The rich are different from you and me
economist.com
economist.com
* Correlation is not causation.
* Poor people may often remain poor because they are not rational. Charity may not be a rational activity. So perhaps what they were measuring was not selfishness, but rationality.
* Being born in a rich family is correlated with a better education, so the point made in the article's last paragraph may be incorrect.
* I'm (currently) poor, but I don't think much of most organised charitable activities, or to giving money to homeless people. I think most charities are an utter waste, and giving money to homeless people only gets them buying alcohol and cigarettes. I'll happily give my sandwich to a homeless person on the street though. My suggested figure for "% of salary to donate to charity" is 0%, and will remain 0% for the rest of my life. However, once rich (assuming I get there), I'd be quite happy to devote years of my life to helping people directly (which may involve leveraging financial resources, but not donating money to charities).
* Average figures tell us little. What was the distribution? Did 90% of rich people suggest 0% and 10% of them suggested 50%? How did they get to the 2.1% figure?
* What kind of social pressure was there when asking people how much they would donate (of their credits, or of their salary)? Social pressure is a huge influence. Here on HN, an open-minded, thoughtful environment, I explain my views on charities above (even though I know I'll get some passionate replies). Sitting in a circle of people I don't know, I might still express these views (because I'm like that..) but most people probably would be wiser and keep those views quiet.
* What kind of social pressure was there before? What kind of social pressure did they expect after? Did people give an answer to please the examiner?
A lot of holes in this article, I think. Surprising, coming from a quality publication like the Economist.
However, the article noted that when a participant was lead to believe they were higher or lower on the social ladder, that changed the amounts they gave or believed was right to give. --This doesn't prove causation of course, but it does suggest with some strength that a higher perceived social position does affect your decisions when it comes to charity.
One last thought... You may consider yourself poor, but you don't know the scales they used in the experiment. It's possible that you aren't as poor as you think.
What grounds do you have for thinking that charity (and presumably altruism in general) is irrational? Are you assuming that only self-interested actions can be rational?
That's pretty much the definition of "rational" as it is applied in Economics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory
> They found that both real lower-class participants and those temporarily induced to rank themselves as lower class felt that a greater share of a person’s salary should be used to support charity.
They could on some level see themselves as beneficiaries of charity, and be more charity-minded themselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.
If you derive utility from giving money to charity (e.g., you enjoy warm fuzzy feelings) then it is completely rational to do so. Charitable giving is a consumption good just like video games, playing soccer or shopping for clothes.
"Hey, it looked like it'd work on the chart!"
Ok, now, I submit for you consideration the possibility that you just picked a number quite inconsistent with your own behavior, that is, the other efficiencies which you accept as a matter of course. As an example, the efficiency of internal combustion engines.
I don't mind the idea of paying taxes, mind you - I have nothing against the idea of contributing a large portion of one's income to improving the country that one lives in, I just think most government schemes are ridiculously inefficient.
For example, if everyone in my area were forced to shop at a specific grocery store, I'm almost certain that their produce department would suck within a few months. But even if it didn't, I would still object to the use of force for basic moral reasons. I'm not a pragmatist.
When you pay taxes, you aren't "contributing" anything. Perhaps you would pay those taxes voluntarily, but that point is moot because you are not given the option of paying them voluntarily.
I gladly pay the annual fee for maintaining our private roads up here, so don't mistake me for a miserly free-riding ingrate who wants to use other people's property for free. I'm just saying that when the initiation of force is involved, people are no longer customers who can take their business elsewhere. Inefficiency is a likely outcome of the initial moral offense.
Oh, the lines of accountability are too indirect? Fine, call your cable company and health insurance company and try demanding some direct accountability.
Also, you're free to take your business elsewhere, just live in another first-world country. Oh, they all have higher taxes than the US? Hrm. Too bad you're not running things, then we could clear all this inefficiency right up. What's your budget plan?
He addressed this directly.
> Too bad you're not running things, then we could clear all this inefficiency right up. What's your budget plan?
This kind of snark is not constructive.
The GP poster is advocating eliminating taxation period, because it's based on force, if I'm understanding things correctly here. How can someone respond constructively to that?
Guess you're right, I'll stop wasting time engaging.
Of course it's idealistic of me to oppose the initiation of force in principle. But I reject the belief that in a purely voluntary society, people would regress into violent, stupid, and helpless animals. On the contrary, I believe that the initiation of force is responsible for the very level of violence, stupidity, and helplessness we see today.
