Are Rich people less moral? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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For discussion of moral and ethical issues.
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#13907273
Im not sure "riding an expensive car" is a good way of measuring the effect of income. Could be many reasons why having an expensive car would make you a worse driver than just income.

For example:
-if you want to show off with your car, you buy a flashy expensive car. If you want to show off with your car, you're gonna drive too fast.
-expensive cars may give a sense of security. You tend to underestimate your speed when driving an expensive car. In contrast, when speeding in a cheap car, the whole thing seems to fall apart around you.

U.S. surveys find that the rich give a smaller percentage of their income to charity than do the poor.

Imo its hard to conclude from this that rich people are less generous. They give a smaller percentage of their income, but they give more in absolute numbers. Its not obvious which measure is appropriate to measure generousity.

"Our findings suggest that if the pursuit of self-interest goes unchecked, it may result in a vicious cycle: self-interest leads people to behave unethically, which raises their status, which leads to more unethical behavior and inequality."

I don't believe the causality is necesarily in the way this researchers describes.
Maybe being selfish makes you rich, maybe being rich makes you selfish, maybe both. Maybe there is something else going on.
#13907279
pugsville wrote:YES. The Research is in apparently....

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp

Interesting the poor people passing themselves off as rich people behave worse, they apparently pirus drivers are the worst.


The hybrid is among the highest "unethical driving" car brands. :lol:

"This is a good demonstration of the 'moral licensing' phenomenon, in which hybrid-car drivers who believe they're saving the Earth may feel entitled to behave unethically in other ways," Piff says.
#13908551
The study seems to find a positive correlation between self reported social class and egoistic behavoir. However, since probably most of the respondents were probably to middle class and only very few if any millionairs are present. I think the following conclusion would be more appropriate:
"people who report their social class to be slightly higher than middle class are more egoistisc than people who report their social class to be slightly lower than middle class".
#13908574
Oh god, so much junk science in that article.

Like for example the notion that breaking the law is unethical by definition.

The idea that rich people are more evil than poor people also flies straight in the face of my own experience let alone the crime statistics, how many rich men beat their wives for example? I am 100% sure that it is a much smaller number than the lumpenproletariat men. How many rich men assault people on the street or rape women? Again I am fairly sure that this number is much much lower than for men of low income.

I know several wealthy men who are close friends of my family and all of them strike me as good men that are very nice and not at all prone to criminal behavior or violence. The rich men I know well (4 of them) are all good men, they are family men who treat their wives better than most men and they treat their kids well also, in general they strike me as very good people actually, people of much higher moral quality than the alcoholic bozo's or druggies that live in the ghettoes of Denmark.

The things the author calls unethical is also not unethical, like driving up profits or firing employee's, clearly the author of said article is freaking clueless when it comes to the study of economics because neither of these activities hurt society, they benefit it by making every company more efficient and hence raise living standards for everyone.
Last edited by Kman on 01 Mar 2012 15:11, edited 3 times in total.
#13908577
Well I strongly suspect that of people who are significantly richer than would be expected from their inheritance, they are harder working but more ruthless.

Take computing which I know something about as I'm doing some development. How much of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs success is due to making great products and how much is due to monopolistic market manipulation and deception? I'd say mostly the latter. The state of the computer industry is absolutely pathetic. The state of programming language, tools and environment is appalling, because everything is designed to be incompatible. A huge amount of applications run in browsers, its like owning a Ferrari but having to drive around in first gear, this is because of the continual efforts of the companies to make things incompatible. If only business people could be as honourable and honest as politicians, these vermin have no shame. Take Microsoft, they deliberately facilitate the pirating of their own software to get monopolies, but strangle our freedom in the name of property rights when they see profit in it.

No doubt the Libertarians will ride into tell us that any faults in the computing industry are all the fault of fanny mac and fanny mae.
#13908584
^That only happens because government is enforcing copyrights, without copyrights people would not engage in this type of stuff (and no dont tell me that copyrights is the same as property rights because they arent).
#13908588
Kman wrote:^That only happens because government is enforcing copyrights, without copyrights people would not engage in this type of stuff (and no dont tell me that copyrights is the same as property rights because they arent).

sorry Kman but you're to the left of me on this issue. I support copyrights but oppose patents.

I'm never going to become a Libertarian but I would have more respect for Libertarians if they didn't try and hide in the Conservative Right. Another example: Ron Paul's Foreign policy is well to the left in the American political spectrum.
Last edited by Rich on 01 Mar 2012 15:15, edited 1 time in total.
#13908591
Rich wrote:sorry Kman but you're to the left of me on this issue. I support copyrights but oppose patents.


Copyrights = the government telling people they cannot copy goods, it does not deal at all with any property or any theft, when I copy a movie I am not stealing anything from anybody so it is not a left wing issue since I am not using force against anyone.

Edit: but lets not derail this thread with a copyright argument.
#13908604
Kman wrote:Edit: but lets not derail this thread with a copyright argument.

I'm not sure it is a derailment, because as so often the devil is in the detail. Hard working people tend to be more successful and therefore richer, surely we can all agree on that. The question is: is their success an overall contribution to society? Vladamir Lenin was incredibly hard-working, but that doesn't mean he overall did good for people. The same applies to western Business people.
#13908607
Rich wrote:I'm not sure it is a derailment, because as so often the devil is in the detail. Hard working people tend to be more successful and therefore richer, surely we can all agree on that. The question is: is their success an overall contribution to society? Vladamir Lenin was incredibly hard-working, but that doesn't mean he overall did good for people. The same applies to western Business people.


Vladimir Lenin forced people to do what he wanted at the point of a gun, business men do not force you to do anything, when you buy a product of theirs it is because you value it more than the other competitors products.
#13909909
No, the rich are not necessarily unethical. However, many members of the Left have the same criticisms of the bourgeoisie that anti-intellectualists have of intellectuals: that they are "detached from reality".
#13912849
The richer you are, the easier it is to be ethical.

You are living free from jealousy.
Free from compromise.

You have a stake in society that can easily be taken away from you if you transgress it's moral code. You are easier to be held to account.


I'd assume that there is pretty good correlation between poverty and crime for example.
#13913085
From a political perspective, morality is often equated with the relative concept of greed. But what is the greater greed: Someone that wants to enjoy the fruits of their or their family's efforts or someone that sees what others have obtained and then demands that some of it be given to them simply because they exist.
#13977567
pugsville wrote:YES. The Research is in apparently....

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp

Interesting the poor people passing themselves off as rich people behave worse, they apparently pirus drivers are the worst.


Pseudo-scientific crap!

Lots of relative terms and concepts (including "morality"), purely pseudo-scientific "methodology" and interpretation (correlation=causation, etc.)

Describing such "studies" as scientific should be severely punished!
#13977578
Does it matter?

They're the enemy: They hoard stuff that we'd rather have for ourselves and they use their influence to preserve their privilege. Even if every rich person in the world's history was a good guy, the right thing to do would still be to crush them under a proletarian jackboot.
#13977584
KlassWar wrote:Does it matter?

They're the enemy: They hoard stuff that we'd rather have for ourselves and they use their influence to preserve their privilege. Even if every rich person in the world's history was a good guy, the right thing to do would still be to crush them under a proletarian jackboot.

The bolsheviks and other commies already tried that and failed miserably to do anything positive! Not it's time for things to happen the other way around: any wackos with communist or socialist ideals should be euthanized!
#13977915
The bolsheviks and other commies already tried that and failed miserably to do anything positive!


A big fan of pre Bolshevik Russia? I'm sure the peasantry would agree with you. :lol: In terms of advancing the position of their people they were one of the best regimes in human history.

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