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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the status-quo dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Human beings largely object to income inequality and are willing to correct injustice—unless, of course, it rattles their status quo.

That's the conclusion of a recent study looking at how far people would go to redistribute resources between the haves and have nots. Participants fiercely objected to "when winners become losers and losers become winners," researchers note in the paper, published in the latest issue of Nature Human Behaviour.

Researchers initially recruited Indian, American, and Chinese participants take part in an experimental game they called "the redistribution game." The gist of the game was simple: Participants were given a number of scenarios that would redistribute a fixed sum from a richer person to someone poorer. Participants were told the original standing of wealth was assigned randomly.

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.

In the second version of game, participants were asked whether they'd transfer one coin to person B (where person A ended up with three coins and person B with two coins). Researchers ran a third and fourth scenario that allowed participants to transfer coins from person A to B, where the outcome still left person A with significantly more coins.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:46AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:46AM (#539797)

    One of the primary aversions to wealth reversal is that somehow those with the money "earned it, deserve it, got it because they are better and should be rewarded, etc." While there's some grains of truth in this, and we all like to believe that if we "play it smart, do the right things, contribute to society, etc." we will also be rewarded, what's missing from this picture are the incredible lottery aspects of life in a world with seven billion people who have, on _average_ far more than they need to not only survive but also prosper.

    There's the Charlie Daniels effect - give some people great piles of wealth and they will squander it - well, gee, can't give them more wealth, can we? Won't they just "waste" it? However, if you look at Charlie Daniels vs Steve Jobs, Charlie contributes to the world economy, keeps the money changing hands and creates jobs by spending (or, rather, giving back) his fortune, whereas Steve - on average - sat on most of his wealth, kept it squirreled away.

    There's the very serious problem of the "Trust fund baby" effect, where you give an average, or even below average, performing individual an advantaged start in the world and they end up in positions of great power, making not so great moves and decisions that affect thousands of lives simply because one of their ancestors happened to accumulate an unusually large pile of money.

    Then there's the simple lottery effect of who gets to cash in on their skills, talents and ambitions. You can have top 1% natural talents, top 1% developed skills honed through decades of development and ambition, and put it out there in the big wide world, make all the best contacts, shoot for all the big roles, and still fall flat - mostly un-recognized, receiving mediocre compensation in an also-ran role because those top 1% opportunities are mostly locked up by people with less talent, skill and ambition but better relationships with the important contacts, luck, timing and position. Also, many of the top 1% opportunities are de-facto lottery roles because the people who fill them have to have credible "every person" attributes, appearing to the masses like "anyone" could possibly aspire to that role and attain it.

    The one I'll never understand is the poor man who votes for people who will look out for his boss, because if their boss gets pissed off about some new regulation or cost of doing business then their lives are going to get worse when the boss does something petulant like lay a bunch of people off. These are people who seem to change not only jobs but whole career paths every few years, and yet they're worried about keeping the sucky job they currently have. Yeah, the "yacht tax" was a bad idea for the domestic yacht industry, but that's a rare example of an optional luxury - if you want to get ahead in the world, maybe you shouldn't be building shiny playtoys for people richer than you ever think you'll become. If one jerk gets out of a real industry like housing construction or food distribution because of a legislated increased cost of doing business, two more will step up to take over the work that the jerk turned down.

    So, yeah, on average, the wealthy "earned it" more often than the poor "deserved, but didn't get it", but it's a thin marginal difference, with huge numbers of wealthy who never did anything to deserve what they have, and huge numbers of less well off who could fill the roles of the wealthy and "do a better job" for everyone concerned, but will never get the opportunity.

    In other words: I see this as much more than an abstract: Bob has 4 and Charlie has 1, therefore it is unfair that afterwards Bob only has 2 while Charlie gets 3... we've got to know a little more about Bob and Charlie and what they are doing to "earn" this abstract reward. We also need to get past the mindset that wealth is a zero-sum game, that may be true in the financial trading markets, but it's not true in the larger actual working economy. I've got no problem with the early Chef at Google earning hundreds of millions with his stock options, or the CEO of Ben & Jerry's only earning 5x what an uneducated line worker makes moving product around the production floor.

    Maybe if we could get some realistic education going at the elementary school level about economics and where wealth comes from, we might get a better educated public who could guide their elected officials better than we have been for the last 50 years. Too bad that any such program would be seen as a political grooming project and subject to such extreme biases that it gets scrapped altogether because the various ideologies can't agree how the children should be indoctrinated.

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