Why shame may be fading and why markets and metrics may not be the whole story

A former industry insider argues that shame is declining, but he contends that technology is not the root cause and that shame never did the main work of holding communities together. He points to a 1990s Haifa study in which fining late parents at day care centers roughly doubled tardiness, suggesting that monetary prices can turn social obligations into simple transactions. The author cites the New Yorker columns of Jay Caspian Kang, who blamed the decline of shame on phones and tech-driven optimization and called for regulation. He acknowledges that the Haifa findings are less certain than their fame suggests, since the researchers themselves could not separate their explanations and later survey attempts failed to replicate the result. He then turns to a Swiss village study on a proposed nuclear waste site, where offering compensation lowered acceptance, to support his broader argument about how payments can erode consent.