

The rich are different from you and me - bootload
http://www.economist.com/node/16690659

======
swombat
Counterpoints:

* Correlation is not causation.

* Poor people may often remain poor because they are not rational. Charity may not be a rational activity. So perhaps what they were measuring was not selfishness, but rationality.

* Being born in a rich family is correlated with a better education, so the point made in the article's last paragraph may be incorrect.

* I'm (currently) poor, but I don't think much of most organised charitable activities, or to giving money to homeless people. I think most charities are an utter waste, and giving money to homeless people only gets them buying alcohol and cigarettes. I'll happily give my sandwich to a homeless person on the street though. My suggested figure for "% of salary to donate to charity" is 0%, and will remain 0% for the rest of my life. However, once rich (assuming I get there), I'd be quite happy to devote years of my life to helping people directly (which may involve leveraging financial resources, but not donating money to charities).

* Average figures tell us little. What was the distribution? Did 90% of rich people suggest 0% and 10% of them suggested 50%? How did they get to the 2.1% figure?

* What kind of social pressure was there when asking people how much they would donate (of their credits, or of their salary)? Social pressure is a huge influence. Here on HN, an open-minded, thoughtful environment, I explain my views on charities above (even though I know I'll get some passionate replies). Sitting in a circle of people I don't know, I might still express these views (because I'm like that..) but most people probably would be wiser and keep those views quiet.

* What kind of social pressure was there before? What kind of social pressure did they expect after? Did people give an answer to please the examiner?

A lot of holes in this article, I think. Surprising, coming from a quality
publication like the Economist.

~~~
joshuacc
"Charity may not be a rational activity. So perhaps what they were measuring
was not selfishness, but rationality."

What grounds do you have for thinking that charity (and presumably altruism in
general) is irrational? Are you assuming that only self-interested actions can
be rational?

~~~
dminor
> Are you assuming that only self-interested actions can be rational?

That's pretty much the definition of "rational" as it is applied in Economics.
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory>

~~~
joshuacc
Indeed but "economic rationality" is a narrow subset of rationality as a
whole. And the lines I quoted above seemed to imply that charity is
irrational, not just "economically irrational."

~~~
billybob
Agreed - "economic rationality" is an extremely narrow concept. As an example,
it's "rational" to buy yourself a car or an ice cream cone, because you get
utility or enjoyment out of it. It's "irrational" to give money to others,
because... you don't get enjoyment out of it? Wait, what if you do? A giant
problem with the definition, methinks.

~~~
jbooth
Yeah, then there's the fact that approximately 0 people on earth conform to
the expectation of economic rationality.

"Hey, it looked like it'd work on the chart!"

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gyardley
A caveat: the findings of Piff's research are applicable only to his research
subjects, who are likely Berkeley undergraduates at the Social Interaction
Lab. Findings in psychological experiments don't carry across cultures. See
'The Weirdest People in the World?' for more:

<http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf>

That said, other researchers conducting Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game
experiments have found that higher-status individuals offer less to their
counterparts, even when the 'status' is entirely make-believe (for instance,
being told that they scored higher than their counterpart on a previously-
conducted test of skill - even though they were in fact randomly assigned to
their roles.) Researchers have also found that in Ultimatum Game experiments,
lower-status individuals were willing to accept less, even when the low status
was similarly make-believe.

In other words, Piff is making a somewhat politicized argument about wealth
and 'the rich', when he should be talking about status. I'd argue that all
this experiment shows is that American college undergraduates have
internalized that high status is deserved, and therefore it's fair for high
status people to retain a greater proportion of the benefits of status.

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roc
My own pet theory is that people simply have a harder time justifying the
giving of help/charity to people they do not know and/or understand.

e.g. It's easy to hate "the other" because you don't know them, you don't live
next door to them, you've never lived through what they've lived through, etc.
And this is amplified by those who benefit from the hate, and who slander with
strawmen and push for rules that maintain the separations and distinctions.
(DADT, segregation, most suburban zoning laws in the US, Arizona's new
immigration laws, etc)

Similarly, it's harder for rich people in the suburbs to support social
programs than even similarly rich people who simply live where they have more
contact with people of more economic classes. Even if neither set of rich
people had been personally poor.

Likewise, poor people --while more likely to give charity to other people who
are in situations they understand-- are still very skeptical of charity given
to "the other" (e.g. TARP)

Truly, some people have a strong philosophical belief and act accordingly. But
mostly, people are just skeptical of "the other" and act accordingly.

