Then we are rewarding the very people with morals we hate by giving them more money and power. Thus it becomes moral to try and limit these people’s power, and immoral to try and increase it.
Without this proof of correlation, it might be possible that poor people were just jealous. With it, we can move on to making society better.
I’ve been conducting an ongoing study during most of my life that shows people are greedy and lack compassion. So this study shows that rich people are people too.
This is some pretty shoddy science. Just looking at the first study, I don’t see how they conclude that “people driving more expensive cars at this intersection” represents a good, random sample of “rich people”. It’s a good random sample of “people who drive more expensive cars at this intersection”.
The study about having people think about whether they had more or less than other people assumes that rich people sit around thinking about how much better they have it than other people. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe most rich people spend more tim thinking about how much more they need to make to keep up with people who are richer than they are.
But even if the conclusions are correct, so what? I certainly don’t think rich people are better than poor people. I just assume that people are flawed, and the more power they have, the more those flaws manifest themselves. Which is why libertarians try to limit the amount of power anyone has as opposed to instilling more power in the rich people sitting in Congress in Wash DC.
Also, the study only claims to measure relative amounts of those attributes. I don’t know what the correct amount to have is.
Not only are you trying to treat the symptom instead of the disease, you’re treating the wrong symptom. There are both ethical and unethical means of becoming rich, despite what Der Trihs might think. Punishing people who have done nothing wrong just because they’ve been successful is itself unethical.
A great many people do, however. A great many people equate wealth with virtue.
No, libertarians want to hand effectively absolute power to the wealthy. They oppose the government because the government is the only protection the common people have; they want the domestic functions of the government to be reduced to making sure that any common people who rebel against their lords and masters are crushed, once all legal recourse has been taken from them. “Libertarians are anarchists who want government protection from their slaves”, as one writer put it.
And even more people associated being poor with virtue. So what?
Wrong.
Seriously? have you ever read a history book?
This is actually the complete antithesis of Libertarianism. It is literally as bizarre and as ignorant as describing a Communist as “Someone who wants everyone to work hard and make money”.
Anyway, back to the original post.
I have to agree, it is the shonkiest kind of social science. In addition to the problems that John Mace points out:
The study looked at just two types of “inconsiderate” driving behaviour out of, what, about ten thousand? Had they filmed a stretch of road and examined all inconsiderate behaviour the study might have some validity, but as it is it’s farce.
Let’s assume for a second that rich people are more likely, on average, to consider their time more valuable than poor people are. Not an absurd assumption in any way since it is based in objective truth (ie rich people are able to earn more per hour) and since more people with worthless time (ie the unemployed and retired) are likely to be poor than rich. So, which of these groups do you think is more likely to cur people off in traffic? Now switch that around, which is more likely to drive slowly and block up the traffic in such a away that people need to cut off others to get around them?
If the researchers had deliberately selected a behaviour that is more likely to be caused by the wealthy they couldn’t have picked a better case. The metric is so flawed as to be useless, and it;s inexcusable given that the study could just as easily have examined all inconsiderate driving.
The next problem I have with the study is how they determined that somebody had been “cut off”. Being “cut off” is an entirely subjective event. What I call “being cut off” would be just normal merging to another driver. It depends, as much as anything else upon the extent to which someone’s personal space extends around their vehicle. People with a small personal space may not feel cut off even if someone moves in and forces them to break heavily, others will feel they were cut off if a merging vehicle forces them to take their foot off the accelerator for a fraction of a second. There have beennumerous studies that suggest that more empathic people have smaller personal traffic spaces than less empathic people. So the results of this study may actually be showing that rich people are more empathic than poor people, and much more empathic than the people conducting the study and subjectively evaluating “cut off”.
This is one of the major problems with using subjective criteria in science. In this case it has been multiplied by making entirely unwarranted assumptions about the motivations for the subjective behaviour. It is just as likely that rich people are merging closer to other cars because they have a smaller personal space due to being more empathic. But since nobody actually asked anybody why they did something, we can’t know. But the authors of the study just assume.
The candy study is at least equally shonky and makes equally unwarranted assumptions. The biggest problem is that I am seeing no attempt at a control. Where were the groups that were told the candy couldn’t be used after the study was over and was going to be thrown out? The most obvious control to see whether the amount selected was actually based on increased compassion rather than increased appetite or increased need for comfort food or a greater fear of gaining weight or simply to test whether poor people were less able to spot an obvious lie? The necessary control just wasn’t implemented into the study. The researcher invented a lie that they thought would make people feel compassionate (everybody agrees that children need more candy after all :rolleyes:), then based all the results of the study on an assumption that every single human being on the planet felt compassionate towards rich white children who wanted candy. From that assumption they “reasoned” that any difference in the amount of candy selected must be due to differences in compassion.
What a load of horseshit. What if feeling good about yourself makes people less concerned about their weight? Isn’t that a plausible hypothesis? If so then wouldn’t you expect people that thought about how fortunate they are to take more candy? What if thinking positive thoughts decreases stress and increases appetite? Isn’t that a plausible hypothesis?
Yet the study makes no attempt to control for these kinds of obvious effect and just assumes that everybody feels compassion for rich white kids who want candy, and that the sole reason for varying the amount of candy taken is compassion, that it is not influenced at all by hunger or body image.
That assumption is so clearly a load horseshit that the entire study can be dismissed out of hand.It is the sloppiest kind of pseudoscience.
I could keep going all day with the other obvious flaws in this “science” but basically it’s nonsense from beginning to end.
As a wide man once said: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
I can’t speak for Evil C., but I think the point is to recognize that policies that reject programs to help the poor and middle class, and to protect the wealthy from paying more taxes, are the result of these attitudes among wealthy people.
