
Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor - urahara
https://qz.com/1026390/humans-want-equality-researchers-found-as-long-as-the-rich-stay-rich-and-the-poor-stay-poor/
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lloydsparkes
I think this article misses a key point about fairness that seems to be
ignored (I have not read the underlying paper, so perhaps its bad journalism)

In this scenario:

"In the first scenario, participants had to decide if they wanted to transfer
two coins from person A (who already had four coins) to person B (who had
one). Researchers note the “transfer would reduce inequality,” (as there’s
less of a gap between them), but person B would end up one coin richer than
person A, reversing their status."

"Just 45% accepted the redistribution when it changed the hierarchy."

They have focused on changing the hierarchy, and this is where fairness comes
in.

Should people who have "wealth" be forced to a redistribution mechanism, where
that person ends up poorer than everyone else? - Its one thing to redistribute
for to reduce or eliminate inequality, its another to make them poorer than
everyone else (even if the overall equality is reduced)

So I don't think its about maintaining the hierarchy, but a sense of fairness
in the redistribution

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tw04
I mean, it's interesting but a bit flawed. When you've got 5 coins total and
you're saying someone has to be a loser. Why not do the experiment with 4
coins? I don't think humans want equality "as long as the rich stay rich and
the poor stay poor" \- that's a pretty poor summary of the findings.

What the findings DID discover, and shouldn't be surprising to anyone, is that
45% of people think it's unfair for you to take so much away from the person
who "has money" that they end up with less than the person who you're
supposedly helping.

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weberc2
I'm surprised that only 45% of people think this is unfair. That's a
disappointingly low number.

~~~
tw04
Well, I think that's because the premise of how they first acquired the money
is that it was "completely random".

So ya, if Bill Gates randomly started pulling names out of a hat and handing
out money, I think people would tend to feel less bad about that money being
redistributed than something that was actually earned.

~~~
LyndsySimon
In that circumstance, the money _was_ earned - by Bill Gates. Why should
stealing it from him make someone feel less bad than stealing it from someone
else?

~~~
jakelazaroff
GP is saying the reverse: that people shouldn't feel bad if the money that
Bill Gates hands out randomly is redistributed _again_ , since none of the
people he gave it to initially had earned it.

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arcanus
If the world actually equitably shared wealth, the western would have an
absolutely astounding drop in our incomes and quality of life. Few would
accept this. The average person in the first world has a massively higher
quality of life than developing countries.

This is why the only long term answer is technological development, without
which we would all still be subsistence farming (and all poor). It would be
nice if we had more social advances coupled with this, but that is predicated
on human nature taking a different turn than it has historically acted.

~~~
freneticfox
While the average quality of life in the western world is still currently
higher than the global average, there have been recent data points in the US
that globalization has drug certain subsets of the US down to 3rd-world levels
of life quality[1][2]. Globalization is desirable on many levels and
happening, and it is already beginning to pull down on the bottom end of
western society (and similarly, pull upwards on the bottom end of non-western
societies).

What we're getting is globalization (which essentially causes equalization
across geographic/national boundaries) without wealth redistribution (within
national legal boundaries), which means that while the global average scales
are slowly equalizing, there will continue to be a vast split between the rich
and poor everywhere.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_County,_West_Virginia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_County,_West_Virginia#Life_expectancy)
[2] [https://www.sanders.senate.gov/life-in-mcdowell-
county](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/life-in-mcdowell-county) \- "Men in
McDowell County have the same life expectancy as men in Namibia"

