Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

[Brian Peacock]

The Money-Empathy Gap

JUNE, 2012

In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that ineffably combine to create success in games as in life—have been made immaterial. Here, the only thing that matters is money.

One of the players, a brown-haired guy in a striped T-shirt, has been made “rich.” He got $2,000 from the Monopoly bank at the start of the game and receives $200 each time he passes Go. The second player, a chubby young man in glasses, is comparatively impoverished. He was given $1,000 at the start and collects $100 for passing Go. T-Shirt can roll two dice, but Glasses can only roll one, limiting how fast he can advance. The students play for fifteen minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall in another windowless room, the researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording in a giant spreadsheet the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.

T-Shirt isn’t just winning; he’s crushing Glasses. Initially, he reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. “Hey,” his expression seemed to say, “this is weird and unfair, but whatever.” Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate. He’s a skinny kid, but he balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece (in the experiment, the wealthy player gets the Rolls-Royce) as he makes the circuit—smack, smack, smack—­ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang! Four minutes in, he picks up Glasses’s piece, the little elf shoe, and moves it for him. As the game nears its finish, T-Shirt moves his Rolls faster. The taunting is over now: He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet Glasses’s gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash.

For a long time, primatologists have known that chimpanzees will act out ­social dominance with a special ferociousness, slapping hands, stamping feet, or “charging back and forth and dragging huge branches,” as Jane Goodall once wrote. And sociologists and anthropologists have explored the effects of hierarchy in tribes and groups. But psychology has only recently begun seriously investigating how having money, that major marker of status in the modern world, ­affects psychosocial behavior in the species Homo sapiens. By making real people temporarily very affluent, without regard to their actual economic circumstances and within the controlled environment of a psych lab, the Berkeley researchers aim to demonstrate the potency of that one variable. “Putting someone in a role where they’re more privileged and have more power in a game makes them behave like people who actually do have more power, more money, and more status,” says Paul Piff, the psychologist who designed the experiment. The Monopoly results, based on a year of watching inequitable games between pairs like Glasses and T-Shirt, have not yet been ­released. But Piff believes that they will support and amplify his previous provocative research.

Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”...

[pErvinalia]

It could be a bit of the tail wagging the dog. People with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to succeed in our capitalistic framework.

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah right, I can already see the kids that would hate the game, find it annoying (eg this isn’t fun, obviously you can’t win) and sympathize with the “poor guy”. How many games were observed and who were the participants —oh right, kids at Berkeley.

But the biggest problem is likely going to be the real world, where poverty is already blamed for bringing out the worst in us. However, in that research it’s taken as given that other factors besides poverty contribute.

I guess they could find that either extreme leads to problems.

—//—

But maybe some people are just wired to be assholes.

[Sean Hayden]

Rich US Tourists Will Make Europeans Feel Poor

For decades, Europeans have drawn solace from the fact that while absolute wealth levels are higher in the US, we fare better when it comes to other elements of the good life. We enjoy longer paid vacations, less gun crime, healthier diets and walkable cities — factors that in turn contribute to greater longevity. Average lifespans in the European Union are estimated at 81.5 years, compared with around 77.5 years in the US.

Lately, though, Europe has begun to worry about a yawning trans-Atlantic divergence in economic growth and technological competitiveness. “Americans just work harder,” whereas Europeans are less ambitious and more risk averse, Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund, told the Financial Times in April. Prior to stepping down as chief executive officer of Dutch chip manufacturing equipment giant ASML Holding NV, Peter Wennink warned last year that Europe is falling behind and must overcome complacency. “Looking at our society, I sometimes get the impression that we are, as they say, `fat, dumb and happy,’” he said.

…continued https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... -feel-poor

[pErvinalia]

Yeah happiness is overrated. What matters is competition and dying early.

[macdoc]

Work is over rated....fat and happy with the finer things in life and the time to enjoy them. and a better GINI index

[Sean Hayden]

IMG_0452.jpeg (57.14 KiB) Viewed 3570 times

[macdoc]

√
It IS surprising how much difference 5 years make.
I mean look at Biden and I can speak from experience.
These very active 100 yr olds make me jealous. I'll be 80 for the next Summer Olympics!!

