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Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More
An anonymous reader writes The Economist reports, "'UNDER capitalism', ran the old Soviet-era joke, 'man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.' In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity. Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last year to test Germans' willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to €6 ($8). ... The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers ... when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
"socialism"
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
How much money did the people in each group have, on average, during their youth?
Otherwise they might be just testing whether richer people give a lesser value to a small amount of money than poorer people.
I'm pretty sure the average 20yo european would cheat less to get 8$ than the average south american and more than the average japanese.
I'm just on my morning coffee. Isn't it a bit early in the morning for propaganda? (Or does anyone here think we would be reading this if that plane hadn't gone down?)
People raised in a country were the government spies on its citizens, encourages selling people out, and kidnaps dissenters are more likely to lie for personal gain.
My guess is this is more an effect caused by Stasi, and not the communism/capitalism divide.
real socialists don't have any need or opportunity to "cheat", so they haven't developed the ability to resist cheating.
pie the revolution!
Researcher ask two groups, that they know to be different beforehand, a question, and then are surprised to get different answers? Really? If it had gone the other way around, they would have had simply reversed the explanation. And this study has so many potential confounds, like poverty, or even geological distribution, that it's hard to describe the level of ignorance of researchers that contribute this effect in their abstract to "exposure to socialism". Last week there was something about children from religious groups vs. children from non-religious groups, and the message that gets picked up is: religious children are more superstitious, and this week it is: socialism makes people dishonest, etc., while in reality no such conclusion can be drawn. Seriously? F* this kind of research.
From TFA:
The study reveals nothing about the nature of the link between socialism and dishonesty. It might be a function of the relative poverty of East Germans, for example.
Although the historically observed relative poverty may indeed be causally linked to choice of an economic-political system, even that would not be sufficient to appropriately identify the economic-political system as the cause of the alleged differences in moral aptitudes.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
hate to say it, but correlation does not equal causation. didn't east Germany also have significantly lower economic prosperity and hence people grew up with the need to take every advantage they could get. Even then it is still just correlation but I would be willing to bet economic conditions have more to do with it than political system/philosophy.
It's a common thing in virtually all places where people are oppressed. When the system exists to keep the people down, any kind of covert damage people can do to the system is considered a virtue. Given a few generations of this, and morals can be completely up-ended. Witness the entire Ukraine and Russia conflict. Ukraine as a culture is attempting to break out of that old form of thought, while Russia is still entrapped in the old corrupt soviet mind. The social system is set up in a way that they naturally try to drag everyone around them down into it as well, turning the region into a continent sized crab bucket. Having met people with that mentality, it's obvious it's an adaptation to a completely different reality and way of life, but it is also maladaptive to what we would consider a normal and healthy way of living.
Sigh. We've known for a long time that in autocratic regimes of any type, levels of interpersonal trust are lowered. After all, your neighbor might be an informer, and the state itself is a liar and propagandist. Similarly, low levels of social trust correlate with all sorts of antisocial behavior, from cheating and intolerance to distrust of democracy itself. So all this experiment really proves is something we already know: living a long time under an oppressive regime generates distrust which legitimizes cheating and so forth. Capitalism and "socialism" have little to do with it.
Make cheese not war 8:)
How can one make any conclusion with a sample size that small?
The latest book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined sets out the mechanisms and the reasons why this is the case. If you want the short answer ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
Corporations get much, Much, MUCH more welfare than citizens. It makes perfect sense if you look at it that way.
I don't think there is much to see here.
Soviet communism, and marxist communism in general, operate (wrongly) under assumptions of the economy being a zero-sum game, so it's not really a surprise it has an effect on the ethics of its 'players'. Quoting straight from the Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism:
In a zero-sum game people tend to resort to unethical strategies more often, as in the classic Prisoner's dilemma.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Yes I can see what they mean, the only measure of honesty is frequency of thieving and cheating, not magnitude. Under communism everybody cheats all of the time but most people who do the bulk of the thieving are petty thieves whereas under capitalism you have an elite made up of corporate executives, elected representatives and bankers that has been given a license by society to handle most of the thieving and cheating. Capitalists steal less often but when theft happens they rob everybody else blind. Epiphany! I'm beginning to see the mortgage crisis in a whole new shining light of capitalist honesty and moral superiority over communism.... uughhhhhh..... what a bunch of bullshit. Try as I might I have always failed to see how capitalism is any less rotten than communism and that is not likely to change. The only reason I prefer capitalism is that it is somewhat less oppressive but I don't think of it as being in any way vastly morally superior to communism although I realize that many capitalist fanboys are terribly offended by this point of view.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Are they sure the cause was socialism and not the oppressive dictatorship they lived under? It's not like their socialist government was democratically elected, maybe that's influenced them more?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Check out the difference between Republican and Democrat convictions for fraud or similar problems by politicians. This controls for many more variables than a comparison between E and W Germany, but gets you a similar outcome in terms of a correlation between believing in socialism and being willing to cheat to get what you think is right.
