What would it be like in a world where a person’s emotional and social worth could be accurately measured?

It’d be the easiest way to riches. Possibly a more prosperous society, too.

Good question. Sucks the world doesn’t operate like that.

It would be dead.

Our bodies are a representation of life. As fine tuned as some of us might be.
There is an awful lot of conflict and competition that is needed to keep the body running.

Yin and yang is a necessary part of everything.

Wouldn’t that type of scenario encourage competition or cynicism between people of different standing and inevitably cause dissention as opposed to something fruitful?

I am kind of bummed to say that my first thoughts regarding this question were cynical.

I wonder if manipulators would be the most highly valued. I mean if we were judged on how much people loved us, there are those who would do whatever it takes to be loved. People might tend to be very Eddie Haskell-like in their behaviors and be incredibly disingenuous just to ingratiate themselves with as many people as possible.

I’m not sure, but I AM sure I would not want to live in such a world.

I don’t think I’d like that kind of life. I spent my life being under-valued, sidelined, and therefore mistreated. I wouldn’t want my worth based on that sort of thing.

By the way, since that’s what I went through, I try to avoid doing that to others, but in spite of my best efforts, sometimes it slips in anyway. Another reason I’m glad that’s not the way it is.

@CaptainHarley your response has piqued my curiosity. What do you see as the downfalls of the world @daloon describes? Not saying I don’t see any, I do, just interested in hearing your perspective.

Thanks, @SuperMouse. I was wondering the same thing. @CaptainHarley?

This is a very interesting concept. I think our technology would be much different; more primitive. One of the most powerful driving forces to create new technology is the prospect of wealth and status through wealth, and it’s obviously apparent in todays society. Whatever technology produced in such a world would be created to harbor more love from each other, so i’m assuming more sex toys! :P (jokes, but not really joking, just kinda vulgar frankness) Though, one would have to keep in mind that not all people(the majority?) create technology just to create wealth, but for their own purposes… they would work harder because of the love? ....

i think you’re implying that people will work innately to garner love from others? if that’s true then a lot of people would be more kind and caring, but i have this feeling of kind of… skepticism. @SuperMouse explains this feeling. however, if this mode of thinking existed since the dawn of man, i think the concept of man and wealth would be greatly different, kind of negating what supermouse said.

for example, the indigenous people of america (like the metis) had a very different set of values concerning wealth, compared to Europeans prior to the meeting of their cultures. the idea that we value love more than wealth would create a whole new paradigm in thinking, so with that thought, yes. our world would be much different. we would probably help each other a lot, and care about each other a lot.

i’m also contemplating the status portion of your question… i’m not very knowledgeable on the structures of society, but i think that the idea of status would be different… capitalism and communism kind of exemplifies this idea… as in capitalism, more money = more status? (RIGHT? please don’t stab me in the balls), and in communism, everyone = equal. Or even in the monarchy, blood = status and then everyone is subordinate in accordance to whatever triangle they use. or even in a wolf pack where strength = status. in a society where one values whatever someone values them would seem like… highschool? (KIND OF, OMFG).

so to say a society in which, love = status, wouldn’t be MUCH of a stretch… but it seems like a very shallow and empty society to live in, to be reliant on what others think of you. i don’t appreciate that, and all what matters to me is what i think of myself.

Really interesting question, @daloon. I don’t think that something like this would work in a formal sense, but I think we kind of have this informally. In US office cultures or even in regular commerce, people want to be seen as helpful or going out of their way to solve problems. I think that there is some local status conferred to those who are the ones who get things done. But would I want us to all see the status that others have…? I don’t think so.

Seems you can look at this several different ways if I am understanding correctly. If you say someone who is loved more is worth more or gets more money, well there are a whole bunch of sociopaths who are loved. Life of the party people who really don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves get all sorts of attention from others. So will we be able to say that love for them doesn’t count? Will it truly only be good people who are rewarded with these riches?

I would say generally good people are rewarded, not monetarily, but rewarded with the love they receive.

And, what if you are a very good person, but tend to be introverted? Then are you penalized for not getting out there and garnering up more contact with more people so you can inflate your numbers?

I would not want money attached to how many people love you or some other emotional measure.

It’s completely flawed as people would strive to present more love in return for the monetary gain and thusly produce their “love” under false pretenses…

Nobody works any harder when you give them a raise…you do so to retain their services.

Actually there are things that occur already based on our
– likely hood of repaying a loan – credit rating
– dilligence and intelligence – grades/recommendations/reputation
– marital trustworthyness – ability to find/chose a partner
– integrity – community respect
– social honesty (social integrity) – friendships, and treatment by co – workers

There are many factors at play in our interactions.

If I am buying a car, and the salesmans is selling a car I like, but I begin to think I don’t trust him, then, I’ll buy it another day.

When we date, only the most vapid would base choice on income alone, and would that be a relationship worth having anyway?

There are individuals who neglect all other values, and are socially and morally bankrupt to pursue riches.

It would be nice to have a publically available score for this.

I’ver heard it argued that this is one of the benefits of gossip, the poor man’s credit rating.

Money itself is just a symbol as well, but it as a single measure, does not encompass and measure the subcomponents.