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TheAdamAndChe
That is an interesting study, but it isn't too surprising to me. I think most
people recognize that a certain level of inequality is natural, and is often
driven by legitimate differences in personal character and discipline. I think
the aspect of inequality in America that irritates most people is the degree
of inequality combined with the fact that it's only the rich that is
experiencing an improving quality of life. This on top of the fact that
inequality is being driven less by differences in personal character and more
by differences in the return on capital vs return on labor. There are
multimillionaires who aren't any better than the rest of us, but because they
have significant stores of capital, they do much better than the rest of us.

~~~
CalRobert
One thing that's forgotten, I think, is that some degree of income inequality
is a natural result of giving people freedom to choose how to live their
lives. Person A might say "I want to have lots of cool stuff so I'll work 12
months a year" and earn 100k. Person B might say "I want to stop and smell the
roses so I'll work 6 months a year" and live off of 50k.

Sadly, this isn't really possible. By designing a system in which you more or
less start life indebted, health care is tied to full time employment, and you
will be forcefully removed from land that isn't "yours" (though really it was
stolen a few centuries ago from a peasant or a native American for most of the
world) the latter option is removed from a lot of people.

We've somehow built the worst of both worlds, I worry, with near-feudal
degrees of inequality (though admittedly the baseline is higher), combined
with reduced individual freedom and leisure to live the life one chooses with
respect to balancing work and life.

Sometimes I wonder if more of the poor, given the choice, would prefer to live
a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle like that of people thousands of years
ago, if only we hadn't made it illegal via enclosure.

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infiniteparamtr
It's easy to fall into this trap of thinking that we need to hold out our
hands and ask (beg?) for wealth distribution. But this mentality of expecting
someone else to come to the rescue is why we remain "poorer" than these other
people. Especially now that we all have access to the world's information - it
should be easier than ever to take care of ourselves and even coordinate
boycotts of useless goods and services that the rich rent-collectors use to
reap the harvest of proletarian dollars.

The founders of places like America and Rome were self-sufficient agrarians.
The appeal of these places was that they were new and independent of other
powers. The people that settled there were escaping the rich city folk in
cultures that had already been developed.

But a century of rapid industrialization has yielded less capable, reliant
people that have gradually lost their way of providing for themselves. Media
has poisoned the minds of economic participants, from a young age, to desire
more/bigger things than their neighbor, and that is a primary factor in the
simple desire to be "rich".

These days there aren't really any new areas like these aforementioned to
"discover" and cultivate (perhaps Alaska, but this place is not for weak
people which in turn makes it exclusive to more virtuous citizenry).

Constant growth and expansion at all costs is what cancer cells do.

"You're an entrepreneur, so you're wanting to grow your business. How do you
grow?"

"I'll throw you a curve ball - we don't want to grow."

[https://youtu.be/4MdFSbFlksI?t=1118](https://youtu.be/4MdFSbFlksI?t=1118)

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opportune
Not really sure why this is surprising to anyone. In many cases the wealthy
become so through "unfair" or non-merit based means such as inheritance, luck,
personal connections, etc. But in many cases, wealth is also earned. A doctor
probably does "deserve" to have a $500k house more than a cashier. It wouldn't
make sense for the cashier to receive more than the doctor just because they
were poorer to begin with. Actually justifying such a transfer doesn't even
compute for me.

The author interprets this as preserving the hierarchy, but I think that's a
bit of a stretch. I think people don't want to live in a system that could
result in their own wealth being used to enrich others to their own detriment.
Sure, taxes and redistribution schemes do that, and you could argue that
that's the whole point of capitalism (in the other direction), but it seems
perverse and unfair for people to take so much from the wealthiest that the
poor end up richer than the wealthy were to begin with.

~~~
anodari
Why did the cashier not have a medical degree, too? If we consider only the
effort of each one, we could think that the cashier was lazy? But he may also
have the misfortune of being born with less intelligence or in poor social
conditions, and the effort he would have to do to equate himself with the
doctor would be impossible to attain. This could be a problem of the
meritocracy.

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matt_wulfeck
In my experience people want equality but only among their peers. For example
even the poor living in the US are the 1% of the developing world, yet
everyone would object to us taxing the poor here to send it to the
Philippines.

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bluGill
The study says NOTHING about wanting the poor to stay for. What the study says
is people are unwilling to make a change. This is a very different idea from
wanting that someone else to stay poor.

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saint_fiasco
This looks like loss aversion + empathy.

The subjects believe (correctly) that people feel worse about going down in
rank than they feel would feel good about going up in rank.

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vixen99
In other words, what humans want and what they actually do, are rather
different. When made public the wanting is called virtue signalling and often
provides benefits at no or minimal cost and thus it's popular. Example:
[https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/corbynistas-believe-
in-...](https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/corbynistas-believe-in-socialism-
until-the-bill-arrives/) ('corbynistas-believe-in-socialism-until-the-bill-
arrives').

~~~
lostmsu
IMHO, better way to think about it is that humans claim they want not
something they really want.