Correlation isn't causation, but it is at least a better study.
I wonder if socialism was the wrong control variable to use in this study. I have a hunch that any people who were brought up in a society with extremely limited resources would be more prone to cheat to get ahead than where resources where more bountiful. I am a citizen of a third world country myself (India) and I find that among my compatriots, a few specific states that are highly underdeveloped seem to have higher crime rates on an average than those states that are relatively better off. What's more, emigrants from these states seem to suffer disproportionately high rates of incarceration even in other states. If you look at it in terms of poverty, the fact that people who have endured grinding poverty are more inclined to jostle to get ahead is hardly surprising.
It's a simple case of living in system where you need to cheat (be creative, "organize", ...) to fulfill basic requirements.
That means that people who have lived through this deprivation, act funny to people in more normal econimies:
1.) So you need to sacks of cement. Typical response of a Western guy, "okay, let's go buy 2 sacks of cement, and what exact kind do we need?". Somebody tha has lived in the Eastern block might start plotting a "plan" to get his hands at two sacks of cement. That might involve all kinds of criminal or semi-criminal behaviour, be it stealing, defrauding, ... => one of the reason why many building efforts of the communist were not as well built as planned, quite a bit of material disappeared.
2.) Values and perceptions are also shifted. Happened to our family. Our car was stolen in a former eastern country. Very irritating experience, one has to organize how to get home, fill out a ton of irritating insurance forms, and one might wait a couple of weeks for a new car. Our local acquaintances took it as if the theft was "the end of the world" => cars at that time were viewed quite different there.
In my experience, it took at least a decade of "freedom" before the worst of there effects were gone (e.g. I need X => let's see what shops sell X), and multiple decades before it all faded kind of in the background.
Germany is a special case too, because it was a split country (so many things that are not commonly visible are more visible), plus Eastern Germany was one of the economic powerhouses of the Eastern block, so normal people could avoid the deprivation economy quite a bit longer/had to endure it way shorter.
But still, the point stays, if the only way to feed your kids is stealing, most people will start stealing. And if the situation where this is necessary keeps on going for decades, certain habits and values form that cannot be undone quickly.
the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything.
That's not the idea of Socialism. The idea of Socialism is that the *workers* own the *means of production*. The state, as so clearly demonstrated by the failed eastern European experiment, was neither identical with, nor even adequately represented the interests of, the workers; and 'everything' is a far greater scope than just 'the means of production'. In other words, the Soviet bloc countries were no more Socialists than the National Socialists were, which is to say, in name only.
Run this through some biased right-wing news sites or blogs. You know how it'll turn out. I give it two days before we start seeing "Scientists show liberals more prone to lying" or "Science shows a free market makes people honest." Give it a week and someone will find a way to tie it into 'judeo-christian values' too.
I came to the same conclusion long before there was a "scientific" research on the subject (take it from somebody who grew up in Eastern Europe!). Yes, we are cheats - and that's a fact. We have been bombarded with so much lies during the long communist years (the kind that everybody knew were lies) and in the end everybody excepted lies as a fact of life. And once the system changed, our thinking did not. We were still lying to each other and cheating each other. Even today, some 25 years since the fall of communism, I am much happier doing business with western Europeans than with the old communist block. It's said, but that's how things are. It will take a few generations before things change, I think...
I believe our greatest strength in the West has been the relative lack of corruption. I know that claim is like nails on a chalkboard to the common malcontent millennial armed with dozens of mod points around here, trained from birth to rail at every iniquity, but they are naive; the level of corruption that had to exist to reconcile the delta between the state and reality in Soviet bloc nations is several times greater than anything that has existed in the West.
Whole sciences had to be practiced in secret while the practitioners professed absolute allegiance to anti-science dogma such as Lysenkoism. A completely corrupt labor `bonus' system evolved to compensate valuable (not to be confused with `honest') employees despite government policy; something we see emerging today in our own corrupt government workforce. Occasionally the corruption would grow large enough to bubble to the surface and become embarrassing news even in a place that had absolute control over the news; the `Ryazan Miracle' was a case of this. Chernobyl was a direct result of corruption that provided bonuses and awards to officials throughout the system.
