Asymmetrical Information

Maybe you can make a Krugman exception?

What if one's lashon hara adresses another's lashon hara? Geez, there's got to be some way to rationalize this!

I think you're trying to fill the niche left unfilled by the as-yet-unstarted rabbi blog I mentioned last week.

Wow, never have I seen such a detailed scientific analysis on gossip. Yeah, I know the ramifications in public life, but it's still gossip.

TonyB, economists are more nitpicky about social interactions than rabbis, and more contrarian!

Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct

Ok Neel, I hope I didn't offend and I am not familiar with the book you link to. But the distinction would seem to be that, regardless of the hard statistics economists provide; interpreting those statistics is really the field of social interaction. Rabbis would seem to have different types of interaction with which to concern themselves.

No offense was taken (or intended to be given) -- I was just making a joke about the minutiae that economists study!

I read this book a few years ago, and it's a book about how reputation is used to maintain social norms. And gossip is an essential tool for transmitting and building a reputation: one article in the book was an anthropological study of how crime rates in a housing project varied based on the strength gossip networks among the inhabitants. Credit reports can also be considered a form of reputation, as well -- it amuses me to think of Experian being condemned by God for violating the prohibitions on lashon hara. :)

(Of course, social norms can be bad, too: surveys of the South in the 1950s consistently showed that a modest majority of the white population didn't like discrimination, but was afraid of the public condemnation that would follow saying so in public....)

An interesting sideline is that gossip possibly replaced grooming in our early ancestors. Primate grooming is fine for social interaction, but it limits the size of the group to about 150 or so. Gossip takes less energy, less time, and can scale up to orders of magnitude unreachable by any other means. Gossip: It's what keeps us together.

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