The big idea: Reciprocal tariffs on friendships

A personalized way to make sure everyone pulls their weight in every friendship

Last week, the US announced blanket tariffs targeting nearly every country in the world. The individual tariff rates appear to be entirely based on trade deficits: countries with larger trade surpluses with the US got higher tariff rates.

The implication was that every individual country should maintain perfectly balanced trade with the US. It got me thinking: where else could the principle of perfect 1-1 reciprocity apply? Why not friendships?

Introducing Fairiff, the world’s first friendship reciprocity platform.

Perfectly balanced, as all friendship should be

I can admit that I don’t always pull my weight in my friendships: sometimes I’m slow to respond to texts, or wait for someone else to make plans. This has, unfortunately, put me in a friendship deficit with several great people. Now those friends have a way to fight back — through targeted financial sanctions.

Here’s how it works: an app on your phone keeps track of everything you do in your friendships, from text messages (via reading iMessage) to who pays for the coffee (via tracking your bank account). Fairiff goes beyond quantity: content is reviewed for enthusiasm, kindness, chemistry, and overall vibes.

Of course, we don’t live entirely through our phones. Fairiff will have to enable audio recording to track conversational equity and general vibe quality for in-person events. For premium users, connect to your cell phone camera and record your interactions — it’s important to check body language equality.

Using this data, Fairiff assigns a score to your contribution to the friendship (“Friendship Points”). The relative contribution is presented as a deficit or a surplus, telling you who’s the better friend across all of your relationships. And if you’re on the losing side, Fairiff provides the tools to retaliate until balance is restored.

The best way to avoid retaliation is to reciprocate exactly. They get you a coffee? Buy the next one. They planned a dinner party? You’re in charge of setting up a bowling night. With Fairiff, people who like to plan events will run ever-greater surpluses, while the “flakey but fun” crowd runs increasingly dangerous deficits.

What does it actually mean to be tariffed?

Long term deficits can’t go unresolved forever. Eventually, Fairiff needs to issue sanctions, based on this equation:

Where Total Friendship Contribution is equal to the contribution to the friendship (normalized by quality) and Net Friendship Deficit is the gap between bilateral friendship contributions. This is multiplied by the surplus holder’s hourly wage and the amount of time spent together, getting to a total Friendship Fine.

Let’s say you have a new friend named Mike, who organized your last four after work beers for ten cumulative hours. You had a good time and paid for your own drinks, but he really carried the conversation — and worse, you waited two days after he texted “how was the rest of your night” before responding “hey sorry, pretty good!”

Your friendship deficit would be 370 points over 968 contribution, giving you an adjusted deficit of .38. With Mike’s $50 an hour salary and over 10 hours of hanging out together, you now owe Mike $190 — unless you start contributing more to the friendship.

A vision of the future

Finally, perfect reciprocity.

There might be a few flaws with this idea

Of course, the cost of contributions to the friendship can vary by individual. For an introvert, sending a text response might be hours of agony while an extrovert feels joy in picking the right emoji. A wealthy friend who always covers lunch will rack up surpluses that can’t be covered with a heartfelt handmade birthday card. Structural friendship deficits might emerge across social energy, income, and preferences, pressuring friend groups towards homogenization.

Individually, Fairiff requires reciprocity no matter what. Hanging out with somebody once risks creating an obligation to socialize with them again in the future. A quick beer after work can become a cat and mouse game of socialization, only breakable by literally paying the person to leave you alone.

There’s also the risk of a friendship trade war. If you’re consistently in a friendship deficit, you might start to put up barriers to hanging out. Maybe you join a squash league to make yourself unavailable on board game night. You’ll only want to engage in your area of surplus — League of Legends games. As the balance of friendship shifts, they may retaliate with a commitment to less screen time. Soon, you’re not hanging out at all.

The weaponization of friendship

This system creates a lot of opportunities for abuse.

A malicious actor could start sending “how are you” texts to large groups of people, attach it to an LLM, and start collecting surpluses from surface level friendships. There will be real passive income opportunities from curating a circle of indebted acquaintances. Or worse, create group chats with ambiguous purpose — it’s rude to leave them, and you get 10x the deficit when nobody responds to your funny meme.

More insidiously, someone could force their way into your friend group. Show up for movie night, bring the popcorn, and suddenly there’s an imbalance to be corrected. Love bombing becomes tariff harvesting as tangential connections use generosity to trap you in a new friendship.

The system might enter the professional world too. Imagine buying a coffee for a PM on the team you want to join, obligating them to see you again. With enough time, you might end up the best man at their wedding — repayment for years of imbalanced friendship. And that’s when you ask for the referral.

There are maybe(?) some solutions

It’s possible that a blanket duty on all of your friends isn’t the best way to maintain social harmony. There are some lessons from 80 years of progress on free trade we can apply.

Fairiff could add the ability to bring groups together to negotiate free friendship agreements, making certain activities duty free. Maybe you live in different time zones — wipe away the slow texting penalties outside of certain hours. If you need a foursome for pickleball, waive friendship points for new members. This patchwork of compromises and exemptions will let people customize their social life and declare what’s in and out of bounds.

You could also spin up Special Friendship Zones (SFZs), locations where the typical social tariff rules no longer apply. These neutral areas — birthday parties, school projects, work functions — would de-risk social interactions for a wide range of socially-beneficial interactions. The additional social growth occurring here might even spill over into the broader social ecosystem.

Of course, this runs the risk of creating distortions in the friendship market. Instead of organic relationships, everything is funneled through structured friendship agreements that may dictate the time and place of hanging out. It’s just too risky to try picking up rock climbing without some preliminary negotiations.

Wait — are we taxing the wrong people?

Despite the name, this isn’t really a tariff — we’re putting the burden on the person RECEIVING the friendship (the importer), but tariffs target the exporter. And if someone is giving friendship too freely, recipients will demand an option to retaliate.

We need to redefine Fairiff — it’s not a service to target the friends who don’t pull their weight. It’s a service to stop overcommitment by people demanding your time — using targeted financial sanctions.

Imagine someone keeps putting you into friendship debt by inviting you to cool parties that you just can’t reciprocate. Fairiff is ready to intervene. Start by charging a fee to send you a text, reducing the quantity of thoughtful interest in your life. This creates the perfect opportunity to close your deficit by sharing some funny YouTube videos.

If they keep pushing, escalate into greater sanctions: suspend their group chat privileges and block outgoing event invitations. For repeat offenders, a full social export freeze is a possibility — automatic calendar blocks, strategic do-not-disturb usage, and a blockade on first texts (responses only).

Now we can truly restore balance, with room for relative preferences. If my deficit keeps growing, I have flexibility — I can make plans to have you over for dinner or ban you from the gym we both attend to minimize small talk. And you can collect payment or negotiate greater imports by picking up ceramics and joining my classes.

Official idea rating

1.3/5. No Dumb Ideas supports free trade of social interactions. Fairiff might bring more equitable friendships, but at the cost of isolating our most productive social planners — leaving the world with less overall friendship and connection.

I once had a friend tell me “you should always have a little debt between friends. That way, you always have a reason to see each other again.” I thought that was a beautiful idea; maybe the real answer isn’t tracking every interaction, but maintaining a sense of friendly obligation to each other. In this way, we build connection through acts of generosity without the expectation of reciprocation — and that’s a world where care for your relationships creates real community.

That said, I haven’t talked to him in 10 years. Maybe I should have asked him to Venmo me for the coffee.

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