[Sean Hayden]

And you’re still riding, you must’ve been living right at some point doc.

[Brian Peacock]

Well, the Conservatives have always said they're the party of business.

Tory Covid contracts worth £15bn had corruption ‘red flags’, study finds

A landmark study has uncovered corruption “red flags” in government Covid contracts worth more than £15bn – representing nearly one in every three pounds awarded by the Conservative administration during the pandemic.

The analysis, billed as the most in-depth look yet at public procurement during the crisis, warns that systemic bias, opaque accounting and uncontrolled pricing resulted in vast waste of public funds on testing and personal protective equipment (PPE).

The review of more than 5,000 contracts across 400 public bodies identifies 135 high-risk contracts with a value of £15.3bn where investigation is merited due to the identification of three or more corruption red flags, which include a lack of competition, delays or failure to release information on procurement, and conflicts of interest in the award of contracts. The report by Transparency International UK finds:

[*] At least 28 contracts, worth £4.1bn, went to those with known political connections to the Conservative party. This amounts to almost a tenth of the money spent on the pandemic response.
[*] Fifty-one contracts, worth £4bn, went through the “VIP lane”, a vehicle through which certain suppliers were given priority, of which 24, worth £1.7bn, were referred by politicians from the Conservative party or their offices.
[*] £1bn was spent on personal protective equipment from 25 VIP-lane suppliers that was later deemed unfit for use. The VIP lane was found to unlawful by a high court judge in a 2022 ruling.
[*] Eight contracts, worth £500m, went to suppliers that were no more than 100 days old.
[*] The UK government awarded more than £30.7bn in high- value contracts ]without competition – equivalent to almost two-thirds of all Covid contracts by value.
[*] The Department of Health and Social Care wrote off £14.9bn in public money over a two-year period – equivalent to the government’s total spend on personal protective equipment..

...

Almost two-thirds of all high-value Covid contracts by value lacked competition. A year into the pandemic, UK contracting authorities were still frequently making awards without competition even as countries in the EU such as Italy were reverting to competitive bidding.

...

Of the 135 contracts identified as being high risk, the report’s authors write: “The most common red flags were delayed publication of contracts and those awarded uncompetitively. However, most of these contracts exhibited red flags across multiple areas of risk – including those associated with the supplier profile, the procurement process and the contract outcomes – and often spanning all three. Some contracts displayed as many as eight red flags.”

...

[Svartalf]

well, there's the price of doing business, and it's not pretty

[L'Emmerdeur]

Outstanding effort if your understanding is that government exists to streamline the process of fleecing the populace. They achieved that in masterful fashion but failed at the not getting caught part. But then, the repercussions may be minor and so were accepted as part of the swindle from the beginning.

[Sean Hayden]

—and another one…

Yes, a new internal memo obtained by Bloomberg shows that the Toyota Motor Corporation is reportedly set to "halt sponsorship of LGBTQ+ events" and will also "end [its] participation in notable rankings by LGBTQ+ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign and other corporate culture surveys."

For context, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) gave Toyota a perfect 100 score in the organization's 2023 Corporate Equality Index Criteria ratings. Per the messaging in this memo, however, it seems like Toyota will no longer participate in these surveys or collaborate with the HRC.

According to the Bloomberg report, Toyota's internal memo — which was sent on Thursday, October 3, to 50,000 employees based in the U.S. — also explains that the company will now "narrow [its] community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness."

https://www.out.com/business/toyota-no- ... belltitem1

[Brian Peacock]

[Sean Hayden]

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and other executives were indicted by a federal grand jury in New York for allegedly paying more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials and concealing them from US investors. Between 2020 and 2024, the defendants agreed to make illegal payments to obtain lucrative solar energy supply contracts with the Indian government, according to the indictment. “The defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars,” Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. —David E. Rovella

You’ve picked yourself up, and overcome impossible odds, you put in the work and gotten so far. But now you’re stuck, and you just can’t seem to break into the next level. The truth is, you’re probably just too darned straight. Welcome to the Criminal Billionaires Seminar: fear of consequences is a limiting belief, who’s still limiting your potential?