Are rich people meaner? Two teams find errors in each other’s work | Hacker News Reader

Are rich people meaner? Two teams find errors in each other’s work

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58 pointsabrax314176 comments

The majority of wealthy people became that way by some combination of lying, cheating, stealing, fraud, misrepresentation, intimidation (extortion and/or blackmail), market manipulation, insider trading, aggressive selling to vulnerable people such as seniors, etc...... If you succeed on Wall Street, you're most likely engaging in that behavior. Do people actually think that most of these billionaires added billions in value? That every exchange is voluntary and makes each side better off? Is the old lady with dementia who unknowingly signed up to a terrible annuity "better off". Was the woman with dementia a "sucker" for signing up and placing trust in the broker? The ethical way to become rich is largely by inventing or innovating. Corporate raiders such as Kravis, Icahn and Peltz are very far from being moral. Arguably sociopaths with a mean streak. Surprised with the naive posts.

Who, besides dementia sufferers, are being cheated by those rich people? Anyone with a sounds mind is surely making a rational decision that they probably benefits themselves. If they're just trading at better prices than the market, that still means they're providing value by actually being available to trade with.

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record when I say this because I recently learned about this thing called principal agent problem and now everything in the world looks like it to me (when all you have is a hammer yada yada)

So with the apology it of the way, there is a lot of what we can call inefficiency when we look at things from a bird's eye view. Of course, usually someone else benefits from it.

Even if you ignore my silly comparison, there are new individuals born everyday. We don't all start from an equal position. Not that I have a better solution but you could argue some are in a better position to exploit certain opportunities than others are.

There are enough vulnerable people to become rich off of? When I worked in sales the calculus was pretty simple - either you sell to these people to make money or you'll barely make money. The dirty little secret of success in sales is is scoping out people who can be manipulated. Most products being sold do not benefit the buyer. There is not enough ingenuity for that. The view that capitalism just creates a collection of voluntary exchanges that better both sides, is ludicrous.

People often conflate nebulous “evil” with more specific rational self-interest, good investments and cheating/underpaying/stealing from people.

There are a lot of middling rich people whom do underpay people because it works and don’t care about long-term views of themselves or of the relationship... this can sabotage greater opportunities later on or current income streams now (it’s a small world and a hyperconnected one). There are many whom don’t because it also reflects poorly on them and their associates, and it turns off their friends, potential customers, investors and partners... also some people have integrity and wouldn’t dream of it.

In fact, the more connected someone is, the less likely they are to screw people over because it’s a bigger risk. The big headlines of harassment or scams are the exceptions. Certainly, there are instutions like many banks whom obscure their wealth extraction from less rich and transfer it to their investor/owners. They are culpable but may not believe or realize they are.

Wealth is a spectrum, as are integrity and personality. How is squishy “science” going to “measure” take those nuances or mentally-compartmentalized/hidden wealth transfer into account?

> Wealth is a spectrum, as are integrity and personality. How is squishy “science” going to “measure” take those nuances or mentally-compartmentalized/hidden wealth transfer into account?

By measuring on a spectrum of wealth and integrity, and choosing a sample size so as to to ameliorate personality to p < .05. They have graphs of socioeconomic class vs. unethical behavior. A few studies also included priming the subjects to think in "greed is good" ways and measure the impact.

Spectrum isn’t an axis. There is much grey in the world statistics can’t capture. Looking for data to fit a narrative is political science, not science.

The game is selfish, players must be selfish or self-interested to survive. This game efficiently works out niceness/sharing as a matter of survival.

Do you have any research to back up that claim? In my experience, selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile. Gotta care about other people and be a team player to succeed

If you are being a team player because that's what's needed for you to succeed personally then isn't being a team player the selfish strategy?

Taken to the extreme: If you do good to feel good, you are selfish. But I don't think it matters to the outside. Let's judge the whole person and not some Freudian ego of him.

I agree with this as a standard for judging others, which is what your post addresses, so I have no disagreement with it.

