Greed is Good: A Personal Guide to the November elections
by Lorenzo Lazzerini-Ospri
The American public looks forward to see a number of historical firsts established in this year's presidential elections, and all of them are deeply disturbing. Following the unprecedented decision by the Supreme Court in Citizens United to quash all campaign finance regulations, a likewise unprecedented amount of special interests money, most of it from anonymous and unaccountable donors, is corrupting our political process and threatens to fundamentally undermine its democratic nature. Even before Citizens United, the cost of US presidential elections had exploded dramatically, reaching an astounding $1.3 billion in the 2008 race. This year, all indications are out there to suggest we will cross the $3 billion mark. To put things in perspective, all candidates in the 2012 French presidential elections incurred total costs of a little under $60 million, as is typical of European elections in general. Even adjusting for population, it's still a one-order-of-magnitude difference.
Why is this worrisome? After all, so long as people get up on election day, line up at the poll station, and dutifully cast their vote, everything's fine. The candidate with the most votes gets elected, the losers go home. Never mind if the great show of democracy demands tons of cash of its players; let people rejoice - the system works, right?
Wrong. The problem with this model is twofold: First, the theoretically universal right to run for office becomes the privilege of a connected oligarchy who can afford it. Second, what happens the day after the lucky winner gets sworn into office? Will her allegiance be to the people who nominally elected her, or to the deep-pocketed donors who actually made her victory at the polls possible, through a barrage of attack ads against her opponent, paeans of praise by the courtier press, and the most powerfully staged photo op's that a buttload of money can buy? She'd better be grateful, if she ever wants to be re-elected.
All of this has very real consequences for everybody. It's no coincidence that this flood of anonymous money in politics is coming at a time when taxes on the wealthiest Americans are at their lowest level in 80 years; it's no coincidence that no-one has been prosecuted for the 2008 financial collapse that triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. People have lost their homes, their jobs. What's left of the middle class is reeling from the consequences of mass unemployment and widespread misery. But not a single banker or trader has paid the price for his overreaching greed. We're approaching a status quo in society reminiscent of the situation in France before the Revolution, when an incomprehensibly wealthy elite paid no taxes and was unfettered by the strictures of the law, only enforced for the peasants.
It is important to emphasize that this system, which debases democracy to empty rituals, bears no mark of inevitability. Most Western European democracies, for all their many flaws, are at least not completely in the thrall of cranky billionaires and egotistical Gordon Gekkos. Niether is our big northern neighbor, and neither was even the United States up to until relatively recently. The hijacking of our self-governing Republic is a new and troubling phenomenon. It remains to be seen whether an active citizenry will be up to task of remedying the damage done by the Citizens United ruling and three decades of classist policies.
The other historical record broken in the course of this year's elections is the personal wealth of a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, is reported to have an estimated net worth in excess of $250 million. Nobody really knows the exact figure, since the candidate has steadfastly refused to release his tax records and is known to possess a string of offshore bank accounts in notoriously secretive tax havens, ranging from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. Everybody agrees, however, that Mr. Romney is by far the most well-off guy ever to run for the highest office of the land.
Is this irrelevant trivia? Surely, the personal finances of a candidate are nobody's business but his own. So long as he made his money fair and square, who cares if Mr. Romney owns three car elevators or solid-gold toilet seats. Perhaps this is even a positive quality in a presidential candidate: His success in the private equity business makes him a qualified manager of the national economy, and since he's so rich to begin with he'll be less susceptible to pressures from his campaign donors. Right?
Wrong. Recent findings in cognitive science suggest voters should be warier than usual if the owner of untold riches suddenly came up to them asking to run the show for the common good. Why is that? Marxist prejudice in academia - as astute Sen. Rick Santorum once put it? Not really. A number of scientific papers* published in the last few years consistently point to a seemingly counter-intuitive conclusion: over and over again, not low but high personal socioeconomic status is found to be one of the strongest predictors of unethical behavior.