When you have to commit a crime by shopping the `black' market just to put staples in the fridge you are engendering a mentality. Sovok, as you say. An indifference to the value of laws.
Between the `drug war,' our welfare state, piratic corporate governance and ever greater abuse of power by our government, we are rapidly catching up.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
One thing is that the folk is quite cunning in a bad way.
We had a joke in socialism which was called 7 wonders of socialism. I apologize for a quick translation which is inaccurate and probably misses the pun, but:
*1. Everyone has a job.
*2. Although everyone has a job, no one does anything (works).
*3. Altough no one works, the production plan is fullfilled by 100 %.
*4. Although the plan is fullfilled by 100%, there is nothing (nothing done).
*5. Although there is nothing, everyone has everything.
*6. Although everyone has everything, everyone steals.
*7. Although everyone steals, nothing is missing.
We invented company tunelling, go figure.
Of course. A corporation is a legal "person" in the US, and they're persons with much greater expenses than (for example) a disabled single mother, so of course they need more welfare. Only a commie would suggest otherwise!
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
From the article: "The study reveals nothing about the nature of the link between socialism and dishonesty. It might be a function of the relative poverty of East Germans, for example. All the same, when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
A little biased much? Remember "correlation does not imply causation"
In the realm of ethics, three main schools are contesting : virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism.
Virtue ethics say that being ethical is showing a certain number of virtues, and lacking a certain number of vices. Honesty is a virtue, dishonesty a vice.
Deontology ethics say that being ethical is following a certain number of rules (self-imposed or not), and usually deontology ethics contain rules against lying, too.
Consequentialism ethics say they being ethical is judging acts for the consequences it has on people. For consequentialist, lying (or stealing, or killing) aren't bad in thesmselves, but only because they have bad consequences (ie, they hurt people). For a consequentialist, stealing something that would be wasted. For example, after a natural disaster, a supermarket is wrecked and has no staff anymore, and food products are getting rotten, there is no harm done in taking them, so it's ethical to do so.
If you look at that setup, well, what harm is done by lying? Not much, so while virtue ethics and deontology would still prevent people from lying, consequentialism doesn't. Maybe the answer is just that people growing in DDR, less exposed to religion, are more consequentialist ? Which doesn't make them less ethical, none of the three system is clearly the "best", it's a highly contested topic (I tend to lean towards consequentialism myself, but don't completly reject the other two).
And on this, I'm definitely a consequentialist. Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job ! ;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
Socialism is governance for the good of society. Communism is governance for the good of the commune. These are established definitions. You can decide to let people who abuse the terms redefine them to their own ends, but in doing so, you grant them the power they seek. There are many in the world today who claim their atrocities are right, and done in the name of their god - and this includes right-wing Christians and Jews, not only radical Muslims. Should we allow them to do this, or should we point out that that they are breaking the fundamental tenets of Abrahamic law? If we attack all Muslims for the actions of fundamentalist crackpots, we alienate moderate Muslims. If we attack anyone who believes in the concept of a welfare state as being supports of Stalinist gulags, we alienate them.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
My five-year plan says that this study is false! And that steel production is up 5000%!
Can we please stop letting dogmatic capitalists distort the conversation about the relative value of socialism?
partnership with corporate interests in the lead up to WWII.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
A more appropriate saying from the old Soviet bloc was: "They pretend to pay me and I pretend to work."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
..., if anything, is that now, UNDER CAPITALISM, a number of people who became socialized under state-socialism were more likely to lie for personal gain than a number of people who became socialized under capitalism. And there are good reasons imaginable for that behaviour which are not suffciently honoured by the featherbrained reduction to "they cheat more".
Are you suggesting that The Economist is biased towards capitalism? That's just crazy talk.
But thanks for showing it.
Study was done on 259 Germans.
Out of which "90 subjects reported having an East German family background and 98 subjects having a West German family background."
Too small a sample size to be of any use? Indeed.
They are way out in the "our numbers mean diddly-squat" territory, as their margins of error are 7.82% (WGFB) and 8.36% (EGFB).
http://www.raosoft.com/samples...
I.e. when they report 9% and 19% average cheating that's actually 9 +/- 7.82% and 19 +/- 8.36%.
It could just as well be that WGFB are cheating 16% of the time while EGFB are cheating only 11% of the time.
Oh damn! Now it means that "because democracy, stupid", levels of interpersonal trust are lowered in the west.
