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Boing Boing:
There's a wealth of psychological research that correlates wealthy people in the real world with negative traits like rudeness (people driving fancier cars are less considerate of pedestrians and their likelihood of cutting off another driver is correlated to the cost of the driver's car); greed (rich people take more candies out of dishes set aside for kids than poor people); generalized unethical behavior; cheating at games of chance; and overall stinginess.
One possible explanation for all this is that getting rich is easier if you're dishonest, lack empathy, and cheat whenever you think you can get away with it.
But consider that in a rigged Monopoly game, players who won due to an obviously unfair advantage (being given twice as much starting money and twice as many dice-rolls) acted like dicks throughout the whole game, and then boasted about their "brilliant tactics, their finesse at the game of monopoly and their daring moves."
So maybe the causation goes the other way: maybe getting rich is mostly a matter of dumb luck, which we justify for ourselves by convincing ourselves of our superiority, which leads to us treating others as inferiors.
But why are they more likely to cheat, lie and to cut off pedestrians? And why are they less likely to give to charity?
It may be in part because they are cut off from the reality of poverty – living in an upper-class bubble. But primarily the researchers found that greed is actually viewed more favourably in upper-class communities.
“We reason that increased resources and independence from others cause people to prioritise self-interest over others’ welfare and perceive greed as positive and beneficial, which in turn gives rise to increased unethical behaviour,” the researchers concluded.
Opinion: Why do rich people lie, cheat and steal more than those on low incomes? [Diarmuid Pepper/The Journal]
(via Naked Capitalism)
from
Boing Boing:
Oxfam's released its annual report on inequality, timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum, and unlike previous reports (which focused on attractive but misleading stats about the relative wealth of poor and rich people), the new one focuses on the growth in the fortunes of the world's richest people, a stat that is a much more reliable indicator of growing inequality.
In the new report, Oxfam reveals that the planet's richest 2,000 billionaires got $762 billion richer in 2017 -- an average of $381 million each. One seventh of that gain, if apportioned to the world's poorest, would eradicate extreme poverty.
Oxfam is absolutely right, then, to shine a light on the extreme inequality of the world in 2017. Wealth creation is all well and good, but giving new wealth primarily to the world’s billionaires is literally the worst possible way to distribute it. Oxfam’s longstanding proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires makes perfect sense. They don’t need the money; the world’s poorest do. What’s more, as the Oxfam report details, the top 1% too often make their money by exploiting the very poor. Nothing about this is just, especially when a good 35% of billionaire wealth was simply inherited.
Reward work, not wealth [Oxfam]
Oxfam's excellent inequality report [Felix Salmon/Cause and Effect]
(via Late Stage Capitalism)