Yes, you read that right. Psychology researchers had already found that big money interferes with the experience of empathy: Relative to their lower-class counterparts, upper class individuals are less likely to correctly recognize the emotions of others, and more detached during contingent social interactions. In economic games performed in lab settings, they also tend to share a significantly smaller portion of their assigned, in-game, wealth with other players, and national statistics show they give a smaller percentage of their actual income to charity - contrary to the common wisdom. (If they're Republican presidential candidates, they might also be more likely than the average Joe to strap their dog to the roof of the family car while going on a 600-mile trip from Boston to Lake Huron.) But now evidence is beginning to accumulate that this empathy gap translates into a higher likelihood of engaging in downright unethical conduct.
Why is this worrisome? After all, so long as people get up on election day, line up at the poll station, and dutifully cast their vote, everything's fine. The candidate with the most votes gets elected, the losers go home. Never mind if the great show of democracy demands tons of cash of its players; let people rejoice - the system works, right?
Wrong. The problem with this model is twofold: First, the theoretically universal right to run for office becomes the privilege of a connected oligarchy who can afford it. Second, what happens the day after the lucky winner gets sworn into office? Will her allegiance be to the people who nominally elected her, or to the deep-pocketed donors who actually made her victory at the polls possible, through a barrage of attack ads against her opponent, paeans of praise by the courtier press, and the most powerfully staged photo op's that a buttload of money can buy? She'd better be grateful, if she ever wants to be re-elected.
All of this has very real consequences for everybody. It's no coincidence that this flood of anonymous money in politics is coming at a time when taxes on the wealthiest Americans are at their lowest level in 80 years; it's no coincidence that no-one has been prosecuted for the 2008 financial collapse that triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. People have lost their homes, their jobs. What's left of the middle class is reeling from the consequences of mass unemployment and widespread misery. But not a single banker or trader has paid the price for his overreaching greed. We're approaching a status quo in society reminiscent of the situation in France before the Revolution, when an incomprehensibly wealthy elite paid no taxes and was unfettered by the strictures of the law, only enforced for the peasants.
It is important to emphasize that this system, which debases democracy to empty rituals, bears no mark of inevitability. Most Western European democracies, for all their many flaws, are at least not completely in the thrall of cranky billionaires and egotistical Gordon Gekkos. Niether is our big northern neighbor, and neither was even the United States up to until relatively recently. The hijacking of our self-governing Republic is a new and troubling phenomenon. It remains to be seen whether an active citizenry will be up to task of remedying the damage done by the Citizens United ruling and three decades of classist policies.
The other historical record broken in the course of this year's elections is the personal wealth of a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, is reported to have an estimated net worth in excess of $250 million. Nobody really knows the exact figure, since the candidate has steadfastly refused to release his tax records and is known to possess a string of offshore bank accounts in notoriously secretive tax havens, ranging from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. Everybody agrees, however, that Mr. Romney is by far the most well-off guy ever to run for the highest office of the land.
Is this irrelevant trivia? Surely, the personal finances of a candidate are nobody's business but his own. So long as he made his money fair and square, who cares if Mr. Romney owns three car elevators or solid-gold toilet seats. Perhaps this is even a positive quality in a presidential candidate: His success in the private equity business makes him a qualified manager of the national economy, and since he's so rich to begin with he'll be less susceptible to pressures from his campaign donors. Right?
Wrong. Recent findings in cognitive science suggest voters should be warier than usual if the owner of untold riches suddenly came up to them asking to run the show for the common good. Why is that? Marxist prejudice in academia - as astute Sen. Rick Santorum once put it? Not really. A number of scientific papers* published in the last few years consistently point to a seemingly counter-intuitive conclusion: over and over again, not low but high personal socioeconomic status is found to be one of the strongest predictors of unethical behavior.
