
Money on the Mind [video] - rbanffy
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365029352/
======
skunkworks
> You, like a real rich person, start to attribute success to your own
> individual skills and talents, and you become less attuned to all of the
> other things that contributed to you being in the position that you're in.

Rather than hammer an obvious point about the general bias against social
services by the wealthy, I think it's more useful to point out the other side
of the coin, which is that many poor people are poor not because of a direct
lack of talent or skill but because of all the other things that contributed
to them being in the position that they're in. There was another post recently
on HN that compared poverty to a rogue background process that drains
willpower, and yet another one about how entrepreneurs are disproportionally
from well-to-do backgrounds. You can't take risks when you're poor, you don't
have mobility, you can't pay for childcare, you spend time clipping coupons
instead of reading... the list goes on.

~~~
maxharris
_you can 't pay for childcare_

Having children is a choice. There are no storks dropping babies into random
homes.

True, people do make bad choices for a variety of reasons (teen pregnancy, for
example), but nearly every parent, including teens, have _some_ idea that
children are a major responsibility that require a considerable amount of
care, attention and financial resources from their parents.

This is not simply a matter of social/economic conditions or of genes. I
remember being a teenager not all that long ago (I'm 32 now). The girls that
got pregnant all knew better - I remember sitting through the same lectures in
class that they did - but they made their choices.

So if it's not social conditions or genes, what is it?

I really think it boils down to ideas, which are accessible to anyone and
everyone:

1) Life is for keeps. You only get one go at it, and that's it!

2) Your own life matters most, and it is possible to make something of it, if
you try.

3) What's good for you does not come at the expense of other people.

4) How can you make your mark on the world if you're just starting out and all
of your spare time is spent changing diapers?

\---

Your ideas are not determined by your social/economic conditions.^ If the
ideas people held were simply a matter of economic conditions, no one would
ever rise out of poverty. (I'd supply some names, but it's better if you just
do a Google search for "poor people who became rich.")

^Nor are they determined by your genes - I won't delve into this because I'm
assuming that this point is obvious.

~~~
skunkworks
It's not just a choice in a vacuum, there are other things that contribute
significantly to you making right and wrong choices, and specifically when it
comes to making good life choices, a lot of those decisions are influenced
negatively by poverty.

~~~
growupkids
Citation please.

No but Seriously. This is just a series of platitudes: decisions are
influenced negatively by poverty? Yes, and some are influenced positively by
poverty, as in "this sucks and I don't want to be hungry anymore".

I know it motivated me to see my parents struggle, to eat government cheese,
and to move all the time because of the need for new work for my dad.
Experience is a great teacher, and it motivated me to not make the same
mistakes my parents made.

Its not a zero sum game. Even being poor isn't poor anymore. When I was
little, and we were poor, dirt poor in the backwoods of Tenessee we didn't
have a phone, we had one kerosene heater, we lived on a dirt road, no health
care, and we got our milk from the neighbors cow ( real milk kids is gross ).
Compare that with the average "poor" person today, cell phone, government
health insurance, clean safe water to drink, a government provided debit card
to go shopping ( no govt cheese for them), paved roads!

Yep, life's tough. They'll never get out of poverty. Maybe you're right. If
it's too nice, why bother. I definitely didn't want to be backwoods poor, it
positively influenced my decisions. I ain't poor no more.

~~~
skunkworks
You're welcome to dismiss my argument as a series of platitudes, but you
should also agree to allow me to dismiss your story as a platitude, about how
you were so determined not to be poor that it drove you to succeed.

I'm not actually dismissing your story -- I am in no position to judge fairly
-- but I'm trying to point out that the fundamental attribution bias and the
closely related actor-observer bias
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias))
are both powerful. What if your personality type made it such that you had a
high likelihood of success whether you were rich or poor?

Finally, with all this talk about "choice", let me go ahead and throw out a
controversial statement: we have a lot less free will than we want to believe
we do.

------
javert
There may be a real finding here: If you perceive yourself as rich, you act
more _confidently_ , other things being equal.

However, behaving more confidently does _not_ necessarily make you less
ethical. This work is constructing false ethical standards, and then "crying
wolf" when people don't reach them. For instance:

(a) There is no _moral_ reason that one person should go through the crosswalk
before the other. One has to go through before the other. (I hate the feeling
of making cars stop for me because it wastes the car's momentum.)

(b) If a moderator tells you that you can eat the candy, presumably there is
surplus candy. Otherwise, they wouldn't tell you that you could eat it! Unless
they're a dick. That lady did not come off as being a dick.