For your self, though, if you are doing good only to feed your ego, the appetite of your ego is still the driving force, so your morality will be subject to the whims of your ego, which means that you're a fair-weather do-gooder - sure to do bad when your ego demands it.

You are not taking it to the extreme. You are just discovering that "selfishness" is not hard-defined. It is relative, and thus one cannot measure it through different people since each one of them will perceive it differently.

Yes. Being kind and sharing with other people typically leads to a positive outcome for ourselves. Even altruism feels good on the inside--otherwise nobody would do it. The Dalai Lama calls this "wise selfishness"

And Gus Levy, of Goldman Sachs fame, called it long-term greedy.

Big surprise, the ghost train guy would have used a ghost train..

The true manipulator doesn't need the warm glow of altruism to pursue his ambitions. The rich manipulator calculates everything as zero-sum and sees people for their utility to be exploited.

>selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile

Cultivating relationships to one's own benefit is a form of self-interest. This is about self-interest, not antisocial behavior. You can have one without the other.

Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation is a good starting point.

You don't have to be a team player. You just have to pretend to be a team player. Big difference.

It's surprisingly easy to pretend. From my experience, a lot of rich people are surprisingly bad at seeing the difference between fake and genuine... If everyone around you is fake, you get used to it and it becomes the norm. You don't notice what is normal.

The richer someone is, the nicer people will be toward them and the more easily they become offended when someone is not nice. Being offended is not the norm for rich people so it hurts more when it happens.

Got to be a cuckoobird- pretending to be a team-player, placing all those eggs, in foreign baskets.

Game theory bases that we are all self-interested and that also adds a level of safety in some scenarios. For instance you don't want to tank your team, you want YOUR team to win so you do more because of that self-interest. Cooperation can be part of self-interest in that aspect. Even self interest has a level of moral norms and respect for civil rights because you want that same level of protection.

What happens to niceness? It gets chewed up and eaten. I am a very cooperative person but through my life I have realized niceness/loyalty come at a cost but are hard not to do. If you aren't self-interested in yourself, noone will be.

you are right and I believe that's how most people actually feel about moral, it's just that their team is not the whole humanity, only family/close friends or such.

I was super interested to read how they defined "rich". Is it just networth greater than X? Is someone who saves diligently for 50 years to get X also rich in their definition?

Sadly those details appear to be behind a paywall and it seems what they really wanted to determine was the relationship between greedy attitudes and social economic status although their summary does use the word rich plenty, again, without defining it.

Sci-hub FTW

Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior: https://sci-hub.io/http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.a...

A 4-study replication of the moderating effects of greed on socioeconomic status and unethical behaviour https://sci-hub.io/https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2016...

And to answer the question, it seems like class was self-ranked based on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status[1] rather than having two groups drawn from two classes. "Low" and "High" look like they're just the two groups above and below the median of the study.

[1]: http://www.macses.ucsf.edu/research/psychosocial/subjective....

Equally important is how you define "unethical." I'd imagine people in higher socioeconomic levels are more likely to lie in a negotiation or ignore traffic laws (traffic penalties fines are regressive in the sense they are fixed, skill in negotiating is probably correlated with skill in lying), but less likely to commit violent crimes or engage in drug abuse.

As a sidenote, traffic penalties are not regressive everywhere: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

> traffic penalties fines are regressive in the sense they are fixed

They actually did examine almost exactly that, although none of the studies involved actual laws or punishments outside social repercussions. They measured how likely someone was to cut people off while driving. Most of the other scenarios involved sharing rewards.

> less likely ... to engage in drug abuse.

i really doubt this.

Less likely to get caught engaging in drug abuse, maybe

Or be convicted, definitely.

There is so much right in the above three posts that I'd vote twice, if I could.

The wealthy buy drugs from people who drive nice sports sedans and wear suits, or similar. They aren't down at the crack house giving blowjobs for dime bags.

Some of the biggest stashes of drugs, that I have seen, have been inside what you'd probably call a mansion. No, this wasn't dealers. This was for personal consumption and/or to be consumed by their guests.