Also...
They all rolled the dice only 40 times. A fair dice should give an average mean of 3.5.
They report average mean for "East German family background" (90 people) to be 3.83.
For "West German family background" (98 people) they report an average mean of 3.68.
But when you sample those same Germans whether they CONSIDER THEMSELVES East, West or just Germans - simply Germans (141 people) have an average mean of 3.70 while East/West Germans (73 people) have an average of 3.83.
Note how, smaller the sample the more extreme the result gets? That's because the overall sample size is too small.
A couple of people misreporting the results could be throwing the whole thing off.
AND they have a really strange sample of "German family heritage" (37 people), whatever that should mean as East-West was set as a 0-1 choice, who are practically not cheating at all, giving the average of 3.57.
While "others" (i.e. immigrants) cheat the most. 3.85. And yes, they are the smallest sample of only 30 people.
On the other hand... the incentive to cheat was simply not there.
At best, rolling a 6 all the time (i.e. cheating 100%), they'd get 6 Euros in the end. A cup of coffee costs about 4.2 Euros.
So people were supposedly cheating in order to get between 0.07 and 0.35 Euros?
But there was plenty room for false positives as they used physical dice they ASSUMED were fair.
When IRL a dice shorter by 3% on one side gives 6% more results on that side.
And low quality, toy store bought, dice are even worse.
Also, East-West bias can be noted in the stats measured and stats assumed.
No regression calculation was reported for West German family, while t-test values were always fixed (i.e. assumed) for East Germans and always calculated for West Germans.
And there's that thing of "East German family background" being marked with a 0 and "West German family background" being marked with a 1.
Someone seems to like West Germans better.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
All this study shows is is a difference in attitude towards a game with low stakes while queuing at a passport bureaucracy. Generalizing beyond that demonstrates the limits of the author's ethics, not the participants.
In order to fully understand how any society works, one must grow up under that system. As a person who grew up in the old Soviet Union, I am intimately aware of how and why the people were being cheated. My father pretty much gave me an introduction to the old Soviet system, and explained how it works.
Story #1.
My father used to work two jobs, as a house painter. First job was for the state, and the second job (In Russian "Khaltura") for himself. We lived OK, and could make ends meet. One time on a weekend, when I was ten years old, my father took me to his second job. I was carrying a bucket of paint (it was very heavy), and my father was carrying three. On the way he told me how it works. A state on the first job gives five buckets of paint to work on the apartment. By doing some Soviet Innovation chemical Magic with water, paint, iron powder and gasoline it is possible to make five buckets of paint out of two buckets (which what my dad used to do), and three of the buckets he would take to the second job. I recall being in shock, and my dad told me that the state hardly pays any money for survival, and only the second job can. He also told me that everyone steals, and in the Soviet System everyone steals because EVERYONE IS THE OWNER. I did not like the explanation, and was quite upset. However the person who we pained the apartment of (a local surgeon), interjected into our conversation. He told me that he does the same thing, except he and his nurses take (steal) antibiotics and other drugs, borrow medical instruments and once a week go to remote villages that lacks doctors to operate on the patients. That's how they make 70% of their living. This incident really opened my eyes. Everyone was stealing. A state store personnel would divert the goods from the store onto the black market, thus making a profit. A car mechanic would reuse old brakes (again, Soviet innovation magic) instead of replacing onto new ones, selling the new breaks. And everyone was doing this, not because they are dishonest, but because they needed to survive. To illustrate some quirks of Soviet Survival, here is a story #2.
This happened when I was 11 years old. It was a middle of the night, and approximately 3 o'clock early morning. I suddenly saw a light coming from my parents' room, and heard my dad walking in his heavy shoes. Looking at my alarm clock, I could not understand what would my dad be doing so early.
I came out rubbing my eyes, seeing my dad fully dressed I asked, "Dad, where are you going?"
And he answered me, "I'm going to a milk store, son".
I told him that the milk store opens at 6 in the morning, why would he need to leave at three. To which he replied:
"Son, if I wait until that time to come to the store opening, there is going to be such a huge line of people, that by the time my time comes to get the milk -- there is going to be none there. So I have to go and stay there for three hours, waiting until the store opens."
After my dad left, I drank some tea, ate my breakfast and went after my dad to the milk store to stand with him.
More bullshit from researchers who want to appear like actual researchers, but instead create fairly useless surveys and come away with just bizarre conclusions. One could easily have concluded: people who come from an impoverished childhood, which most of eastern Europe was at the time (given that these people actually lived in Eat Germany, meaning before 1981), are more likely to cheat. I'd suggest that that would be more logical, as that would be a survival mechanism in such environments.
