Information markets as a solution to the problem of loneliness
(I’m (doing the blog equivalent of) temporarily bumping this because there’s a Jacobin article about socializing dating apps and I think the problem, if neither its nor this solution is adequate, is worth thought.)
The problem of loneliness — I’ll concentrate on romantic loneliness, and define it as a long-term and unwanted state of being single — is a problem arising from a lack of information. For every lonely person, there’s (at least) someone out there for them; they just probably don’t know who it is because, being lonely, they’re not in contact with many people. But some people, presumably, do have the knowledge about who the lonely person’s possible mates are—there is someone out there who, if they were told some relevant details about the lonely person, would say “Ah! I know just the person …”
The lonely person should buy that knowledge from the knowledgeable person: there should be an information market for trading that knowledge. They should do so by offering money to whoever can successfully find a match for them, and then relying on the knowledgeable person, driven by a desire for money, to take them up on their offer.
The basic idea is really simple. Many people are ill-served by the methods we tend to use to meet people. They, maybe, don’t have many friends and so don’t get introduced to people through their friends, or they don’t make superficially good first impressions so they stay away from online dating sites. Friends and dating sites are the two main sources we use to acquire knowledge about potential partners, and so people who can’t use such methods are informationally impoverished about their romantic possibilities.
(This is especially harmful if you think that such people would be good matches with other people who also aren’t well-served by such methods: if you think a pair of people with few friends, for example, would make a good match, perhaps because of an underlying similarity of temperament. One of the worst things about loneliness is that not only are you informationally impoverished about possible mates, but it may well be that those mates are also lonely, so also impoverished, so unlikely to know about you.)
But others won’t be so impoverished. If you think, as most of us probably do, that there’s someone out there for everyone, and, indeed, if we’re just talking about dating and not necessarily life-time relationships, that there are many possible people out for each of us, then you should also be at least open to the thought that, given a sufficiently large community, for every person looking for a match, there is someone who knows a suitable match. Not only that, you might even be tempted by a more demanding view: for almost everyone, there is someone close by who is a match (where close byness can be geographical, but also social, economic, and so on.) Arguably this is true in most big cities.
I don’t think this because I think everybody is inherently awesome and great. I think this just because there’s a ton of people out there, and for pretty much every type of niche personality you can think of, there’s someone (many people) who is (are) into, or at least not opposed to, that niche. The problem is that for some people, there are many fewer possible mates around than for others, and given those possible mates might eschew traditional methods for finding people, it is very hard for the lonely person to find out about them. That’s what makes loneliness a problem about information.
All this might sound fancier than I mean it to be, so think of an example. Think of a friend of yours who is unlucky in love. You want to help them, but, in fact, you don’t know anybody suitable for them. You don’t, on that basis, conclude that there isn’t anybody for them: you just conclude that you don’t happen to know who it is. But if you think that, you should also be open to the thought that if we took 10 or 20 or 100 people, and told them some relevant details about your friend, someone would know a good match. Think about it: do you agree with this? If you do, you should take seriously this proposal.
The problem is getting these 10 or 20 or 100 people to take the interest in your friend’s love life that you take. And that’s where money comes in. The person who wants to get matched makes an offer to the community: successfully set me up (where that could amount to a handful of dates, up to a relationship) and I’ll pay you some money (perhaps depending on what success counts as).
Essentially, the person is seeking to buy information about the identity of a person with whom they could have a successful relationship. (To ensure that matchmakers don’t just spam matchmakees with ill-considered recommendations, we can require that if the matchmaker proposes an unsuccessful match, the matchmaker has to pay the matchmakee some money. There are other bells and whistles one could add; you could introduce bidding, you could turn it into a prediction market, etc.)
People who wouldn’t formerly be interested in the lonely person’s love life now are, because they can make some money from it. We can use money to extract the requisite knowledge from the dispersed knowledge which would otherwise remained trapped in the individual members of the community’s brains.
(Here’s a nice twist to this idea. Many people really believe that there’s no one out there for them. As such, they might steer clear of such sites. But we can modify the idea slightly so as to avoid this problem: give people the option of selling the information that they are undateable. If they sell it and someone buys it, and that person fixes them up successfully, then they have, in fact, failed to sell the information that they are undateable (because they aren’t) and so they have to pay up, just as the matchmaker has to pay if they unsuccessfully set up the lonely person. It’s just the reverse case.)
This might all sound a bit annoying and homo economicus-y. But at heart there’s a serious and seriously-meant point: many people are alone not because of some deep existential problem with them, but just because the sort of people one meets via traditional methods aren’t the right sort of people for them. I think this is a shame, and we should think of ways to get around this problem, and this is one suggestion for doing so.