As an expert in the development and validation of psychometric assessments, I can assure you that the targeted attributes in the question are entirely subjective and impossible to adequately operationalize. What does all that mean? “Emotional Value” and “Social Value” can’t be meaningfully defined in terms of some method to measure them because they are entirely a matter of opinion and personal bias.

A world where such a purported measure (no matter how bogus) was applied would be one where mass extermination of those of deemed to have low emotional and/or social value would be routine and justifiable.

Only under a fascist regime could something that supposedly measures those things be used to weed out “inferior individuals” or to identify some “master race.”

Such things have been done before!

Those humans who have not learned or who deny the lessons from the mistakes of the “Third Reich” in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, can easily repeat similar mistakes.

In a country dominated by religious fanatics who seek justification to eliminate those too “unrighteous” or “lacking in traditional family and economic values.” What prevents the religious right to declare all Muslims, Jews, Asians, Blacks, Homosexuals, Liberals or Socialists to be emotionally or socially inferior?

The period of slavery and segregation in the USA is not that long ago.
The political witch hunts of the McCarthy era are even more recent.

All it takes is a fanatical populist leader (Sister Sarah), an economic downturn, and a nation primed to fear and hate those “to blame for all their troubles” to set such in motion a whirlwind like the Holocaust.

If you don’t believe it could happen, then you will do nothing to prevent it.

I expect it would start to be the same as people who are obsessed with things like lurve here on fluther. The best actors win.

Dr L – I like the first 2 paragraphs.

The later paragraphs refer to—

How could social value be mis used? Who gets to define it?

I totally agree, putting a numeric value on global social worth is silly, since value is in the eye of the beholder, in a free market.

Also however we already making subjective judgements regularly.

Which spouse we marry.
Which friends we keep
Our credit rating.
Which doctor you see
Which patients a doctor will “fire” from his practice.
Which individuals have the esteemed position on death row.

Not everything I can agree to however.

I like the term “democide” – where a government is associate with or directly kills its populace.

Government types are more associated with the agenda, than with who and what defines value. In other words, values dont kill people. Making Christians out group individuals and systematically removing their rights does.

Don’t be fooled into thinking Obama’s vague dreams are any safer than the horific visions you have cited. The most drastic democide has occured with “collectivist” societies, where the good of the society is greater than the rights of the individual.

Fascism, is just one example. Much of what hitler said is IDENTICAL to statements by JFK.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to beat the time scale demonstrated by russia and china. they were an impatient reformers. For this ⅓ inhabitants payed the ultimate price in the farm re-education camps. Much death was simply due to starvation, as the cities were depopulated and the farms could not support the masses of intered individuals.

Obama is an impatient reformer. He cares more about the collective, then the rights of patients or physicians. His henchmen accept bribes from the pharmaceutical industry, trial lawyers, and insurance industry.

I am just noticing you left out christians when you mentioned people who could be hurt by government.

in your attack on the religuous right. You are forgetting about the current democide toll of the religous wrong. Are christians never the victim of democide, or perhaps is the religion based on martyrdom? It is not just the rainbow coalition that is always the victim. I should know. I used to live in the city where Obama hails from. I think you have weakened a strong argument with the partisanship

Is abortion murder by the way?

Why do so many answers propose that the measurements could be fooled? I read the question as saying accurate measurement so that would preclude many of the above suggestions. If the accurate measure of a person’s social worth would reflect her/his contribution to the advancement of mankind, it would probably be a good thing.

Ditto that yarn. I just don’t think it’s possible.

I do think, it could reward things better than current.

Medicare makes it possible to treat your offspring like dirt, and still expect to be cared for in your old age.

I see this all the time. I don’t think many would act as they do, if they had consequences, and the changes in the last 60 years have moved us away from that type of accountability

I can do it now. Nobodies worth shit.

@SuperMouse said: “I wonder if manipulators would be the most highly valued. I mean if we were judged on how much people loved us, there are those who would do whatever it takes to be loved. People might tend to be very Eddie Haskell-like in their behaviors and be incredibly disingenuous just to ingratiate themselves with as many people as possible.”

it wouldn’t matter. if you do something good for someone “just because” you wanted to ingratiate yourself to them.. you still did something good for someone. many people fail to realize that there is no way to be fake about doing the right thing. you either did the right thing or you didn’t. your motive is irrelevant all that matters is what has been done.

@daloon great question!

Some smart scientist would discover the uncertainty principle of emotional quantum sociology.

The sleeping position of couples and the momentum of their relationships cannot both be known to arbitrary precision.

I apologise for the length of this answer, but for some reason, I was extremely fired up by it (don’t worry @daloon, I’ve GQed you =) )

I don’t like the idea of a world like this at all. Not only would there be possible manipulators of the system as @SuperMouse said, there also are three incredibly glaring flaws in this world from what I can see.

1. How do you decide what is to be valued? How much one is loved? What one’s relative social importance is? There are too many things which determine who a person is, and how much you’re loved is only one of them. Also, how do you qualify what social importance is? So many factors can go into one’s social importance, be it how much they’re loved, how much they donate to charity, how much they love, how close they are to their friends, how much of a go-getter they are etc. etc. The list goes on and on. To try to construct such a comprehensive list would, in my opinion, inevitably leave out something which still adds to one’s social worth.