Frankly, there are lots of highly ethical and highly unethical people across
all "class" boundaries. I know that from personal experience and observation.

I could keep going, but hopefully I've given some evidence that this video _is
not science._ It's blatantly irrational. Maybe the paper is better than the
video, but I'd be surprised.

------
twoodfin
There was a previous discussion a couple of months ago on hn about this fairly
silly set of "studies":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122707)

The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than
study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to be
rich or poor:

"We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower
social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior."

~~~
gwern
> The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than
> study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to
> be rich or poor:

Because if you did that, then people would instantly start attributing it to
the past history of the rich vs the poor folks or something! The whole point
of the lab manipulation is to start with a homogenous group of people,
randomize, and then observe the effect of giving them some small amount of
power.

~~~
tedunangst
It's a good thing none of the people pretending to be rich or poor had any
preconceived notions of how ethical those groups are.

~~~
gwern
And it's a good thing that none of the psychologists told the subjects 'please
mentally imagine that you are Warren Buffett'. ಠ_ಠ What on earth sort of
manipulations do you think they're using? Seriously.

~~~
mentat
I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the
possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a
Berkley student. This is where people got pepper sprayed for Occupy. They're
going to have a bias...

~~~
gwern
> I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the
> possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a
> Berkley student.

I am ignoring it because if you bother to read the papers and look at their
manipulations, there is no reason to expect the manipulations which increase a
subject's 'wealth' or 'power' by trivial amounts to then trigger cultural
preconceptions or ideologies about plutocracy and 'the rich'.

To be honest, once you've read the actual papers, the main question becomes
the _opposite_ of what you and the other commenters are claiming! These
manipulations are so minor and represent so little real 'wealth' or 'power'
that it's not clear why I should expect these results to have any meaning in
the external non-laboratory world.

------
bluekeybox
> You, like a real rich person, start to attribute success to your own
> individual skills and talents, and you become less attuned to all of the
> other things that contributed to you being in the position that you're in.

Now let's do a simple switcheroo on this one: "You, like a real poor person,
start to attribute failure to external causes, and you become overly attuned
to all of the other things that may or may not have contributed to you being
in the position that you're in."

So which one is the norm? Is the norm poor people attributing failure to
external causes (as well as other people) or is rich people attributing
success to themselves the norm? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle
perhaps?

~~~
manicdee
What evidence do you have to support your thesis of poor people attributing
their situation mainly to external factors?

And why can't both be true? Is it possible that humans innately attribute
success to themselves and failure to their environment?

~~~
bluekeybox
> And why can't both be true?

I did express that possibility (I said, "or is the truth somewhere in the
middle perhaps?"). In fact I have reasons to believe that that is the case.

------
gexla
Maybe this should be a template for the poor. The rich just play the system
better than everyone else. Give a hustler a set of rules and that hustler will
push those rules as much as possible, even to the point of going over the line
at every opportunity. If you want something, you have to grab it, and you have
to beat out the competition who are also looking to grab theirs.

ETA: The monopoly experiment was interesting. The game was rigged so that the
person running the experiment would always win. When asked, the "rich" felt
they should win. The video called this entitlement, but perhaps the rich see
these rules of Monopoly as the same sort of bullshit rules the real world
imposes on them. All games are rigged by someone, so you have to do a bit of
cheating to turn the odds.

~~~
aspensmonster
>All games are rigged by someone, so you have to do a bit of cheating to turn
the odds.

Just don't get caught. And if you do get caught, make sure you have enough
money to not get thrown in prison for years or decades. Make sure that if you
do get thrown in jail, you have a hidden nest egg to return to. Make sure that
if you escape jail but not civil fines, that you still have a hidden nest egg
to return to.

>Maybe this should be a template for the poor.

