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Shame on the Rich
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/02/shame-on-the-rich.html?ref=hp<snip>
To see whether dishonesty varies with social class, psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues devised a series of tests, working with groups of 100 to 200 Berkeley undergraduates or adults recruited online. Subjects completed a standard gauge of their social status, placing an X on one of 10 rungs of a ladder representing their income, education, and how much respect their jobs might command compared with other Americans.
The team's findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty. For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12—even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score.
When participants were manipulated into thinking of themselves as belonging to a higher class than they did, the poorer ones, too, began to behave unethically. In one test, subjects were asked to compare themselves with people at the top or the bottom of the social scale (Donald Trump or a homeless person, for example.) They were then permitted to take candies from a jar ostensibly meant for a group of children in a nearby lab. Subjects whose role-playing raised their status in their own eyes took twice as many candies as those who compared themselves to "The Donald," the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In another test, participants were asked to list several benefits of greed; they were given the example that greed can help further one's professional goals, then asked to come up with three additional benefits. Again, lower-class subjects whose attitudes toward greed had been nudged in this way became just as likely as their wealthier counterparts to sympathize with dishonest behavior (taking home office supplies, laying off employees while increasing their own bonuses, overcharging customers to drive up profits).
<snip>
Although this article might prompt some of us to go "duh", I think it is interesting to note that the study seems to show that greed isn't necessarily the natural state of "human nature" but is exacerbated and rewarded by a perceived change in status. Capitalists often argue that capitalism is teh only system that can keep our "natural" rapaciousness in check with some kind of punishment/reward structure that it presumably has. This study seems to argue quite the opposite, that being rewarded for unethical behavior leads to more anti-social behavior. I'm curious what other people's take on this is.
13 replies
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People are kind of like this emoticon: 
Everybody has got a good side and a greedy bastard inside. A better economic system that didn't encourage selfishness could lead to more overall happiness. Be careful though, it is the perception of one's own power and superior status that corrupts, not only economic class. That applies to anyone in a position of power and status over others. That could be a corporate CEO, or it could also be a government functionary.
I mean, they make it so easy! 
I just found this right before I saw your reply. This story is from *today*. Check this out!: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bonus-withdrawal-puts-bankers-malaise-050100338.html
Bonus Withdrawal Puts Bankers in "Malaise"
Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country's top 1 percent by income, doesn't cover his family's private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.
"I feel stuck," Schiff said. "The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach."
The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.
"People who don't have money don't understand the stress," said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. "Could you imagine what it's like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?"
I guess at this point I'd rather take my chances with a socialist government leader, than the system that props up the poor soul who has to cry in the lap of his therapist that his Wall Street lifestyle is not living up to his expectations.
I shouldn't collect these, they just make my class antagonism flare up.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/wealthy-woman-abuses-maid-658213
Feds Arrest Mansion Dweller In Servant Case
Illegal alien slept in closet, was paid .85/hour, complaint alleges
FEBRUARY 29--A New York woman who lives in a 34-room, 30,000-square-foot mansion is facing a federal criminal charge related to her employment of an illegal alien who allegedly served as a domestic servant in a “forced labor situation” that included her working 17-hour days, seven days a week, and sleeping in a walk-in closet.
Acting on a tip received by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, federal immigration agents last year removed the servant from the 12-acre estate (pictured below) on the Mohawk River in Rexford, a hamlet 20 miles north of Albany.
A subsequent criminal investigation determined that the woman--who barely spoke English and came from the Kerala state in India--was paid about 85 cents an hour during the 67 months she worked for Annie George and her husband (who died in a plane crash in mid-2009).
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The George estate has a helicopter pad, an indoor swimming pool, 15 fireplaces, Scandinavian marble flooring, a four-story solarium, 24-karat gold gilded ceilings, a glass elevator, and an array of other features. Before his death, George’s husband listed the residence for sale at $30 million.
They do seem like they live on a different planet. Sadly they do live on our planet.
I get furious too. Reading the Manifesto usually puts me back in a better frame of mind. Knowing that all of this isn't random, or 'nature' or destined to hang around forever is calming.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
In a perverse way, I suppose we are lucky that there are examples all around us these days, to point up that the class war is still very much alive. It seems to be getting much more simplified too.
was a "walk-in". And more room than she had in India. Wait for it.
