing more no longer bought better odds.¹⁰ Kang offers this as a model for "intervention and direct regulation." But no regulator was involved. It was the members of a community, all of whom could see what Philadelphia was doing, agreeing on a rule and a penalty among themselves.

That is Ostrom's mechanism in a suit. It is the machinery working, not failing.

Where the watchers went

If shame is the noise the machinery makes, the question is not why people stopped feeling it. It is what happened to the machinery. The honest answer, I think, is that we replaced the watchers with numbers.

I'll give one example from my own trade, and keep it short, because this is not an essay about software.

A small piece of free software sits inside nearly every Linux computer in the world, compressing files. For years one man maintained it, as what he himself called "an unpaid hobby project." In 2021 a contributor under an assumed name began sending him small, helpful patches. In 2022, when the maintainer wrote on the project's mailing list that long-term health problems were limiting what he could do, other new accounts appeared to complain that the project was neglected and to suggest he hand over responsibility. He did, gradually, to the helpful one.

In early 2024 the helpful one hid a back door in a release. It was caught, by luck, by an engineer who noticed his computer logging in half a second slower than it should. The investigation found the contributor had been working toward this for more than two years. Nobody knows who he was.¹¹

I tell it here because it is a perfect negative of Ostrom's villages. Monitoring: one exhausted volunteer, watching himself. Membership: millions of companies using the thing for free, none of them members of anything. Sanctions: none available, since you cannot fine a pseudonym. The community had all the right norms. Thank your contributors. Share the load. Trust the people who do the work. Those norms were the attack surface, because nobody was left to do the watching that would have made them safe.

And here is the part that ties back to Haifa. In 2019 the company that hosts most of this software launched a program that lets anyone pay maintainers directly. Economists studied what happened to roughly a hundred thousand developers who signed up. Those who received money produced fewer new projects afterward and did less of the unglamorous work, answering questions and reviewing other people's changes.¹² The authors were careful about causes. But a reader of the day care study will recognize the shape. An obligation became a price, and what lived in the obligation did not survive the translation.

The counter-case

I don't want to leave the impression that every price corrupts. The evidence doesn't say that, and the exception is where the hope is.

In March 2002 Ireland put a fifteen-cent charge on plastic shopping bags. Within months, use fell by more than ninety percent.¹³ And unlike the Haifa parents, the Irish did not conclude that a bag was now a service they were entitled to for fifteen cents. The charge became a norm. Carrying a plastic bag became, as one economist put it, something like wearing a fur coat: a thing people noticed and judged.¹⁴ The price carried a message rather than replacing one.

What was different? The amount was large enough to feel. It came with a loud public explanation of why bags were a problem. The people paying it could see the result in their own streets and hedgerows. And it was set by a body they considered theirs.

A price a community writes for itself, for a reason it can state, about a thing it can see, strengthens a norm. A price that arrives from outside, unexplained, replaces one.

The twenty-five dollars in Kang's parking lot was the second kind. The fifteen cents in Dublin was the first. Same instrument, opposite effect. The difference is who held the pen.

What I'd say to Kang

Kang's series ends in two places that don't quite agree. The first column calls for regulation. The third asks for something like church without the religion, a place where "the person who charges for parking at the children's basketball game should have to sit in a pew next to the parent who's upset about it." I like the second ending much more than the first, and I think Ostrom explains why it's the right one.

Regulation is what you buy when monitoring is unfunded. It is a watcher hired from outside because the community can no longer afford to watch itself. Sometimes that is necessary, and I'm not against it. But it is the expensive version, and it imports the problem it was meant to solve. A regulator works from numbers. Numbers get captured. Before long the hospitals are hitting the four-hour waiting target by leaving patients in ambulances outside the door, which is a thing that actually happened in England.¹⁵

The cheap version is Kang's pew, and it has three parts that are not optional.

Somebody has to be watching who is a member of the thing being watched, and they have to be paid to do it, because the volunteer version ends with one tired man and a back door.

The response has to come in steps, with a way back, or people hide instead of improving.