The end gist: never, ever, trust soft science "research" as having any actual evidence or validity.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
One of the most fair, hard-working & awesome people I know was born & raised in East Germany. She was also one of the first people over the wall when it came down. I've worked with her for 19 years & I'm pretty sure she'd have an exception to this "study".
There is a war going on for your mind.
Is it
People who can heavily influence the rules bend the rules for personal gain, people who don't get to influence the rules cheat
Or
People grew up in capitalist areas bend the rules for personal gain, people who grew in communist area cheat
? I can't quite tell which case it is and they both describe the results well
Maybe living in a functioning economic system just rewards playing by the rules.
Are you saying that you have found a functioning economic system? Please share it, as the rest of the world has been trying to find one for the last six thousand years.
DDR stands for Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic), leading to the European version of Dance Dance Revolution being called Dancing Stage for the first few mixes, and some people called DDR machines "East German disco bars". It also stands for "double data rate SDRAM", leading to bad jokes like "My PlayStation has 700 megs of DDR" in the early 2000s or "My PC has 4 gigs of DDR" as StepMania became popular in the mid-2000s.
But do people from East Germany hug the bar more?
See also DDR (disambiguation) OverplayedEast germany is capitalist. It WAS communist but no more is. If you were raised in a capitalist country, let's imagine your country suddently become communist. All your youth you have been fed capitalist propaganda (oh yes, you have) and now you have to live under communism. Will you just say: well ok, the rules have changed and I will play by the new rules? I bet most of you will just fight the system, cheat it and feel proud about it. People raised in communist states have been fed communist propaganda, which does not work under capitalist rule. The problem is not capitalism or communism it's system change.
No true Scotsman is most definitely a fallacy, it's a matter of moving the goalposts: the classic example being A:"No Scotsman would do such a thing" B:"But this man is a Scotsman, and has clearly just done so!" A:"No *true* Scotsman would do such a thing", a post-hoc revision of the definition to exclude the counter-examples.
Of course that has nothing to do with the current conversation: Communism has, since it's inception, had a solid definition: the ownership by the workers of the means of production. On a large scale that's typically implemented as government ownership (fascism), but for that to remain communism the workers must own the government. If that is not the case (and has it *ever* been so, anywhere in the world?) then what you're dealing with doesn't meet the basic requirement for being communist in the first place.
It may be that large-scale communism is a fool's dream, or it may be that our social technologies are simply not yet up to the task of implementing it in a stable fashion, but to claim that the results to date represent communism is sort of an inverse-Scotsman fallacy - a post-hoc revision of the definition to include examples to which it clearly does not apply. At best they represent failed attempts to create such an economy.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
This has me infuriated.
I am a former East German and lived in a very pro-state family. That also meant, that my family was under heavy surveillance, because they carried some responsibility. (We did not know that back then and were stupid enough to believe, we weren't, because most of the family believed in the system). I say that to illustrate, that my family truly believed in the state.
That said... even though they believed in the state, you had to get creative to get, what you need - as other people mentioned in this thread.
The story i am thinking about, is the moment, when the wall came down. I saw in my family and the families of friends, how advertising was religiously believed. Today we laugh about the Nigerian Prince Spam-Mail or the "Congratulations, you are the 1000000th Visitor to our page" - but back then, many people believed the mail-order and sailsperson-versions of these scams. They had not been exposed to aggressive advertising - a form of cheating. You might see this as trivial... for years I saw my grandma fillling out every stupid order - she was bombarded by telemarketing and she was not a stupid woman. Suddenly, it was not the state anymore, who you had to be afraid of (if you did not agree) - it were your fellow human beings. From a citizen, you were transformed into a customer.
That said - i personally am SO GLAD to live in today's germany. And the greif was unbelieavable, when everything came to light, that happened in Eastern Germany. It broke many people in my family, who truly believed in the idea.
To assign capitalism ethical superiority based on this experiment and the assumption, that cheating on money is a valiable source to do that... is wrong and funnily capitalist ; )
Markets can't solve every problem, but because the open market is the direct extension in human affairs of biological competition in natural ecosystems, it is a default mode of operation in human nature. Widespread cheating is what you get when a society imposes socialism in a variety of situations where an open market would work perfectly well.
Not for nothing is 'cheating' an anagram of 'teaching'.
There are a fair number of people who tie their unwillingness to break rules to their religious faith.
