Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

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I can't help noticing that the article lacked a study of the sort where they parked an open convertible with a MacBook in the back seat in several high-class neighborhoods and in several federal housing projects and measured mean time until theft. How might those numbers look, and might they be plausibly interpreted as saying something about ethics or greed?

Or maybe a professor could divide his undergrads randomly into two groups and send them one at a time for a 10pm stroll through either a high-class neighborhood or a housing project, keeping careful statistics of how many in each group have their money taken from them by violent means. Could differences in willingness to violently rob others be construed as saying something about differences in ethics or greed?

Of course the second study would never pass the research ethics board, but that's okay because, as it turns out, the police keep mountains of such statistics from the natural laboratory social scientists are supposed to be studying. Data on per capita "theft from vehicle" by neighborhood, per capita robbery, and so on, are easily available and could be incorporated into the study, except that...they wouldn't support the desired conclusion, making the study less helpful for promoting other agendas.

While your point about small-scale violence and theft of physical goods is well taken, the ultra rich have the opportunity to steal and commit violence on a scale undreamt of by the poor -- and these crimes are rarely the subjects of police statistics.

As the old saying goes, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries, and start wars with hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.

They get laws written in their favor, buy off politicians and judges, hide their gains in off-shore tax havens, and hire armies of high-paid lawyers to protect them -- with the effect that few of them suffer any consequences (rarely anything like the SWAT-style raids and hard jail time routinely inflicted upon the poor for far smaller offenses).

The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries...

Replace the first word, "the", with "some", and I'm with you. It's undeniably true. And "some" elite and ultra-rich do more good in the world than entire towns full of poor people. This is an observation about leverage, not about differences in average ethics by class.

It's reasonable to assume that the same housing project residents who are so willing to violently assault a passerby and take his wallet or swarm around a traffic accident, stealing what they can from the injured victims, would be willing to "commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries" if only they had the means to do so. That they don't do so is probably not a sign of higher ethical standards.

Here in Brazil a street pool asked two questions:

"Are politicians corrupt and steal public money?"

and

"If you were elected yourself, would you be corrupt and steal public money?"

The first had 90% of "YES" (no surprise here).

The second had a 60% of "YES"

This mean if you put a random person in office, 60% of chance they WILL steal. And 40% of chance they might fall into the group of real honest people, or people that steal but won't admit about it.

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