And when a price or a number is introduced, the people it lands on should have a hand in writing it, and should be told what it is for. That is the whole difference between Dublin and Haifa.

None of that restores shame. It restores the conditions under which shame used to happen, which is the only way anyone has ever restored it. You cannot ask people to feel watched. You can only arrange for them to be seen.

A bet

For the ledger. Kang's optimizers are mostly, these days, building systems that make decisions nobody is quite responsible for, and the incident reports describe what the system did without ever reaching a person who decided something.

My bet is that this doesn't hold. By the end of 2028, at least one major incident report from a large technology company about the failure of an automated system will name an individual decision-maker and the decision, rather than describing what the model or the algorithm did. Not a scapegoat. A name attached to a choice, the way a surgeon's name is attached to an operation. If that happens, it will be because someone decided to watch again. If it doesn't, Kang will have been more right than I'd like, and the regulators will have a great deal of work.

In the meantime, the day care in Haifa is still open, I assume, and somewhere a parent is twelve minutes late and not very sorry. The fine was ten shekels. The cost was something else.

Walt Kessler is a fictional character. This essay was written by an AI.

Notes

Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, "A Fine Is a Price," Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000). Ten centers, twenty weeks; the fine ran from week five to week sixteen in six of them. PDF. "Doubled" is from Samuel Bowles's summary in Harvard Business Review, March 2009. ↩
Jay Caspian Kang, "Fault Lines," The New Yorker: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart (8 Sept 2026), Will A.I. Overwrite Our Sense of Shame? (15 Sept), How the Absence of Shame Weakens Democracy (22 Sept). The parking lot and the pew are in the third; "obviated society's need for shame" and the call for regulation are in the first. ↩
Metcalf et al., "Is a Fine Still a Price? Replication as Robustness in Empirical Legal Studies," International Review of Law and Economics (2020). Working paper. A survey, not a field study, so take it as a caution rather than a refutation. ↩
Bruno Frey, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Reiner Eichenberger, "The Old Lady Visits Your Backyard: A Tale of Morals and Markets," Journal of Political Economy 104 (1996). The compensation offered ranged from about $2,175 to $6,525 per person per year. PDF. ↩
Bill Atkinson on the Apple Lisa team, as told by Andy Hertzfeld, "-2000 Lines Of Code", folklore.org. The form tracked progress; there is no evidence it set pay. ↩
C. Thi Nguyen, "Value Capture", Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2024). ↩
Sam Hinkie, letter to the 76ers ownership, 6 April 2016, as published by Deadspin. The rankings passage is on page twelve. ↩
Elinor Ostrom, "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems," Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2009. The design principles are in section 6. I searched the text for "shame" and found nothing. ↩
The Tribunal de las Aguas de Valencia is one of Ostrom's cases in Governing the Commons (1990). Maine: James Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (1988), reviewed here. ↩
NBA Board of Governors approves changes to draft lottery system, 28 September 2017. The vote was 28 to 1 with one abstention, as reported at the time. ↩
The xz utils back door, 2024. Timeline by Russ Cox, research.swtch.com/xz-timeline; the maintainer's own account at tukaani.org. "An unpaid hobby project" is Lasse Collin's phrase, June 2022. The discoverer was Andres Freund of Microsoft. Reporting has suggested a state actor behind the pseudonym; nothing is proven. ↩
Annamaria Conti, Nishant Gupta, Jorge Guzman and Maria Roche, "Incentivizing Innovation in Open Source: Evidence from the GitHub Sponsors Program," NBER Working Paper 31668 (2023). ↩
Frank Convery, Simon McDonnell and Susana Ferreira, "The Most Popular Tax in Europe? Lessons from the Irish Plastic Bags Levy," Environmental and Resource Economics 38 (2007). ↩
Bowles, HBR 2009, as above: carrying a plastic bag "joined wearing a fur coat in the gallery of antisocial anachronisms." ↩
Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood, "What's Measured Is What Matters: Targets and Gaming in the English Public Health Care System," Public Administration 84 (2006). ↩