They should test corporate CEOs. They have not proven to be the most ethical bunch of late, or for that matter, ever. If that's as good as capitalist ethics gets, I'd say the difference between socialism and capitalism when it comes to ethics is negligible.
Didn't you get the memo? Capitalism is the worst system of economics there is, except for all the others. That's the mantra, anyhow.
...if it is, it's more a symptom than cause.
I believe it's societies in which the economically optimal behavior is cheating.
In Socialist East Germany as many have posted here anecdotally, the system was so broken that cheating - going outside the formal rules of the system - was the only way to get many basic and preferred needs met.
This is endemic to CORRUPT societies, not just socialist ones.
For cheating to be optimal, you have to have two elements:
- a system that gives people motivation to break the rules AND (importantly)
- an alternative - a black market, corrupt officials, etc - that is workable.
I'd argue that *any* overbureaucratic society will eventually reach this point.
Capitalism - insofar as it mitigates the issue - allows people to DIRECTLY follow their self-interest, without having to 'cheat' around the system.
I'd argue that the conflicted desire of the US populace for ever-greater safety-nets and protection by the government (and thus control) will likewise ever-more incentivize cheating in precisely the same way.
-Styopa
Socialism, communism ( Same shit! ) = Corruption by default. Can someone please come up with a new political pragma that derives from, intelligence, ethics, moral, responsibility and perhaps also respect for the individual?
Well, don't look to capitalism. Even Adam Smith recognized it's largely driven by the "invisible hand" of greed. Not exactly ethical, moral or responsible. Or for that matter, respectful of the individual and not particularly intelligent (pragmatic though, I suppose).
The article just claims "cheating". However, cheating happens in different situations. There is cheating on your friends or family or neighbours, and there is cheating on authorities.
In East Germany, the authorities were out to get you. Spying on you. Trying to catch you out. Your neighbours on the other hand were the people that you had to rely on and that had to rely on you. A person coming to you and asking questions was highly suspicious and probably up to no good. Everyone would lie to them. But not to your friends and neighbours.
That's probably still there, so if some scientists will come and ask questions, whatever the questions, nobody raised in East Germany will have any problem lying to them. Will they cheat to take advantage of their neighbours? I doubt it.
The proper conclusion is that SOME combination of rampant surveillance by the government, totalitarianism, socialism, and poverty in East Germany lead to a greater willingness to lie and cheat. They have not even attempted to control for the confounding factors sufficiently to pin it on socialism.
Honestly, were I to make a guess, I would rank socialism as the least likely among those conditions to be the actual cause of the measured difference. I would place the fact that the Stasi employed a full third of the population to tattle on the other two thirds near the top of the list. Why not lie to someone who is 33% likely to report you to the authorities if you tell the truth?
If they really want to draw a solid conclusion, they need to compare with other populations as well.
If you have a better system we're listening. I know I've looked and ever other alternative is either worse even in theory or based on wishful thinking.
So, is this the new standard for scientific reasoning? Run an experiment and draw sweeping conclusions without considering the alternatives? This sort of tripe is simply stupid - it is no better than climate denial or hollow-earthism; I don't think it belongs in a forum of people with an interest in science and technology - or even politics.
What this experiment really shows, is that a group of people who grew up in East Germany "cheated" more than a group of West Germans. We don't hear by which criteria - 'randomly' just means they can't be bothered explaining. There is no explanation of why it is considered reasonable to extrapolate from a small group to humanity in general, or indeed how you get from 'East Germany' to 'Communism' in general, or indeed what is meant by 'Communism'. Being exposed to 'Communism' was hardly the only influence acting on people growing up there, just like 'Capitalism' wasn't the only thing that shaped the lives of West Germans.
A far more likely explanation is that if you live with the fear that your neighbors are informants for an oppressive regime, then you don't have much confidence in the merits of social virtues like sharing and trusting, which are necessary preconditions for fair play: you won't play fair, unless you trust that everybody plays fair. But living with that kind of fear is not unique to communism or socialism; indeed, oppression is arguably incompatible with socialism, which is all about sharing and trusting the society you are part of.
From my experience — growing up in the USSR — it was perfectly Ok and morally acceptable to cheat the government. Because the repressive beast cheated the citizens far worse — when it was not outright killing them.
Sadly, modern Western government — hell-bent on income redistribution (known affectionately as "spreading the wealth around") — increasingly arouse the same sentiment...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I would wager you could do this exact same test with people from any long term economically down trodden people.
