Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

I think this article misses a key point about fairness that seems to be ignored (I have not read the underlying paper, so perhaps its bad journalism)

In this scenario:

"In the first scenario, participants had to decide if they wanted to transfer two coins from person A (who already had four coins) to person B (who had one). Researchers note the “transfer would reduce inequality,” (as there’s less of a gap between them), but person B would end up one coin richer than person A, reversing their status."

"Just 45% accepted the redistribution when it changed the hierarchy."

They have focused on changing the hierarchy, and this is where fairness comes in.

Should people who have "wealth" be forced to a redistribution mechanism, where that person ends up poorer than everyone else? - Its one thing to redistribute for to reduce or eliminate inequality, its another to make them poorer than everyone else (even if the overall equality is reduced)

So I don't think its about maintaining the hierarchy, but a sense of fairness in the redistribution

I mean, it's interesting but a bit flawed. When you've got 5 coins total and you're saying someone has to be a loser. Why not do the experiment with 4 coins? I don't think humans want equality "as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor" - that's a pretty poor summary of the findings.

What the findings DID discover, and shouldn't be surprising to anyone, is that 45% of people think it's unfair for you to take so much away from the person who "has money" that they end up with less than the person who you're supposedly helping.

If the world actually equitably shared wealth, the western would have an absolutely astounding drop in our incomes and quality of life. Few would accept this. The average person in the first world has a massively higher quality of life than developing countries.

This is why the only long term answer is technological development, without which we would all still be subsistence farming (and all poor). It would be nice if we had more social advances coupled with this, but that is predicated on human nature taking a different turn than it has historically acted.

That is an interesting study, but it isn't too surprising to me. I think most people recognize that a certain level of inequality is natural, and is often driven by legitimate differences in personal character and discipline. I think the aspect of inequality in America that irritates most people is the degree of inequality combined with the fact that it's only the rich that is experiencing an improving quality of life. This on top of the fact that inequality is being driven less by differences in personal character and more by differences in the return on capital vs return on labor. There are multimillionaires who aren't any better than the rest of us, but because they have significant stores of capital, they do much better than the rest of us.

It's easy to fall into this trap of thinking that we need to hold out our hands and ask (beg?) for wealth distribution. But this mentality of expecting someone else to come to the rescue is why we remain "poorer" than these other people. Especially now that we all have access to the world's information - it should be easier than ever to take care of ourselves and even coordinate boycotts of useless goods and services that the rich rent-collectors use to reap the harvest of proletarian dollars.

The founders of places like America and Rome were self-sufficient agrarians. The appeal of these places was that they were new and independent of other powers. The people that settled there were escaping the rich city folk in cultures that had already been developed.

But a century of rapid industrialization has yielded less capable, reliant people that have gradually lost their way of providing for themselves. Media has poisoned the minds of economic participants, from a young age, to desire more/bigger things than their neighbor, and that is a primary factor in the simple desire to be "rich".

These days there aren't really any new areas like these aforementioned to "discover" and cultivate (perhaps Alaska, but this place is not for weak people which in turn makes it exclusive to more virtuous citizenry).

Constant growth and expansion at all costs is what cancer cells do.

"You're an entrepreneur, so you're wanting to grow your business. How do you grow?"

"I'll throw you a curve ball - we don't want to grow."

https://youtu.be/4MdFSbFlksI?t=1118

Not really sure why this is surprising to anyone. In many cases the wealthy become so through "unfair" or non-merit based means such as inheritance, luck, personal connections, etc. But in many cases, wealth is also earned. A doctor probably does "deserve" to have a $500k house more than a cashier. It wouldn't make sense for the cashier to receive more than the doctor just because they were poorer to begin with. Actually justifying such a transfer doesn't even compute for me.

The author interprets this as preserving the hierarchy, but I think that's a bit of a stretch. I think people don't want to live in a system that could result in their own wealth being used to enrich others to their own detriment. Sure, taxes and redistribution schemes do that, and you could argue that that's the whole point of capitalism (in the other direction), but it seems perverse and unfair for people to take so much from the wealthiest that the poor end up richer than the wealthy were to begin with.

In my experience people want equality but only among their peers. For example even the poor living in the US are the 1% of the developing world, yet everyone would object to us taxing the poor here to send it to the Philippines.

The study says NOTHING about wanting the poor to stay for. What the study says is people are unwilling to make a change. This is a very different idea from wanting that someone else to stay poor.

This looks like loss aversion + empathy.

The subjects believe (correctly) that people feel worse about going down in rank than they feel would feel good about going up in rank.

In other words, what humans want and what they actually do, are rather different. When made public the wanting is called virtue signalling and often provides benefits at no or minimal cost and thus it's popular. Example: https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/corbynistas-believe-in-... ('corbynistas-believe-in-socialism-until-the-bill-arrives').