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I'm not wealthy, I have to work, but I'm far more affluent than anybody in my family has been. I've given this some thought and here's my belief:
You grow up and for whatever reason, your ambition is to accumulate wealth. You make sacrifices. You invest yourself. You trade years; your 20s, your 30s. You make a fortune.
Your bank account is full, but to your surprise you're still hungry. The money you've been chasing your whole life, it turns out, does not have magical powers to make you happy. The thing that was supposed to offer you fulfillment and peace didn't work. And that sucks. You deny it, for years probably, or forever. And you get angry about it. Lashing out. High taxes and entitlements are the problem, or pan handlers, welfare and obamacare, all the people with their hands in your pocket. And it all just pisses you off.
None of this is fact, of course, just my belief. I'm trying to learn from these lessons as best as I can. So far I give myself a C+ at best.
It's so tempting to engage this conversation on its premise, it's such a popular idea to say there must be something bad about people who have more money, but this article is so unscientific and has so many problems it just hurts. It's like eating bacon and marshmallows; so satisfying to do, but so bad for your health.
The very headline is a push-poll, suggesting the answer before a question is asked. The first piece of evidence is trash data. The consequence for breaking traffic laws is a fine that hurts poor people more than rich people. There's no direct evidence presented between breaking traffic laws and being "mean". The interactive questionnaire asks a bunch of questions about whether you would do things that hurt unspecified mega-corporations. Monopoly money is fake money that's part of a game where the rules are specifically designed to pit opponents against each other so they'll do mean things, it's impossible not to play monopoly meanly.
What does this all mean?
NOTHING.
I've always been suspicious of these types of broad psychology studies. They always seem to make claims that go beyond what their data says.
Laboratory experiments where the people know it's an experiment don't seem like they should be able to say things like "rich people act meaner." There's just so many variables that could be different--for example rich people might be more competitive and a lab environment makes them feel more like they're playing a game than dealing with real wealth and well being.
For the car experiment, he's not really looking at rich people, he's looking at people who choose to buy an expensive looking car and live in the Bay Area. Notably, there are a number of people who live in the bay area, are quite wealthy, and drive a car that doesn't show off their wealth. He also says "hundreds" in the video when his paper[1] says 152, notably with n=5 for those with a car rated 1. The methodology also states that they didn't actually record the car type, they just guessed based the cost at the time based on what they saw.
They claim the observer was blind to the study's hypothesis, but the task was to record on a scale of 1-5 how expensive he or she thought the car was and whether they stopped for a pedestrian. It doesn't take half a brain to figure out what the hypothesis they were testing was.
Okay, so rich people act meaner.
But does that mean money makes you mean?
Maybe mean people are more likely to get rich.
Or maybe mean tendencies are evenly distributed, but rich people are more likely to think (quite rationally, I imagine) that they can get away with being mean, so they tend to act more meanly.
The article itself gives plenty of reason to doubt that "rich people act meaner." Attempts to replicate these studies resulted in opposite conclusions or no conclusion at all.
Among the poor, there are compensating factors against the rich man's "I can get away with it", such as perhaps:
- "I have nothing to lose"
- "I'm too stupid/drunk/irresponsible to consider the consequences".
If only the poor stopped being so stupid and irresponsible, maybe they could pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
I know you jest, but there is a subset of the poor that absolutely could pull themselves out of it if they stopped being stupid and irresponsible. Certainly not a large subset, but a subset nonetheless.
From the small cross-section of lower income people I personally knew while working for a factory, there were several people held back by their record, several held back by various substance abuse issues (including some issues which were ongoing and others that led to direct problems at work/getting fired), and at least one person born to a well-off family who was completely unable to support himself due to various anger/substance issues.
The longer-term employees (i.e. the most responsible of the bunch, due to selection effects) were, in general, able to move up a little. Their kids have some hope of ending up with much better jobs than their parents. They really were moving on up and I did what I could to help those I could help that happen.
The less responsible folks were drinking away their paychecks for the most part. Several of them migrated to other, similar jobs after weeks or months after failing to show up to work after getting paid a few times. This is a common enough occurrence that people have little doubt about what a no-call, no-show means in those circumstances on average and they do not permit such things to become regular.
I'm hopeful that better access to internet education will allow the more industrious among those who have been trapped by their circumstances to move beyond them. But education is part of the problem for most of them. In spite of having completed high school, for the most part, a lot of them were simply unaware of all the great things on the internet these days that could help them.
But... that's true for a lot of people, not just the working poor. I mean, just the other day, I was telling a lifestyle business owner of all the simple things he could do to expand his business online (most of which I learned from reading patio11). It's surprising what teaching someone a few searches might enable.
Hmm, where do more emergency calls related to domestic violence originate? Rich neighborhoods or poor ones?
(This is not rhetorical: does someone have the facts? It's easy to have an obvious stereotype about this.)
Here is a map of greater Seattle with crime statistics overlaid:
http://web6.seattle.gov/mnm/statistics.aspx?tabId=3
Here is one of the only income maps I could find: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/files/2013/12/politics...
It looks like the yellow areas correspond to higher rates of assault, but things aren't so clear cut as you move away from the relatively densely populated Seattle area.
is domestic violence caused strictly by meanness? would it be reported equally as likely between the rich and poor neighborhoods?
IMHO domestic violence has complex roots and it wouldn't be beneficial to try and draw any conclusions by finding correlations with one variable.
Does your definition of domestic violence include spanking? If not, why not? Is spanking not violence that happens in the home? Is spanking not violence against those who have even less choice than their parents of moving away?
If you do include spanking in your definition of domestic violence, then I think you won't find the numbers you're looking for.
The only 100% relevant statistic that gives us comparative meanness would be ... some sort of measure of meanness itself!
Since we don't have that, numbers like reported violence can serve as indirect estimators.
If spanking were reported, then it could certainly be used as an estimator of meanness. Spanking is aggression, but less violent than giving someone a black eye, obviously. Depends on the spanking too. Back of the hand versus palm? Head versus buttock? ...
Are you suggesting women are getting black eyes as much as children are being spanked? Is getting spanked 936 times a year as a 4 year old less violent than getting a black eye as a grown woman who has access to friends, cars, the police, weapons, means of negotiation, and so on?
Indeed the numbers we have are only indirect estimators. That was my point. Who cares what the numbers are if we are not going to do anything to protect the defenseless from being beat up daily and by the millions.
I won't even address your disrespectful disdain of this issue by suggesting it matters what part of the hand it is used to hit a defenseless human being, or where they are hit, but I will compare it to asking if the rapist used a condom, and which orifices were involved.
> Are you suggesting women are getting black eyes
/me rereads what /me wrote.
I don't see anything even remotely resembling such a claim anywhere, sorry.
I'm way nicer now that I'm not broke any more
Stupid article. Example, referring to the dictator game: "Rational economics would say the poorer person should keep more for themselves, the richer person should give more away." No, rational economics says the dictator should keep it all. If he really wants to give some of it away, it's better to give it to a person of his choosing after the experiment is over rather than giving it to an unknown person in the course of the experiment.
Upon reading the article, I recalled seeing a Ted talk from Paul Piff himself about his study. So here it is, dug up from history: http://go.ted.com/5D7 [2013]
Yes.