Wait a second...

~~~
gexla
This assumes that I was talking about straight up criminal behavior, which I
wasn't.

I was talking more about pushing the law into the gray area. Should Uber be
allowed to operate in NYC when taxis are regulated? Should AirBNB be allowed
to compete with hotels? I think the founders of these services knew they could
run into problems, but they chose to take the risk anyways. I think this is
more of a risk oriented mind-set. People who aren't willing to take on risk
may not even dare to get close to the edges.

It's only after the financial crisis that people were wondering if we should
be locking a bunch of people up who were partly responsible for the mess. Did
anyone go to jail? I don't know, but the list of people who did is probably
pretty short. Obviously the people involved were pushing their rules as far as
they could go.

Apparently even the government will do this. The NSA obviously pushed their
given rules as far as they could, possibly into illegal territory, but still
gray enough that it isn't obvious that we should be locking people up.

And laws change because a situation may not be obviously illegal. One day your
actions may be illegal. Another day they may be fine. Again, separating those
two lines is a bit of gray area. Perhaps successful people are there partly
because they are more willing to push. Some may call this unfair and cheating.
But that person may still walk if the issue was brought to court.

The world isn't fair. Sometimes it's the strongest and most ruthless people
who win. The U.S. ended WW2 with a nuke and still has a lot of power through a
superior military. Sometimes the U.S. will play by the rules, sometimes not.

I think people who are highly successful may tend to see that the rules aren't
always solid. Sometimes they may be more like the edge of a rising and falling
tide. Less successful people may see the rules as like prison walls. Not only
do you not try to test them, you don't even get close to them.

------
jsonmez
Simple experiment to prove this theory wrong: drive to a poor neighborhood at
night and walk around...

------
nostromo
How does he square his findings (which are unearthing pretty mild
transgressions) with, say, data about wealth in relation to violent crime?

~~~
jammur
It would seem obvious why there might be a negative correlation between wealth
and violent crime. Violent crime essentially has the lowest barrier to entry.
I'd have to imagine that if poor people had the option to choose white collar
crime over violent crime, they would.

~~~
MaysonL
Depending upon how you define violent crime: war is rarely started by the
poor.

~~~
jlgreco
How many rich people do you think are responsible for starting wars in the
past century?

Being _as loose_ with "rich person starts a war" as possible, I really can't
see that number going higher than the low hundreds. Peanuts, in the grand
scheme of things.

~~~
yohanatan
That's astonishingly naive. Who sets corporate, national and international
policies?

~~~
jlgreco
I am including those people in my "low hundreds of rich people" guess. Lets
say for the sake of discussion that Oil Barons are responsible for Iraq... how
many of those are there actually? _How many_ rich oil barons are responsible
for Iraq?

The point of being rich and powerful enough to start wars is that there aren't
many other people like you. Being unusually powerful and being common are
mutually exclusive.

~~~
yohanatan
And what percentage of all 'rich people' is that number? I would venture that
it is quite high. Certainly a much higher percentage than the number of poor
people responsible for these wars (which I think was OP's point).

~~~
jlgreco
> _And what percentage of all 'rich people' is that number?_

A very _very_ small percentage. _Currently_ there are _several million_
millionaires in the US alone. Now, the question isn't _" are rich people
responsible for starting more wars than poor people"_. Of course the answer is
"rich".

The question is whether poor people or rich people are more unethical. Poor
people have a very disproportionate amount of violent crime. Rich people have
a disproportionate amount of war-starting. However few rich people get a
chance to start a war.

I don't doubt for one second that poor people commit more crime per capita
than rich people start wars per capita. Maybe somebody can work out those
numbers, but it seems plain enough for me to not even bother.

~~~
MaysonL
Lots of rich people lobby for wars, and support wars, and get richer off of
wars. Poor people not so much (except perhaps those who go fight, and take
exceptional advantage of things like the GI Bills.)

------
skidoo
I'd say that wealthier people commit crimes over not having what they want,
whereas not so wealthy people commit crimes over not having what they need.
There's a mighty big divide between greed and desperation.

~~~
Kudzu_Bob
And what those not-so-wealthy people need is money for drugs.

~~~
wavefunction
Craziest fiends I ever met came from wealth and means

~~~
jlgreco
What do you think the chances are that the guy who broke into my car a few
months ago (only to steal a few dollars in toll quarters I had in the center
console) came from wealth and means? If you were a bookie, what odds would you
put on that?

~~~
gph
That's a bad use of statistics. There are significantly less wealthy people
than poor people, so any single instance is going to be much more likely to be
perpetrated by a person from a poor background. That doesn't prove that people
from poverty are more likely on aggregate to break into your car.

------
nugget
"Behind every great fortune is a great crime."

------
ballard
I disagree with the findings being a blanket truth.

I encounter a great many persons that appear to maintain their own internal
pride by practicing anonymous civility in the everyday world. So much so that
it becomes almost competitive courtesy that eats a little extra time. I'm fine
with some of that. Perhaps the strategy is selfish shrewdness: to prevent
misunderstandings that could be very costly.

------
mentat
It's a natural psychological process for people to attribute to themselves
good outcomes and to attribute to others bad outcomes. This seems to twist
that to same something about ethics. Also, the playacting by undergraduates
some of whom may have been pepper sprayed by agents of the 1% (in their view)
seems not exactly unbiased.

------
ccarpenterg
Well when it comes to business you can replace words like unfair and unethical
with a term like 'competitive advantage'.