I was amused to hear you say "too bad you're not running things." I'm sure you realize that is the last thing I would ever want to do. However, I think reasonably competent people like me are perfectly capable of running businesses, providing services such as road construction, garbage removal, education, landscaping, security, package delivery, telephone, and such. Our "budget plans" would be whatever is required to keep customers, owners, and employees happy. It is not my responsibility to devise other people's business plans. It is their responsibility to do it, and without resorting to force.
As for designing our own "countries," I think we'll see a lot more of that sort of thing in the next hundred years. Right now the entrenched State violently opposes such competition, much as the entrenched Church violently opposed heresy long ago. The trend is in the right direction, but it could be awfully bloody and messy along the way.
Unfortunately, the second option there isn't really possible anymore.
> How can someone respond constructively to that?
Have you never encountered this political opinion? Maybe we travel in different circles, but this seems like a pretty common line of argument to me. However, you're right: it's hard to respond to constructively, because you two are operating on different fundamental axioms: 'initiation of force is sometimes okay' versus 'initiation of force is never okay.' This is a pretty big and decisive difference, made from two different ideologies... there's no real way to argue if one is better or worse.
This is getting fairly off-topic, though. If you'd like a further discussion of the libertarian viewpoint on taxes, feel free to email me. I'm not exactly a libertarian anymore, but I was for long enough to explain it to you fairly thoroughly.
There's exactly one country in the world that just plain does not have taxes: Somalia.
It's a reasonable (but silly and immature) opinion to demand that the country slashes taxes in, say, half, without outlining the spending cuts. Demanding that they're slashed by 100% is just madness.
Just because all current countries do thing one way does not mean that it's the best way; there isn't really a large variety of government/economic systems in use. Yes, there's variability, but essentially all of them are based in capitalism, and most governmental systems are either some form of western "liberal democracy" or monarchy. I personally find it tragic that there's no place left in the world to experiment with different ways of organizing governments; I always fear monoculture.
And even if you do move to other countries, sometimes, there's just no fit. This is a question I've given a lot of though to lately, and there's really no place that I could live where I'd consider the government to be truly moral. I'd simply be trading one kind of unhappiness for another, and while it might get _better_, it won't reach maximum.
> Demanding that they're slashed by 100% is just madness.
Even those who advocate such a thing consider it to be drastic, yes. Life wouldn't continue in the same way, but they have other solutions to those problems.
No, they don't. They have some hand-wavey wish-aways. Who runs the government if it doesn't have any money? Volunteers?
There is in fact a model for this, and it's called anarchy. Again, see Somalia.
I suspect your opinion of anarchy is that of 13 year olds and punk bands, and I can't really blame you. There's a large amount of poor press involved. It's actually very thoroughly thought out, even if you disagree with their premises. If you'd care to learn more, there is a FAQ: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html
Note, this is from a collectivist perspective, who say that anarcho-captialists are not anarchists. I'm not sure of a great resource on anarcho-captialism, but it's basically just a more extreme version of libertarianism/minarchism anyway.
Okay, enough off topic stuff. Just please try to consider the way you casually dismiss others' beliefs, it makes them less likely to listen to your arguments (which are good ones).
Perhaps this paragraph can plug first few of your perceived holes.
On the other hand there are a few charities that do work to permanently improve the conditions for those they were supposed to help (teach fishing charities) these are most certainly not a waste of time or money to support (alot of Amnestys work would fall into this catagory).
The whole rationality/lack thereof may actually be the case (at least from my personal experiences working in lower end jobs, where the people were either older and, frankly, not particularly smart, or younger, smarter, and temporary). Does the fact that it could be considered irrational invalidate any value of the altruism?
I was most interested in the last part, where they were seeing if people would help another person who was right in front of them. It shows something more about simple compassion, which I consider different from altruism. It also helps address your point about organized charitable activities: it was an opportunity to give what would have been perceived as help someone more in the here and now and less in the airy "well, this seems like a good percentage of my income to donate to charity...".
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pd...
It's probably behind a paywall for you, though.
If by poor you mean what some refer to as the "working poor" or people only slighly above the working poor on the economic ladder, then my admittedly limited and admittedly anecdotal experience would contradict it. They tend to be hard working, generous with what little they have, and would be insulted by most suggestions of charity (though I have known a couple to take loans from friends to be paid back when they were able...) In short, my limited and anecdotal experience tends to support the concept in the article that the lower and working classes tend to be generous and helpful.
So what were you going to spend that .50 cents on?
