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Are Rich People Less Moral?
sciencehabit writes "New research suggests that the upper classes are more likely to behave dishonorably than those lower on the economic spectrum. The rich are more likely to cheat, steal, and even disobey traffic laws than those with less money and power (abstract). Curiously, in one experiment, Prius drivers also behaved badly, regardless of their wealth."
It's just easier to get rich if you're amoral to begin with.
It's the sense of entitlement (perhaps appropriate for some rich people...not even remotely appropriate for the Prius drivers) that does it. When someone sees their job/life/goal as being "important", they figure that they should be "allowed" a bit more leeway. I doubt it's a conscious decision on their parts (at least for most), but I've noticed the same thing: The higher up on the totem pole you get, you notice an increase in the undeserved entitlements that are claimed.
Money doesn't spoil character, money reveals character.
Most people haven't fully gauged their inert moral capabilities, I'd suspect. Most of it is adapted and constructed, and once people get rich and have access to power and independace from others, it's these flaky concepts of morality that disintegrate.
Someone with real character and moral concepts that one does not neccesarly derive from the need to be nice to other people due to scarce resources is more likely to maintain his values, wether he is rich or not.
It's for this reason that I'm very curious about what would happen with my behaviour if I, for whatever reason, should someday turn rich. I like to believe that only little of my character and my behaviour towards other people would change, but never the less I'd be curious to know if that actually is the case.
However I do believe that most people reveal an underdeveloped character when exposed to certain amounts of wealth over longer periods of time. Today education througout the world rarely focuses on values independant of economic wealth - which shows how poor humanity actually is.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That would be more communistic. Also, be careful what you wish for. On a global scale, you may well discover that you are the 1%.
Give someone a sense of 'empowerment' or 'better than you' and it's amazing what their conscience will let them get away with.
see also def. Anonymous Coward
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I'm only risking my own damfool neck, I can at most cause others a dent.
Not sure if you truly believe this or if it was just an illustration, but cyclists that disobey traffic laws are putting others lives at serious risk. If people lacked in morality they would just run you over for being where you should not have legally been. As a matter of fact in many places it would be illegal for them to not at least attempt to avoid a collision with you. In the act of avoiding you, while you break the law, there is a high potential of causing a far more serious accident. So please, if you do justify breaking the law, make sure you realise your just making excuses and don't have any legitimate grounds for that justification.
or Compassion.
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
(Matthew 19:24)
"But the root of all these evils is the love of money, and there are some who have desired it and have erred from the faith and have brought themselves many miniseries."
(Timothy 6:10)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I take it you are not a capitalist, then.
In a capitalist economy, the banks would have failed, the mortgages would be refinanced, and we'd all be fine - except the bankers who made bad loans. That's how it's supposed to work, they failed to use their capital well, they lose.
In our Bush/Reagan economy, the banks were bailed out with tax dollars, and stopped issuing routine loans, the homeowners lost their jobs, so they couldn't pay the mortgages, so the banks foreclosed.
Then you'll love this one. Watch as he helps rob an entire country's treasury.
The sum of all the theft obtained by all the "stupid criminal shows" and "youtube videos" of car thieves, ATM snatchers, bank robbers, and other lowlifes that I've ever seen in my life comes nowhere close to the amount stolen by AIG and Goldman Sachs. It probably doesn't add up to one decimal point of a percent of the $150,000,000,000.00 they stole. It probably doesn't add up to one decimal point of a percent of the $450,000,000.00 in bonuses they stole.
Put another way, all shoplifting in America adds up to less than $19 billion a year. They stole more in one fraud than every thief in America will shoplift in the next 9 years.
And none of the thieves in this giant swindle weren't already millionaires. They just wanted to steal more money. Money that comes from the retirement plans and investments of millions of ordinary people.
Are there more dishonest people per capita at certain income levels? Is it just that the magnitude of their crimes is so much higher because of their station in life? Or is it the size of the immorality of stealing all the net worth of millions of people, and not just their lunch money or their car, and not one personalized theft at a time?
John
What does morality have to do with driving and traffic tickets?
Most of the time it has nothing to do with a desire to cheat, steal, or harm another person. It could just be ignorance and bad driving habits. You could be a great driver and habitually speed 5-10 mph above the limit. That is not, in of itself, a sign of sociopathic behavior. Cutting people off and trying to run them off the road *is*.
Parking tickets are a better indicator. I personally know of some people that are not anything close to rich, but have a ton of parking tickets. They have TV shows about the boot being put on people that act that way. If anything, that would be independent of wealth. We all have experienced those assholes who cannot part for shit. You know the type. Those that literally park with no regard to anyone else, if they are even lined up the spot correctly, or blocking somebody else.
Making a ticket proportional to wealth is just discrimination. I hate it when people just want to penalize the rich for "being" rich. It's stupid and disingenuous to the debate over traffic safety.
You really want change? Eliminate the financial penalty entirely. Mandate that every ticket is a minimum 10 hours of community service picking up trash, visiting senior citizens, meals on wheels, whatever. If the minimum was an entire days worth of work on the weekend that benefited the community traffic violations would plummet. We can't do that because we built an entire financial infrastructure out of people breaking laws and being fined . All that encouraged was greater fines, gaming of the system (fucking with orange lights to increase running reds), and new laws to increase revenue.