We are talking about people who needed to lie to survive for 3 generations.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, it might really be, that if cultere has christian values, stealing is a bigger thing than in so called socialsim without moral bases. I have read some stories that people living somewhere like Moscow really losed morals. So now that is done. :-)
Sadly I do not know well enough those sosieties, and my sources is a bit hard to find. Those stories were in christian books and so on from the era when society chrashed.
a) At least two of the three authors are from business schools. They don't appear to be social scientists or psychologists.
b) Read the summary, and tell me that isn't showing outright bias and intent to find results to match preconceptions.
This isn't even vaguely science, it's propaganda. For extra credit, do the same study with people of East German origin and hedge fund managers and traders.
mark
Under capitalism, if you don't like them, you pay to have them changed in your favor.
Either way, the same shit happens.
Have gnu, will travel.
partnership with corporate interests in the lead up to WWII.
No, WW1 plus a punitive peace treaty plus social crisis lead to WW2. Partnering with corporate interests was just a tactic for state control of industry. It was an implementation detail not a cause.
Socialism, communism ( Same shit! ) "
No, they are not the same thing. Maybe you should understand the difference of what does exist before looking for something new.
"intelligence, ethics, moral, responsibility and perhaps also respect for the individual"
It's called socialism.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Communism works incredibly well but only in very small groups where pooled resources are necessary for survival.
In other words extended family situations where there is a strong emotional bond between individuals who actually know each other to a degree.
A better system is a mixture of the better aspects of both capitalism and socialism. Getting the mix right is a challenge, but arguing for impossibilities like "a purely free market" or "pure socialism" are extremist and unrealistic.
Isn't socialism mostly about sharing and cooperation - why is this a surprise? This is more about worldview as opposed to ethics.
The study basicly looked at East Germany, of all socialist states, not suprising, being that its slightly anti-communist bias of "The Economist".
Communism was never supported by the population of East Germany, and was only held in place by force, and under dirrection of the Soviet Union. The Russians, really hated the germans, and saw East Germany as nothing more than speed bump to slow NATO advances.
It had the world's biggest secret police, which should also tell you something about the popularity of the state. 10 times as big as the gestapo it replaced.
That seems to be the best compromise for the moment, though there are signs that this system trends towards Fascism.
A completely corrupt labor `bonus' system evolved to compensate valuable (not to be confused with `honest') employees despite government policy; something we see emerging today in our own corrupt government workforce.
Are you referring to VA workers who falsified patient wait-time records in order to earn bonuses?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The study's abstract:
"By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior.
1) 'socialism' is a loaded word here. There were other differences between east and west Germany than simply the economic system. Any reading of history that doesn't acknowledge that is disingenuous.
2) "family background" does not equate to exposure to an economic system. Are you telling me that if I have children after having lived under a specific economic regime I'll have somehow infected them with specific values derived from that system? That's crazy!
3) This study was done by a group of business professors. We can't expect business proferssors to do anything but advocate for free markets, it's something of their jobs to be advocates for it.
In all this study looks like a complete waste that doesn't contribute anything to our understanding of values and economics. An area that I'm actually interested in, and like to read papers on occasionally.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
What an interesting coincidence. I was having a conversation with my dad this last weekend about just this subject. He proposed his theory that people in, for example, countries like Russia and China were less ethical than in other countries because of the purging of religion that happened in those two examples, within recent history. This surprised me because he's a fairly liberal-thinking person, although he has become more religious as he gets older. I think of myself as agnostic for the most part, but after giving it some thought, I wonder if he might have a point.
What do you think? Did the suppression of religion in those countries reduce the level of ethics? Can ethics effectively spread and be maintained among a large population without a broad system of organized religion?
Too right. Actually, the central idea behind socialism is that the economy is geared to satify social and economic need (production for utility), rather than to accumulate capital -- who actually owns/controls the means of production depends on who is interpreting the word "socialism". The Soviet Union was not socialist in this sense. Many of the modern democracies seem to employ both capitalist and socialist policies in their government of both social and economic spheres. They aren't antithetic.
A philosophy grounded in parasitism tends to bring out the sleazy in it's adherents? Who'd ever believe it!
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
IMO this is not about capitalism vs socialism, but whether people consider the power legitimate or not.
that West Germans are still far better off money-wise than people who grew up in East Germany ( so they - the old West Germans care less about the little extra money) and / or that East Germans are always up for a good game and gain and are actually the better players because they actually win the prize. lol However I do dislike the article and the possible hidden intent behind the study or at least it's interpretation - to proof that East Germans are cheaters - Really ?! wow, I am wondering who is actually behind that study. and - who was financing it? I would also encourage that very same team to study why so many West Germans who make/ made it big in Politics were cheating to get their academic titles and show strong signs of corruption with an unbelievable self-esteem...
why do people like to generalize so much - including you ?!
excellent point!