~~~
anamax
Humans find it very easy to hate people who they know.

See the middle east for an example.

~~~
roc
_know_ ?

Last I checked Israelis and Palestinians weren't generally living in the same
neighborhoods, subject to equal treatment under the same laws, shopping at the
same markets, etc.

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lee
Growing up relatively poor (at least for Western standards), it feels that I
can empathize with the poor a lot more than those who did not grow up
similarly.

You can read about poverty, imagine it, and have knowledge about it. But
unless you've experienced it first hand, you cannot truly understand what it's
like.

I think that understanding can lead people to be more altruistic.

~~~
yardie
I agree completely. A poster above was saying how giving to charities is a
waste and giving to the poor just means them getting drunk. I can assure you
the homeless drunk needs to eat at some point if he doesn't want to be dead in
a ditch. And the easiest way to do it is spare change.

I've met far too many people trying to do the noble thing by buying a sandwich
or milk. Completely oblivious to that persons dietary requirements. It would
have been far easier to give a dollar, let the poor guy figure out what he
wants to eat. If he buys alcohol he'll only get thirstier and hungrier.

~~~
gaius
It's quite normal to be asked for money to something to eat, but in 20 years
of saying, I'll buy you whatever you want to eat from this store, I've never
been taken up on the offer.

Another thing (in London anyway) is to be asked for money to stay in a shelter
overnight. Well the shelters are free, paid for by the local councils, and
always have spare beds.

I think if anyone did ever say, I need the money to get high, I'd probably
give it them, just because they'd be the first honest one...

~~~
ollysb
I once saw a couple of beggars in Barcelona sitting with three pieces of card
propped up next to a wall. The cards each had a title: whiskey, wine, and rum.
It raised a chuckle out of me and I did give them so money.

------
stcredzero
Old Japanese aphorism: "It's through suffering that we learn the true value of
kindness."

~~~
TGJ
"Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their
suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little."

(Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C)

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alexandros
If I may venture into armchair evolutionary psychology territory, this seems
to verifiy that humans evolved and use altruism as a survival strategy. A
person of lower status would have more to gain by investing in relationships
through altruism than a person who is already of high status or wealthy.

~~~
harscoat
I don't understand (or I am scared to understand?;). Do you mean we all
evolved towards altruism? then this is contradictory, if we evolved (over
1000s of years) towards altruism then one can not modify instantaneously his
evolved behavior depending contingently on if one belongs to the high or the
low class. Or do you mean that the altruism "gene"(or whatever) is expressed
_only_ when one is in lower class? and that Altruism behavior is only
expressed when survival is necessary, and is not a standard/general human
behavior.

~~~
alexandros
I don't see where the problem is with evolving context-specific altruism. We
have numerous strategies that we evolved and use in specific contexts.
Screaming, or crying or laughing for instance. Altruism could be another.

~~~
harscoat
ok and that answers my question. Altruism as one item in our evolutionary
library toolkit vs more deeply ingrained in our behaviors or even genes. My
hope is that it is selfishness which is more an item in our library... that we
evolved more towards being cooperators while still being able to defect (free-
riders) some times...

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Tycho
Yeah they are... They give away much more money through taxation (which the
article/study doesn't seem to consider. For instance, asking 'If you earned
$500 000 a year and lost 40% of it through tax, how much additional wealth
should you give away voluntarily,' is different from asking 'what percentage
of your income should you keep/lose?' Perhaps one believes all people should
keep the same portion of their income, and answered that lower income people
should give more to charity in order to compensate for their lower taxation.
The study misses this and the article concludes 'rich people think poor people
should give more.' It's also an easy explanation for why even when
hypothetically adopting a different income bracket, their attitudes
'changed').