Really?
Can we have some evidence for this claim?
Listen to some pronouncements from the congressional leaders who were elected in 2010. It is clear what they advocate, and who benefits from these policies is clear from the statistics. You really haven’t seen them?
You guys should really come to grips with this fact, instead of just saying “wrong.” Your religion is really transparently and obviously delusional, and dangerous.
Der Triys is exactly right. Have YOU read a history book?
Oh well, since you repeated it in another post, it must be true.
Consider me convinced. Why would I need evidence when the same assertion has been repeated twice. 
I think it can be a little more general than that, but obviously you can’t have a perfectly random sample because most of America isn’t flooded with pedestrians. So you have to have an imperfect measure. But to rise to the level of “shoddy” I think you’d have to do a lot worse than this. The conclusions may be too sweeping from this individual dataset, but it didn’t sound to me like the conclusion was reached from this dataset alone. Note: I didn’t read any of the links yet.
I don’t think it implies that at all. It does imply that if they ever think it—and we know that people do think this sometimes because they say it (literally and figuratively)—then it would color later interactions (though how much later?). You were just reflecting on taxes, thinking about how you shouldn’t be taxed just cuz you’re better at something than someone else. You were just washing your new Jag-you-are and looking at the neighbor’s cheaper BMW. Conspicuous consumption is exactly the kind of thing which reflects the thought in question. Entire political movements are framed around emotional keywords like “deserve what I got,” “I earned everything myself,” etc. So, no, I don’t think rich people just sit around all day and pat themselves on the back, but I don’t think that’s what this study is meant to illustrate. It’s that this kind of self-priming is an impulse to subsequently greedy behavior.
That’s right. But if they think they are, even for just a little bit, what are the effects?
Sure. Read the OP.
Have you? All your freedoms, all your rights come from the government, unless you happen to have an army of personally loyal followers.
No; it’s as “bizarre and ignorant” as saying that the actual effect of communism is to hand all power to a tiny elite. Libertarians care no more about any liberty but their own than a “People’s Republic” cares about the people. You are just doing the standard libertarian thing of insisting that anyone who doesn’t take libertarian claims at face value is crazy or ignorant. Apparently, unlike every other political movement on Earth they never lie and everything they push will work exactly as advertised.
Your complaint that luxury cars are typically not driven by wealthier people goes against common sense to a sufficient degree that it amounts to an extraordinary claim. How about some evidence that some large fraction of luxury car drivers are in fact not wealthy? Before you can denigrate a study with such an objection, you need something a little more substantive than this.
Once again, going against basic logic and common sense. Perhaps wealthy people don’t spend a lot of time thinking “I’m considerably better off than others” but it beggars logic to think they don’t notice it at a very basic level. Most people cling desperately to anything that gives them a sense of superiority over others, are you going to have us believe that rich people don’t do this in respect to their wealth? Is this even a serious point you are making?
Yet typically libertarians got no problem given virtually unlimited power to rich people sitting in corporate boardrooms. A puzzler, eh?
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
The notion that a study is invalidated because it did not measure various other types of rude behavior that might exist is the farcical one.
Hmmm. So rich people think it is all right for them to be inconsiderate to others because they make more money than others. Imagine that. They are still being inconsiderate. All you have done is revealed that you buy into the notion that wealth justifies lack of consideration for others.
I drive regularly, I see people get cut off all the time, it’s generally clear cut behavior. I only think of it as “cutting off” if the behavior rises to the level of creating a lot of potential for an accident. If you see “cutting off” as a variation of “passing” your objection makes sense, but I don’t think most people see it that way.
Yes, that is a plausible hypothesis. A more plausible hypothesis is that people varied in how good they felt about themselves, how hungry they were, how they felt about kids in both groups, and yet, the single variable of thinking rich vs. thinking poor tended overall to make people take more candy and deny them to the kids in the other lab (of indeterminate color and wealth, I believe).
I realize that you would like to dismiss the study out of hand, but basically what we have here is a series of studies conducted by academics published in a leading scientific journal, vs. an anonymous Internet person waving his hands frantically in a desperate attempt to discredit them. Their work has the weight of a bowling ball, your objections have the weight of a feather.
That’s not my complaint. I’m sure you understand the concept of a random sample. The method used in the study does not produce a random sample of the groups they claim to be studying. Nor is able to gauge the degree of wealth by the make of the care.
Science doesn’t work that way. You don’t make assumptions about what people think about much less how much they think about x vs y.
Nope. If you don’t like iPhones, you buy an Android. If you don’t like President Smith, what do you do?
As humans, we all share certain characteristics. Greed and compassion being two of those. The study does not, per your thread title, say that rich people lack compassion. It says they have less compassion that poor people. I don’t know what the correct amount of compassion one should have. More is not always better.
Cream and bastards rise to the top.
Can you describe some circumstances in which more compassion would be worse, everything else being equal?
That does raise an interesting point in that “compassion” can be subjective.
Scenario 1: Your brother-in-law is crashing at your house because he can’t get a job. He stays home and plays video games all day without sending out resumes or doing anything else proactive to find a job. Is it more compassionate to kick him out or let him stay?
So, yeah, if you tell me it would be worse to kick him out, I’d say you’re wrong.
Scenario 2: Your brother-in-law has an idea for a new business venture. You really want to help him out, so you loan him $10,000 thinking it’ll be a good investment anyway. He squanders the money on hookers and blow instead of actually investing in his business. You suddenly lose your job, and now you can’t pay the mortgage because you have no savings.
I don’t think you’ve quantified compassion in these examples at all. There’s too many ways that compassion can have nothing to do with the decisions to help and what those decisions are, and the degree of one’s compassion is not necessarily measured by the actions one takes in response.