Yes, you read that right. Psychology researchers had already found that big money interferes with the experience of empathy: Relative to their lower-class counterparts, upper class individuals are less likely to correctly recognize the emotions of others, and more detached during contingent social interactions. In economic games performed in lab settings, they also tend to share a significantly smaller portion of their assigned, in-game, wealth with other players, and national statistics show they give a smaller percentage of their actual income to charity - contrary to the common wisdom. (If they're Republican presidential candidates, they might also be more likely than the average Joe to strap their dog to the roof of the family car while going on a 600-mile trip from Boston to Lake Huron.) But now evidence is beginning to accumulate that this empathy gap translates into a higher likelihood of engaging in downright unethical conduct.
Let's start with a rather lowly example. A recent study looked into how likely a motorist is to cut off others at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides, as a function of socioeconomic status as reflected by the driver's car (cars were ranked by researchers over 5 tiers according to model, age, etc.). Surprisingly, the most prestigious cars were found to be significantly more likely to cross the intersection without waiting their turn (see fig. 1). A similar investigation into how likely a car is to cut off pedestrians at a crosswalk found an even more dramatic correlation between car status and probability of not yielding to the pedestrian (fig. 2). In another study, researchers wanted to know if socioeconomic status influenced moral decision-making even in different settings, e.g. the lab instead of the road. Researchers asked study participants if they would engage in some questionable behavior (lying, cheating, etc.) in order to attain a certain personal gain, and - Guess what? - individuals scoring high in a standardized scale of socioeconomic status were significantly more likely to go for the dishonest option, even after adjusting for age, sex, and race. All of these are of course correlational studies - they cannot establish if higher social class per se (as opposed to another, uncontrolled for, factor) impels people to act unethically.
Consider then this further study: An individual's subjective perception of his or her own socioeconomic status was manipulated by researchers, by asking the study participant to compare him- or herself to higher (or lower) ranking individuals. This is an accepted method to prime a person's subjective feeling of his or her own social standing. Such priming has long been known to influence decision making (e.g., it can alter the magnitude of altruistic donations), and the ability to recognize other people's emotions. The participants then again were probed for their self-declared propensity to dishonestly achieve a personal goal. The individuals with the highest subjective socioeconomic self-rating were the most likely to decide for the unethical behavior. But wait, there's more - at the end of the experiment, researchers gave subjects a sealed jar of candies, ostensibly for children in the lab next door. They were told that they could take some from the jar if they wanted to, though doing so would make less candies available for the children. In an incredible Mr. Burns-esque twist, the higher the subjective socioeconomic status, the more candies the subject took away from the children - the difference between the high and low class ranking individuals being statistically significant. Ok now, even conceding -grudgingly- that socioeconomic status may have some bearing on a person's ethical standards (or lack thereof), one might wonder about the underlying psychological causative mechanism.
Some researchers speculated that greed could be a part of the explanation. They devised the following experiment to test their hypothesis: Imagine you are a manager tasked with negotiating a salary with a job applicant seeking long-term employment. You're well aware that the position the applicant is being hired for is going to be eliminated soon, but disclosing this to the guy would presumably lead to him demanding higher compensation. Do you decide to tell him the truth? If you test a bunch of people, it turns out the decision to lie to the job applicant is correlated with only two factors: self-rated socioeconomic status, and self-reported attitudes toward greed. Age, sex, race, religiosity, political views are irrelevant in themselves. But the higher your socioeconomic status - and the more positive your view of greed - the likelier you are to deceive the job applicant. Statistical analysis revealed that upper-class people are indeed more prone to deception in part because of their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
The same two factors (socioeconomic status and valuation of greed) predicted, in yet another study, the experimental subjects' tendency to cheat in a lab game in order to win a prize. Let's take a step further: If thinking greed is good really makes you more of an unethical schmuck, then “artificially” altering your opinion of greed should also affect the probability of your engaging in unethical decision-making. Lo and behold, that's precisely what was determined in the final study of our series, with researchers finding that making subjects list three benefits of greed – a “greed-is-good” psychological primer – did in fact increase their rate of unethical decisions (lying, appropriating public goods, cheating) in lab self-reports (fig. 3 below). There are of course many caveats attached to this kind of studies, but an objective fact remains: Over a series of different tasks, settings, and operationalizations, a consistently higher propensity is found among upper class individuals to disregard rules and social conventions, not to mention the rights of others, in order to have their way.