Those guests may well have included people who work in the judicial system, by the way.

Back in college my cocaine dealer was a city police officer. I had no idea until I saw him eating at a local restaurant in his police gear.

I don't want to be too specific, but one of the best 'cooks' that I've known was the ADA and now holds a higher elected position.

Cooks, for those who don't know, turn coke into crack, a smokable form.

She would do it with a stove and a coffee pot, as much as an ounce at a time.

the biggest dealer at my college went to a "very good" law school and is now working in DC.

go figure.

In the affluent suburban town where I grew up, the chief of police was caught selling percocet to a middle schooler.

It depends how you define it.

Alcohol abuse is positively correlated with wealth. Tobacco, marijuana, and cocaine use is negatively correlated.

Source? Marijauana use and alcohol use both seem to correlate positively with wealth, but Tobacco indeed appears to be a negative correlation. [0]

[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3410945/

The study you cited is limited to young adults (18-23), which is a rather small segment. A more recent study with a wider population [1]:

> Poorer marijuana users smoking the most. Pot users profile closer to cigarette smokers than alcohol drinkers.

[1] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/14/study-poorer-marijuana-...

This is confirmation bias epitomized. Rich people mean? Or do rich people simply have a different view of the world than not-rich people? My kids think I am mean. They are not rich by comparison. The differences in our behaviors are the major reasons for our differences in incomes.

I think wealth can sometimes give a false sense of superiority and invincibility

You imply there is a true sense of superiority somewhere. What could be more a true measure of general superiority than wealth? It comes from succeeding in a game that everyone's playing.

Is this even a question?

Having spent my teenage years in what would otherwise be called a ghetto and now living in a wealthier suburb, poor neighborhoods have way more selfish assholes. I'm very glad I got out of there.

I think being an asshole hurts you more than is helps you as you get richer.

In one case you were looking at the world from the perspective of a poor boy, in the other from a rich earner.

> I think being an asshole hurts you more than is helps you as you get richer.

As a product of private school: my experience is yes and no. There are certainly some behaviors that hurt your success, and there are plenty of extremely successful people who are successful specifically because they are excellent human beings all-around. There are also plenty of people who are financially successful because they are exceptionally selfish and generally horrible to others, but not in overt or combative ways.

I have the same experience. When I was younger I was puzzled when my friends mom (richer family) was so nice. Cooked large breakfast for us when I stayed over, etc. And his friends were nice. And they talked normally to each other and were funny and clever.

Where I came from, the norm was just anger. And the conversation was mostly putting each other down. Or challenging each other. Still trying to overcome that.

For me maybe not a ghetto but dirt poor people that rest of a small city referred to as 'miracles street' (drunks, poor people, police visits once a month) had bunch of decent people and friends I think will have contact for life whereas I got to know quite some rich people who were maybe smooth in contact but in reality they were awful backstabbers.

So your mileage may vary...

Sort of related, there are a lot of lessons learned and observations made when one changes social class.

At some point in my life, I've been close to both extremes. I've been a poor college student with a family and just barely below the poverty line because of the dependents. I was firmly middle class for my youth and then after starting my business. Selling my business has put me in the upper class section.

There are some broad stereotypes that can be made but the biggest difference I see is in how others respond to you and how the system responds to you.

Depends how you look at it. I think rich people are more likely to look out for each other. You can often see this in the way our laws work, if the middle and lower classes are screwed over it's a huge fight to bring justice. But if rich people are screwed over, justice seems to come at a swift pace.

I think rich people treat rich people better and poor and middle classes tend to treat each other like trash but treat rich people like they are gods.

In that scenario there are more factors determining behaviour than availability of money.

A better comparison is between people in the same social bracket who have relatively more or less money, such as the Monopoly experiment where one player was given an intrinsic advantage.

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean

How do you define rich?

You don't. You compare wealth/class to mean-ness. Arbitrarily defining a cutoff would affect the results from the onset.

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