~~~
mathgladiator
So, I have no problem with "unfair" as a competitive advantage since that's
kind of the point of having an advantage (i.e. to not be fair). I'm not sure
about unethical; would you care to illustrate?

~~~
ccarpenterg
Something could be perceived as unethical by a poor person but as ethical by a
rich one.

~~~
ballard
Ethical relativism

------
robomartin
So, Steve Jobs was a criminal? Obama? Bono?

I ask because such icons usually short circuit the synapses of zealots who
have been indoctrinated into believing that making money, being well paid or,
in general, busineses, corporations are evil. All are evil until you bring up
Apple. CEO's are money grubbing bastards, until you bring up Steve Jobs.
Bleeding heart liberal artists are cool and "one of us" while reality is that
they earn tens of millions of dollars per year doing relatively little. My
favorite new example being Bono who, while pulling at everyone's heart strings
is, behind the curtains, evading taxes in Ireland through some machination
involving passing money through The Netherlands. Yet, he isn't evil. Other's
are evil, but these examples never are.

Given that the average profile of HN posters is on the young side it is easy
to see that there's a fair degree of indoctrination at play here. This comment
is likely to be mercilessly down-voted, as is anything that points out that
the emperor has no clothes.

I don't know what it takes for someone to see past their indoctrinated
beliefs. I do not necessarily want to have you see things my way but rather
see that you think things through and don't opine as you are told but rather
after carefully studying and understanding the facts. Yes, that's hard work,
particularly when your Pavlovian reflex is to do exactly the opposite. You say
"Burn the witch!" while not making an effort to determine if she is, in fact,
a witch.

One can't escape using Obamacare as an example of this. Unions, through the
same Pavlovian reflex, militantly supported this abomination. Lots of people
tirelessly pointed out that it was a mess. Nobody listened. Now we have a
remarcable scenario where Jimmy Hoffa, Teamsters president says something like
this in a letter published in The Wall Street journal[0]:

"Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a
problem; you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of the ACA are
severe. Perverse incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios:"

This is the consequence of indoctrination of the masses. Of cargo cult
thinking. Of sheep, not independent humans. Call it what you wish.

Wake up and snap out of this bullshit thinking. In the US the poor are poor
because most of them don't want to make an effort, not because they are being
oppressed. I know a number of them. They just don't care. In the meantime poor
immigrants come to the US without command of the language, work their asses
off and succeed. I personally know a guy who slept in his car for nearly six
months while launching a delivery service. Now, years later, he owns several
homes and employs dozens of people. Yet assholes like those who might write
articles like the OL might call him a greedy bastard, even a criminal.

I also know entrepreneurs who have literally died (dead as a nail) from the
effort and stress of navigating a business through rough waters.

There are also poor that are so through circumstances outside their control.
These people should receive our help and compassion. Can we lift absolutely
everyone out of poverty? Nope. Won't happen. A friend of mine lost his brother
to alcoholism. They tried every form of intervention they could think of.
Every welfare check he'd go get drunk. One day they found him dead behind a
7-eleven due to exessive alcohol consumption. You can't save them all. And.
Yes, welfare has created generations of perennially poor families without the
drive or interest to elevate themselves in any imaginable way.

Th subject of poverty is complex. Don't believe everything you are told,
regardless of the source --myself included. Listen to all points of view. Get
some life experience. Then decide.

[0] [http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-
intelligence/2013/07/12/union...](http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-
intelligence/2013/07/12/union-letter-obamacare-will-destroy-the-very-health-
and-wellbeing-of-workers/)

------
chrischen
I wonder at what level of wealth people start believing they are above the
law.

And also, what percentage. I'm sure most wealthy people after some level
believe they are above the law. The law is designed for the average person,
and they probably believe they are above average, therefore, above the law.

~~~
kylebrown
Everybody believes that its necessary to bend the law, that is universal.

Another thing is that rich folk will not admit to being upper-class, it must
be considered bad form to do so. The rich consistently categorize themselves
as "upper-middle" class (because they are always comparing themselves to the
ultra-rich rather than the middle-class). If they were to ever read a study
like this, it would never be about them, only about the folks richer than
them.