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
That said, other researchers conducting Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game experiments have found that higher-status individuals offer less to their counterparts, even when the 'status' is entirely make-believe (for instance, being told that they scored higher than their counterpart on a previously-conducted test of skill - even though they were in fact randomly assigned to their roles.) Researchers have also found that in Ultimatum Game experiments, lower-status individuals were willing to accept less, even when the low status was similarly make-believe.
In other words, Piff is making a somewhat politicized argument about wealth and 'the rich', when he should be talking about status. I'd argue that all this experiment shows is that American college undergraduates have internalized that high status is deserved, and therefore it's fair for high status people to retain a greater proportion of the benefits of status.
e.g. It's easy to hate "the other" because you don't know them, you don't live next door to them, you've never lived through what they've lived through, etc. And this is amplified by those who benefit from the hate, and who slander with strawmen and push for rules that maintain the separations and distinctions. (DADT, segregation, most suburban zoning laws in the US, Arizona's new immigration laws, etc)
Similarly, it's harder for rich people in the suburbs to support social programs than even similarly rich people who simply live where they have more contact with people of more economic classes. Even if neither set of rich people had been personally poor.
Likewise, poor people --while more likely to give charity to other people who are in situations they understand-- are still very skeptical of charity given to "the other" (e.g. TARP)
Truly, some people have a strong philosophical belief and act accordingly. But mostly, people are just skeptical of "the other" and act accordingly.
See the middle east for an example.
Last I checked Israelis and Palestinians weren't generally living in the same neighborhoods, subject to equal treatment under the same laws, shopping at the same markets, etc.
You can read about poverty, imagine it, and have knowledge about it. But unless you've experienced it first hand, you cannot truly understand what it's like.
I think that understanding can lead people to be more altruistic.
I've met far too many people trying to do the noble thing by buying a sandwich or milk. Completely oblivious to that persons dietary requirements. It would have been far easier to give a dollar, let the poor guy figure out what he wants to eat. If he buys alcohol he'll only get thirstier and hungrier.
Another thing (in London anyway) is to be asked for money to stay in a shelter overnight. Well the shelters are free, paid for by the local councils, and always have spare beds.
I think if anyone did ever say, I need the money to get high, I'd probably give it them, just because they'd be the first honest one...
Social programs to help the unemployed are, economically speaking, little different from something like TARP. Would you say that your increased altruism extends to supporting assistance given to rich/corporations?
Being poor means you experience all of these burdens, more so than those who are not poor, and so you can understand the plight of those who experience it.
>> "more charitable toward problems they understand and people they empathize with?"
Can you be charitable to problems that you don't understand? I don't think so. If you gave your money away to anyone who asked, that's not charity.
>>> "Social programs to help the unemployed are, economically speaking, little different from something like TARP."
I disagree with that statement. The TARP is a calculated move by the government to prevent economic collapse. The motivation for it was self-preservation, not altruism.
(Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C)
It's likely that their parents or grandparents were "self-made" and also passed on their selfishness.
I always assumed it was empathetic based, poor being relatively close to and could easily be knocked down a rung to homeless/destitute. Were as rich fairly far removed from homeless/destitute experience and could not relate.
Also to the rich money is status, valuable, something you work hard and sacrifice for. To the poor money is something they just don't have.
Also poor receive (and need) more charity than the rich and may feel obliged to "give back" when they can. They at the very least are more likely to know how much a little charity can help.
You could simply give away your money by dropping dollar bills out of a hot air balloon, but most people wouldn't consider that as charitable as donating the same money to cancer research.
Perhaps the article truly is pointing out that the rich see charity as an investment where poor people see it simply as "giving extra money away."
What's with the assumption that charity should scale linearly with income? With the numbers they give, people making 250k wanted to give $5250 and people making 25k wanted to give $1400.
Well, not so much neighbours but harsh weather conditions. That is why socialism works in Sweden; people do their bit rather than trying to game the system.
Uh, why would anyone give away credits? It's a totally zero-sum game. The only way you can 'win' if is someone else is foolish enough to give you their credits.
If this is what the experiment was, though, I would question their methodology a bit; an important part of the Ultimatum game is that both partners have to think of one another as human—and therefore capable of irrationality. The partner anonymity in their experimental set-up creates (mental) distance between the partners, which encourages a more rational cost-benefit analysis, vs. the immediate "I should punish you for giving me such a bad deal" reaction you have to a real person. If the players realize this, they will benefit by acting more selfishly, because they can rely on their partner to not see them as "human enough" to be worth punishing.
* Correlation is not causation. Tell that to al gore!