In a money game with anonymous rich and poor players, rich players will give up some money to help the poor but poor people are more likely to spend their money to make the rich players less rich.
That is from Jason Kottke.
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They didn’t seem to consider that the size of the payoff could explain the behavior.
The spin on the study results is also interesting. This could just as easily represent petty jealousy as an innate desire to promote equality.
Put the middle class in there, and they’d join together to work against that/those
player(s).
Thanks to Marginal Revolution, I have read “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior” and could have predicted this outcome.
Oh great, more of the “meme” meme.
My thought, our morals more or less arise from naturally evolved emotions. We have a natural capacity for empathy. We have a natural capacity for jealousy. Empathy + jealousy = equality.
If that’s not clear enough, if we think other people are jealous, we empathize. We want don’t want this emotion to continue so we interpret that making things more equal must be “good”.
I would have liked to see different causes of inequality tested. In that experiment, luck was what got the rich ahead. Would the poor respond differently if being rich were the product of some observable effort or skill?
I wonder if this means some people would quit their jobs if they have no other employment prospects. If they truly believe they are the ones being exploited, then I assume they would believe they are hurting their employer worse than themselves, thus promoting equality.
If they truly believe they are the ones being exploited, then I assume they would believe they are hurting their employer worse than themselves, thus promoting equality.
Only if you believe that the desire for equality/envy is the *only* thing humans care about. Not surprisingly, there’s a fairly large number of factors.
More importantly, pretending it doesn’t/shouldn’t exist is simply closing one’s eyes and hoping that it goes away. Weighing it in the mix of how our society is built is prudent. After all, unless you are content to have a society imposed by force on its members, if the unhappiness caused by “envy” becomes higher than the happiness through other causes, you’re going to see change, and not necessarily peaceful change.
This reminds me something that seems prevalent in government work. I’ve noticed that people will put nearly an hour’s effort into avoiding a few minutes of work.
I think your thesis in the above is rather weak, relying as it does on research based on self-reported happiness measures. But that’s a discussion for a different time. I was making rather a different distinction. I’m not talking at all about a drive that propels anyone to material success. I’m talking (as are the researchers in the paper, when observing the poor) about a drive to destroy the material success of others.
Please come to requiem lant, we will give you a great surprise.
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