Tipping, Simple Voting, and Toilets
This essay will be slightly different than the norm. Instead of focusing on one topic, I’ll be covering three, smaller topics. Time for a Utopian lighting-round!
Tipping
Prices gravitate towards the balance of supply and demand. It matters not whether people are paid in wages, salaries, benefits, or tips, the price of labor is going to gravitate towards the equilibrium.
In theory tipping is a way to align the incentives of laborers with those of customers, but their incentives were already aligned by the normal price, and tipping introduces a bias towards visible factors and away from properties of a good laborer that are harder for a customer to notice, such as how often they show up to a shift on-time. Worse, this bias towards visible traits tends to unfairly reward attractive people and punish minorities. There’s some evidence that tipping in America is rooted in racism.
Tipping costs time and stress on the part of the customer, and can lead to ambiguity, unreported income, and cultures of bribery.
Many places in the world do just fine without tipping, including East Asia, Oceania, and many places in Europe, such as Switzerland. It’s just a question of how people are paid for their work, not whether they’re paid. Tipping is a bad way to pay, especially when it’s expected.
That being said: unilaterally trying to change culture by refusing to tip only hurts poor people working hard jobs. The path forward is through collective action by governments and restaurants, not individuals.
Tipping is strongly discouraged in Utopia. Even in contexts where a worker goes above and beyond what’s expected, it’s expected that their reward should gratitude and a good word with their employer. When gratuity payment is part of encouraging someone to do more than what’s expected, it should be treated as the customer simply paying the worker directly for an additional service.
Simple Voting
Democracy is good, right? So when a group of people need to make some decision, a good strategy is to ask everyone to vote for an option, and then select the option with the most votes.
WRONG!
This procedure, which is the most common way to vote, is known in the literature as first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting, and is widely agreed to be the worst method of voting on an outcome (that’s actually in use).
FPTP favors the plurality — whatever option is selected by the most voters, even if a majority of voters don’t like that option. Two similar options can split the vote, making the choice of options highly influential and encouraging candidates in a political race to form coalitions or drop out to reduce the number of options.
Here’s a nice 6-minute video by CGP Grey from way back in the day giving a good example of the toxic dynamics:
There are a bunch of good candidates for better ways to vote, but my favorite is approval voting (because it satisfies the FBC). When approval voting, people simply vote for as many options as they like.
Approval voting is simple. The winner is still the option that got the most votes, and it’s not hard to understand “Vote for everything that you approve of.” By releasing people from the constraint of only voting once, the vote-splitting dynamics of FPTP are avoided. Vote-counters no longer need to make sure people don’t vote multiple times. And it’s even possible (though slightly worse) to have people vote as options are being presented, rather than waiting until all options are in.
Approval voting is easy to do in small groups, and I encourage you to use it as the default. In Utopia, when options are decided through a simple vote, people default to approval voting.
Toilets
Toilets are great, but most toilets in America (and most other countries) are insufficiently great! Japan knows what’s up.
But seriously, we need better toilets. Most people find that washing after defecating is both more pleasant than toilet paper alone, and leaves one feeling more clean. If you got poop on any other part of you (even your foot/ankle/armpit!), would you simply wipe it off or would you wash it off with water?
Unfortunately the science of whether washlets/bidets are actually more hygienic is scarce. Only a few papers have been published about the effect of bidet use on health, and their results are mixed. (I was able to read all of the abstracts on PubMed in one sitting.) One of the big problems is that most studies are surveys of the correlation between bidet use and health problems, which run serious risk of falling prey to reverse causation (i.e. people with health issues often prefer bidets). Excessive/improper use and not enough cleaning of the toilet can lead to problems like the spread of bacteria and increased infections for people with vaginas. But proper cleaning seems to be sufficient, and most people with bidets don’t suffer health consequences. My best guess is that when bidets are used and maintained correctly, they offer mild benefits to hygiene, but that’s mostly based on common sense and I would easily change my mind in the presence of one good, large-scale RCT.
Advanced toilets certainly cut down on the use of toilet paper, and probably also reduce the use of flushable wipes, both of which are major contributors to plumbing problems, especially in septic systems. Depending on factors like how advanced one goes and how costly local water is, fancy toilets may even be cheaper than the alternative by cutting down on the cost of toilet paper.
In Utopia, toilets with washlets/bidets are the norm. Foot-petals control both the opening of the lid and the flushing, reducing the number of surfaces that need to be touched, and making it rare for the toilet to flush while the seat is up. An adjustable platform in front of the toilet allows for squatting at whatever position is most comfortable. In cold regions toilets have warmed seats, while in hot regions they can be cooled. And unless one’s house has cats that will play with the dangling sheet, Utopians put the toilet paper on the roll the right way.