I'm going to qualify what I'm saying by stating that this is a guess. Without further interviewing or reviewing the profiles of the population of the study, I don't think anyone could seriously speak more strongly. Capitalism is founded on the rules applying equally to all. If Alice creates a widget that outperform's Bob's, she's going to earn more money. Both were free to produce whatever they wanted according to the same rule of law, but one performed better than the other. It's natural that willing participants in such a system observe that for the system to work, law must be followed to create the closest state reasonably possible to an operational environment equal to all who participate. The mentality of socialism places an emphasis in closing the gab between the inequalities of outcome. Here, Alice may produce a widget that outperforms Bob's, but others will frown upon a wide income gap between the two, regardless of how much better Alice's widget is. There are negative impacts perceived in such a wide income gap. In these circumstances, one who subscribes to the ideas that underpin socialism would tolerate working outside the protocol of the rules of producing widgets for the sake of preventing Alice from outperforming Bob to some extent. And if one happens to be Bob, breaking the rules of the game of economics is actually contributing to the greater rule of keeping the income gap from becoming what such a person considers too wide. It may strike Bob in his view of what's fair to break the rules. As for some final thoughts, I don't think anyone can reasonably conclude that people who advocate capitalism are people who respect rules and those who advocate socialist ideas are not. Rather I think that the operational environment entices people to behave in certain ways. Put a raving capitalist in a socialist system, and he may not behave according to the rules. Additionally, in a system, such as socialism where execution of the rules and control of resources resided more so in a centralized authority, the most pertinent rule is learning to gain favorability with that centralized authority. All other rules are subordinate to that. Just for the sake of full disclosure in case you've read this far and are still wondering, I mostly prefer a capitalist economic model over a socialist one. Cheers, and happy Slashdotting.
the common malcontent millennial armed with dozens of mod points around here, trained from birth to rail at every iniquity, but they are naive;
So, first you have a go at millennials for being worried about corruptiuon...
Between the `drug war,' our welfare state, piratic corporate governance and ever greater abuse of power by our government, we are rapidly catching up.
Then you say their worries are justified.
Which is it?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
A number of years ago a study was published that indicated that when the government was not seen to be legitimate by some large section of the population, crime of all kinds go up. So for example, when a Democrat is in the white house crime in red states goes up, and vice versus.
I strongly suspect that this is just another example of that, and not something specific to socialism.
it is the correct variable, what do you think the policies of the church of ron paul lead to? Massive poverty, lack of equality under the law, loss of all opportunities to get out of poverty.
...
Sure, you can say that the problem is poverty, but poverty in unregulated free market countries came from unregulated free markets - lack of private ownership and operation of property due to hyperconcentration of wealth, lack of individual freedoms.
...
If the law is applied differently to some people even in such concepts as different tax brackets and different tax breaks you will have less economic freedom, less initiative, fewer opportunities, fewer people trying to get ahead
Amazingly that statement needs no adjustments. You just described the ambitions of your fascist cult for us in great clarity.
Of-course there are very few moral people in an immoral system.
Precisely. I could hardly image a less moral system than the one you have been advocating endlessly here. Being as you are one of the system's top cheerleaders I don't see how you could possibly be able to help bring about the rise of any moral people, though.
I think that people "cheat", that is do not respect the unfair advantage their using the system creates for others, when they think that either they are more deserving that the others or that the system isn't fair to begin with. By this thinking there ought to be more cheating in Latin American oligarchies by the elites there, meaing that despite the pretense to a rule of law, they tinnk themselves above the law. People who do not respect the rule of law cheat, too. The defining issue is that when people think the institutions are corrupt or inneffective, they will cheat more.
So, respect for authority and property rights, might imply less cheating, these same people respecting the rule of law and due process to pursue criminals, except that elitism might take over and an elite class might cheat because it thinks itself above the law. Trouble is, that is corrosive to the whole idea of rule of law because the unfairness of it quickly becomes obvious. The systems of the Soviet states created privileged elites, and the unfair advantage of that did much to undermine them. The same is true of elitism based on Capitalism. When the perception is that a plutocratic elite gets an unfair advantage then the same mechanism is in play and it can undermine that system, undermining both the rule of law and the authority of power.
http://business.rediff.com/rep...
Casteism