Let’s just use your example of “how much one is loved” as a scenario (since your question seems to be focusing quite heavily on this). So what if our world does allow for such a measure? Don’t you think it’s bad enough that people are judged purely based on how much money they earn? Now they’re going to be judged by others based on how much they’re loved? By making one part of a person’s character so obvious to everyone else, it makes it only so easy to ignore all the other parts of that person’s character which makes him who he is, especially since now you’re providing a direct window into his soul, where his monetary worth only allows for very indirect inference.

2. Even if we were able to truly take everything which determines a person’s social worth and put it into a quantifiable measure, I think that it would spell the end of personal privacy. As earlier said, in order to truly know what one’s social worth is, you’ll have to take everything in one’s life into account, and then present that as a measure to practically everyone. This means that this person, from the data provided, will be able to see how much I care for my family, how well I’m doing with my friends, how much I love them, how much I’m loved by them, whether I’m a go-getter or whether I prefer to take orders. Sure, some of these things may already be obvious to the sharp observer, but to make it such that they’re so blindingly obvious to the whole world is just a horrible thought.

Furthermore, have you thought about how anyone would be able to gather such information? It would have to involve the technology which pries into every single aspect of your personal life. I don’t think any normal person would be able to stomach a thought like that.

3. The last, and perhaps most important criticism, is that it’s unfair, no matter how accurate it is. Why? Because humans have the capacity for change. So what if my social-o-meter reads that I can only contribute ten sociobels to my city? That is only a measure of how much I can contribute at that exact moment. People are not stagnant. Who I am today does not determine who I am tomorrow, no matter how strong a link there may be. Tell me, who has the right to pigeonhole me, perhaps permanently, based on what my abilities are at a certain point in time? Your world would probably be filled with individuals who can never reach their true potential because of this measure.

And if your measure can tell me what the absolute social potential of a person is for his whole life.. Well.. Then that’s a very worrying world we’ll be living in. People might start being segregated from a young age. It’ll be no different from tyranny where free choice is eliminated (@Dr_Lawrence has very helpfully listed out various examples of eras which would share the characteristics of this world).

In conclusion, such a world is one which I hope never comes to pass, for that would be the end of the life we all love and know.

Thank you all for such thoughtful and interesting responses.

A lot of you have focused on the practical issue of how such a system could be devised. As @yarnlady said, this is outside the scope of the question. I asked you to assume that it could be done. Personally, I do think it would be impossible to measure.

Having said that, I was thinking about operationalization of this idea last night. It does provide some insight into what I am thinking about. Some of you may be familiar with social network analysis. There’s software for this. What it does is measure the relative importance of individuals within a group of people. Importance is determined by number of ties to other people. In theory, you can also add data about the type and quality of the tie to other people. You end up with one of those maps where there are dots of various sizes and lines to all kinds of other dots. The largest dots are significant nodes in the model.

When I say “love,” I think I’m referring to more than love—something more like social ties. Underlying this is the assumption that the bigger a node you are, the more people respect you or use you. What matters is that you are important socially speaking.

As I was thinking this through last night, I realized that one thing I wanted to include was the desirability of a person. I.e., how many people want to know or be near this person. As you can imagine, movie stars and important government officials might have millions of people who want to be near them. Others might have hardly anyone wanting to be near them.

I do not see this as a state-administered system. There is no God who determines who is more desired than anyone else. It is a market-driven system. You just measure ties between people. Obviously, this already can be done, and is being done. This very site is one site that can (and for all I know, does) it. Facebook and other social networking sites make their money off of their knowledge about individuals, and one part of that knowledge is ties to other, and strength of those ties (based on privacy settings).

On fluther, one need merely look at how many fluthers someone is in for an approximate measure of desirability. This all happens in a market. Individuals make choices. No one forces them to do anything and no one oversees the system and cheats it. (Not that cheating could be eliminated, just as it is not eliminated in the money system.)

So many of you have objected to this idea because you believe it would be impossible to measure fairly and accurately. That’s a fair objection. Another objection is that it would mean a loss of privacy. I’m not sure that necessarily has to be so. Right now, we have some information about how wealthy someone is by how much stuff they have. It’s not always an accurate indicator, as some people are faking wealth while others hide it. So there is uncertainty with money, and I think there could be equal uncertainty with desirability. We would not have some counter flashing our desirability level above our heads. The level of desirability would largely be unknown, except insofar as people voluntarily give out the information, as people do about their income and wealth now.

Of course, people already do this. We all have a sense of the esteem in which others hold us. Some of us under-estimate this esteem and others over-estimate it. However, if we had some kind of private esteem counter, and wealth was tied to esteem, how would society change, if at all? It’s a thought experiment, I guess. It’s about the role of desirability/love/esteem as overt, more measurable currency in our lives.

We would find that those much adored and supposedly loved aren’t.

Ahhh Daloon. If we got money for how many fluther we are in you would be rich indeed. Your questions are always so thought provoking and creative :).

@JLeslie Thank you