My grandfather was a traffic cop who barely wrote any tickets. Towards the end of his career he was catching hell because he was not meeting his quota. He would actually give warnings and talk to people to explain why it was dangerous. Can't have that.
As for the study, I think it is incredibly stupid to say, "the rich" are more immoral. While it is true that the rich are less affected by most penalties, a more accurate statement would be that our current environment financially rewards those who act like douchnozzles to the rest of us. Large scale sociopathic behavior has so many legal loop holes that it is readily apparent that the whole game is rigged.
Those that act with honor, give back to their communities, are penalized and have to work that much harder in business to compete. It takes sacrifice, financial sacrifice, to operate a company that refuses to outsource, screw employees over, and actually work to the benefit of society instead of just giving lip service.
There are plenty of rich people that are complete sociopaths, but I also know quite a few that are genuinely nice people that care. There is nothing about the state of being wealthy that induces immoral behavior. Immoral behavior exists independently. It's the regulations and tax laws that allow immoral people to attain wealth easier.
Are there more dishonest people per capita at certain income levels? Is it just that the magnitude of their crimes is so much higher because of their station in life? Or is it the size of the immorality of stealing all the net worth of millions of people, and not just their lunch money or their car, and not one personalized theft at a time?
I would say that dishonest people are simply more likely to get ahead... After all, everyone would be honest if dishonesty didn't convey some sort of advantage. So almost by definition, people who are good at lying, cheating, and stealing without getting caught are likely to be successful. It's even less surprising, then, that we find so many psychopaths in positions of power, since they're exceptionally convincing liars.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
At best, you can lay 50% of the blame for the housing crash on the lenders and brokers
I lay 100% of the blame on the lenders and brokers. Why? Because the crash was caused when default rates were still *below* historical norms. It wasn't until the recession they caused caught up with the economy where the foreclosure rates were "interesting". The bankers set up the system to magnify gains and losses, and lied about the risk. The brokers and lenders lied about the risk as well (a D---- borrower who paid 3 months in a row was then reclassified as an "A"). The derivatives that crashed the market and then the economy that made it so people couldn't make their payments, regardless of underwaternesss, were invented by bankers and the crash was caused by the bankers, lenders and brokers. Yes, the homeowners were sometimes "in on it" trying to game the system for their benefit. But everyone else was as well, so why should they get blame for doing what they were told was right?
Learn to love Alaska
It's not. The GP explained it quite clearly: the value of a fine is meant to dissuade you from performing the action leading up to that fine. If the fine is irrelevant when compared to your income, it doesn't serve its purpose. Flat rate fines *are* discriminatory, since they only affect poor people. Making them proportional to your income fixes that problem. Also, someone "rich" who gets fined isn't being penalised for being rich; he's being penalised for not obeying the law.
Case in point: some guy was fined around $1M a couple of years ago for speeding in Switzerland. His income is, presumably, many times that number. If he were fined $200, do you really think that would be a deterrent against future infractions?
Now, you argue that fines are not the way to go. That's a different discussion. Where I live, you get a fine and lose your licence for up to 3 years - there's a penalty that affects all income brackets equally (*). I like your community service idea even better. But your analysis of the fairness of income-proportional fines is flawed, and typical of the "oh poor rich people, persecuted by the evil society" mindset, so unbelievably popular these days (with GOP candidates, I mean).
(*) Well, at least on the surface. In fact, those of us with drivers will be less affected, as will those that can pay to take a cab anywhere they go.
To keep things in perspective though, is a speeding fine was 25 cents, would you be very observant of the rules yourself? I think the 'noble' kind of morality is grossly overrated, case in point from the article that when poor people are made to think they're special, they break rules too. Being rich doesn't make you less moral, it just greatly diminishes the consequences of being amoral.
Bottom line is that we're pretty much *all* selfish, we just can't all afford to be.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I lost my house (shortsale) and had to move to a new state to find work. When the scenario is one person in ten thousand then it's likely they had poor judgement. When it's nine thousand out of ten thousand the system was flawed. When the system failed it snowballed creating a gap in the economy, which ended in high unemployment through a cascade of lost revenue.
My loan was fine when I was fully employed. Companies stopped spending because the banks stopped loaning money so I had no clients. No clients, no income.
Risky mortgages propped up a false economy and high home prices. This was not common knowledge or even discoverable by a well informed home buyer.
I was defrauded and lost my principal and equity. The mortgage industry and banks are culpable for this travesty. They were both aware and in control of the factors which lead to the false economy.
I was lucky to be able to cut my losses. Not many are/were so lucky and we all deserve justice.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
We hire experts in various fields when our knowledge is not sufficient for the task at hand.
Medical problems? Call a doctor.
Legal problems? Call a lawyer.
Tax problems? Call an accountant.
Don't understand how mortgages work? Call your local bank/mortgage broker.
What, the nice mortgage broker tells you that you can afford a mortgage far above what makes sense to you? Well, he IS the expert and he's on your side! He works for your bank, after all...
Of course, he may get a commission on pushing through as many mortgages as possible and he may be falsifying paperwork and credit scores out of whole cloth at the urging of the lending institution, which is selling these bad mortgages up the chain, but hey... He IS the expert.
Expecting a home buyer to understand the purposely-obfuscated home buying process is as stupid as expecting him to understand why chemo may be necessary. Banks took advantage of the trust of their customers and cheated them, end of story.