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Comment by gnramires | Hacker News Reader

It's never as simple as simple economic models suggest :)

Some studies indicate poor people are more altruistic:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_poor_give_...

I won't express an opinion on who is more altruistic, [edit] because I don't think I have sufficient data to draw a broad conclusion. Studies on college campus like these always seem pretty weak to draw societal wide conclusions from. These tiny experiments are usually conducted on college students and often are not reproduce-able.

"In one of these experiments, the researchers, led by doctoral student Paul Piff, gave participants the opportunity to share $10 with an anonymous stranger. A few days earlier, the participants had all filled out a questionnaire in which they reported their socioeconomic status. The results showed that people who had placed themselves lower on the social scale were actually more generous than upper class participants were."

This strikes me as a pretty weak study to extrapolate to any society wide conclusions.

Having spent my childhood in one of the poorer corners of the globe, it tracks with what I experienced, for what it's worth. When folks don't have much, group sharing any bounty received, and being the recipient of others', is how people survive.

It may also be the case that a community more inclined towards socialism ('sharing any bounty') doesn't fair as well, and is disproportionately likely to be poor. Not saying that's the case, but it's one possible explanation of why poor communities would disproportionately exhibit that behavior.

I honestly think you have it in reverse. If you and your community are poor, the only way to survive is through cooperation. The folks that didn't participate? You don't see them because they didn't survive.

So yes, you see cooperative behaviors in the poorest of communities. Because other behaviors at that income level are incompatible with life!

I noticed you countered by using 'cooperation', a word found nowhere in my above comment. I do not think this is an accident, and calling me to have it 'in the reverse' of a word I never said is no doubt a deliberate and misleading framing on your part, although I admit it is rather clever

? I used cooperation as a synonym for sharing the bounty, which is think is perfectly reasonable. Please assume good faith in discussions here. HN is run differently than most internet fora.

Chicken/egg. Populations that share poverty traits practice collectivism to survive. But collectivism is a local maximum that prevents stronger traits from capturing benefit, and thus inhibits them from taking hold.

In the long run, non-collectivist populations develop an advantage through hard times and environments. Collectivist populations subsist, and nothing more.

A better study on US Army officers, though focused more on empathy and narcissism rather than altruism

https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2015.0680

I’ve been to over 40 countries and I can tell you this is true. The people that have the least are some of the most caring people, who will insist on feeding you even when they don’t have much food to give.

It is economic disparity that creates violence. Only when villas are in reach of a small poor town do you start to get petty muggings, scams and murders.

Can attest to this, numerous times I have been invited to dinner, helped tremendously for no reward and met with just pure humility from dalits (untouchables) when backpacking in India.

I am not claiming that people from other castes behaved badly, in contrary, but when you see how little those people have (ie 3 generations, or 10 members of family sleeping in 1 room 3x3m and that was their whole 'house' - just 4 super basic walls with no roof, nothing else). Coming back to my relatively crappy eastern european country where people constantly complain how poor they are compared to ie germany made me feel sad, ashamed and badly out of touch with my folks...

>It is economic disparity that creates violence. Only when villas are in reach of a small poor town do you start to get petty muggings, scams and murders.

I remember hearing about this in a Jordan Peterson video. The correlation between economic inequality and young make violence is apparently one of the strongest in all of sociology, and still applies regardless of the size of the geographical boundary you draw.

Historic studies on altruism often failed to account for all costs or benefits of certain actions. This led to results showing a great deal of altruism that later research overturned when scenarios were better crafted to control costs and benefits. It has been a while since I read the specifics but one example involved sales people who appeared to act altruistic and not take advantage of a seemingly oblivious shopper. Once the study was changed so that the specific sales person who took advantage of the shopper wasn't known to the researchers, only how often it happened, the altruism disappeared. There was a social currency of "appearing to be ethical" that was worth more than taking advantage of the shopper. Once that social currency was removed, the sales people reevaluated which options were most optimal.

This is all to say that any studies on altruism need to be scrutinized to see if some benefit or cost was missed in the experiment design.

That makes perfect rational sense to me. You would expect people who may come to rely on charity or who have relied on it in the past to be more charitable now.

If you're poor because predators (like police, the courts, a vindictive ex, whatever) take whatever wealth you have, then it might also make sense to be extremely benevolent with whatever you have before you get stolen. Then you'll get the social capital and when your neighbor has a good day you'll get some of that too. Almost like a method of decentralized banking.

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