The Chest Economy
By Michael Davis
What are we really paying for?
It’s easy to think the cash exchange of $2,000 is for the labor of replacing the dead grass with new sod. That’s only partially true.
That’s where our society gets a lot wrong. There is a predicate — a pre-condition — to exchanging any money. In fact, this predicate or precondition must exist for anything in society to function reliably. That pre-condition is trust.
Many of us have learned the (very) hard way that we can’t trust most ads or systems or even people (I’m referring to the pretend roofers who come through our neighborhoods after a large hailstorm). The underlying systems of trust have been eroded even with the proliferation of technologies that promise to verify our identities. Even those systems are a game of whack-a-mole.
In his book The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis refers to our understandable mistrust of “men without chests”: we have little reason to trust what we cannot see or know to be true. Men (speaking of all humanity) need chests. We need to have a real moral presence in the world. That presence is rare — which is why we feel trust toward our landscaper.
Our landscaper, for well over a decade, has done imaginative work, priced competitively, and exceeded the bare minimum of the promised service. We know him by his first name. He shakes hands. We know his face. We started with small jobs (I’m sure, from his perspective) but we’ve also used him for the big jobs. My point is this: he’s meeting and exceeding his promises. Even the tiny ones. If something seems off, he fixes it. No questions asked. He has a chest.
The chest economy is more resilient because it doesn’t depend on technology. It depends on what I can see, on behavior. Verification technology can confirm who someone is; it cannot confirm what someone will do. We can’t put a stop to the dangers of our distrust economy. We can try to live up to every promise, every day. And before we commit to working with others, we can find ways to explore their truth claims: do others’ appearances really have chests, or are they merely facsimiles of truth?
Getting what you pay for begins with trust: yours, mine, and theirs.
💡 - Two things to do today to have more chestiness (the moral seriousness)
- Repair. Pick a forgotten or abandoned item and close the loop today, even belatedly. A “hey, I said I’d send that and I never did — here it is” message is exactly the kind of thing your landscaper fixes “no questions asked.” That moment — small to you, visible to them — is chestiness in action.
- Notice the pattern, not the score. The audit isn’t about guilt; it’s about finding where your promises leak. Most people discover they’re reliable where money or bosses are watching, and leaky where only a friend or neighbor is counting. Lewis’s man without a chest isn’t the person who fails sometimes — it’s the person who behaves differently when nobody can see.