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dmoney
_This revealed that whether high status was inherited or earned made no
difference--so the idea that it is the self-made who are especially selfish
does not work._

It's likely that their parents or grandparents were "self-made" and also
passed on their selfishness.

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njharman
I noticed this very strongly when I lived in SF re beggers.

I always assumed it was empathetic based, poor being relatively close to and
could easily be knocked down a rung to homeless/destitute. Were as rich fairly
far removed from homeless/destitute experience and could not relate.

Also to the rich money is status, valuable, something you work hard and
sacrifice for. To the poor money is something they just don't have.

Also poor receive (and need) more charity than the rich and may feel obliged
to "give back" when they can. They at the very least are more likely to know
how much a little charity can help.

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hnal943
The article defines "charity" in an incomplete way; simply _giving your money
away_ is only half of the equation. The other half of donating money is
finding the organization that will leverage it to the most good.

You could simply give away your money by dropping dollar bills out of a hot
air balloon, but most people wouldn't consider that as charitable as donating
the same money to cancer research.

Perhaps the article truly is pointing out that the rich see charity as an
investment where poor people see it simply as "giving extra money away."

------
endtime
>Upper-class participants said 2.1% of incomes should be donated. Lower-class
individuals felt that 5.6% was the appropriate slice. Upper-class participants
who were induced to believe they were lower class suggested 3.1%. And lower-
class individuals who had been “psychologically promoted” thought 3.3% was
about right.

What's with the assumption that charity should scale linearly with income?
With the numbers they give, people making 250k wanted to give $5250 and people
making 25k wanted to give $1400.

~~~
notahacker
Theoretically at least, people making 250k are far less likely to notice the
missing $5250 or even the missing $14k if they scale linearly: they'll consume
a much smaller proportion of income in the present and are much less likely to
encounter problems resulting from lack of savings in the future.

------
mrvir
One counterpoint for super rich:

<http://givingpledge.org/>

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scotty79
I read some time ago about tribe which members are extremely generous,
friendly and selfless. In research turned out that this tribe had in the past
many violent neighbors so close cooperation of tribe members was absolutely
necessary for survival. Tough environmental factors probably lead to increased
cooperation as well.

~~~
gaius
That tribe is called the Swedish :-)

Well, not so much neighbours but harsh weather conditions. That is why
socialism works in Sweden; people do their bit rather than trying to game the
system.

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tkahn6
Am I understanding this correctly? The study gave each participant 10 credits
and then said they could keep them or give them away and at the end, those
credits would be converted into real money.

Uh, why would anyone give away credits? It's a totally zero-sum game. The
_only_ way you can 'win' if is someone else is foolish enough to give you
their credits.

~~~
derefr
There's definitely something missing from the description of the experiment.
It sounds like the first half of the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game>. The second half—informing the
player that their hypothetical "anonymous partner" would get to decide whether
both, or neither, of them got the money—provides the incentive for the player
to cooperate. Selfishness could then be gauged by how often players still
choose "unfair" splits despite the chance of rejection.

If this is what the experiment was, though, I would question their methodology
a bit; an important part of the Ultimatum game is that both partners have to
_think_ of one another as human—and therefore capable of irrationality. The
partner anonymity in their experimental set-up creates (mental) distance
between the partners, which encourages a more rational cost-benefit analysis,
vs. the immediate "I should punish you for giving me such a bad deal" reaction
you have to a real person. If the players realize this, they will benefit by
acting more selfishly, because they can rely on their partner to not see them
as "human enough" to be worth punishing.

~~~
gyardley
This is a related but different experiment called the Dictator Game.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_game>

------
mrperfect
Counterpoints:

* Correlation is not causation. Tell that to al gore!