Consider then this further study: An individual's subjective perception of his or her own socioeconomic status was manipulated by researchers, by asking the study participant to compare him- or herself to higher (or lower) ranking individuals. This is an accepted method to prime a person's subjective feeling of his or her own social standing. Such priming has long been known to influence decision making (e.g., it can alter the magnitude of altruistic donations), and the ability to recognize other people's emotions. The participants then again were probed for their self-declared propensity to dishonestly achieve a personal goal. The individuals with the highest subjective socioeconomic self-rating were the most likely to decide for the unethical behavior. But wait, there's more - at the end of the experiment, researchers gave subjects a sealed jar of candies, ostensibly for children in the lab next door. They were told that they could take some from the jar if they wanted to, though doing so would make less candies available for the children. In an incredible Mr. Burns-esque twist, the higher the subjective socioeconomic status, the more candies the subject took away from the children - the difference between the high and low class ranking individuals being statistically significant. Ok now, even conceding -grudgingly- that socioeconomic status may have some bearing on a person's ethical standards (or lack thereof), one might wonder about the underlying psychological causative mechanism.
Some researchers speculated that greed could be a part of the explanation. They devised the following experiment to test their hypothesis: Imagine you are a manager tasked with negotiating a salary with a job applicant seeking long-term employment. You're well aware that the position the applicant is being hired for is going to be eliminated soon, but disclosing this to the guy would presumably lead to him demanding higher compensation. Do you decide to tell him the truth? If you test a bunch of people, it turns out the decision to lie to the job applicant is correlated with only two factors: self-rated socioeconomic status, and self-reported attitudes toward greed. Age, sex, race, religiosity, political views are irrelevant in themselves. But the higher your socioeconomic status - and the more positive your view of greed - the likelier you are to deceive the job applicant. Statistical analysis revealed that upper-class people are indeed more prone to deception in part because of their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
The same two factors (socioeconomic status and valuation of greed) predicted, in yet another study, the experimental subjects' tendency to cheat in a lab game in order to win a prize. Let's take a step further: If thinking greed is good really makes you more of an unethical schmuck, then “artificially” altering your opinion of greed should also affect the probability of your engaging in unethical decision-making. Lo and behold, that's precisely what was determined in the final study of our series, with researchers finding that making subjects list three benefits of greed – a “greed-is-good” psychological primer – did in fact increase their rate of unethical decisions (lying, appropriating public goods, cheating) in lab self-reports (fig. 3 below). There are of course many caveats attached to this kind of studies, but an objective fact remains: Over a series of different tasks, settings, and operationalizations, a consistently higher propensity is found among upper class individuals to disregard rules and social conventions, not to mention the rights of others, in order to have their way.
It should be emphasized that attitudes toward greed explain only a part of this statistical trend. It has variously been proposed that the mega-rich are more, let's say, 'ethically-challenged' because their wealth makes them less dependent on fellow humans, leading them to self-centered attitudes and overarching feelings of entitlement. Others have speculated that they have fewer inhibitions in acting out unethical tendencies because they think they have the resources to escape the consequences of their actions – and all too many people on Wall Street have been proven right in this belief.
A statistical finding is of course no indicator of the moral worthiness of a specific individual, even in the case of Mr. Romney, whose life is fairly well documented following his decision to run for President. There are in fact countless examples of wealthy people who have proven their probity and generosity, even in the service of public good – people the likes of Warren Buffett or Averell Harriman.
It remains up to the voters to decide whether somebody like Mr. Romney - who used every trick in the book to dodge his taxes, who assaulted a gay classmate in his youth and laughed about it on national TV in his maturity, who doped up one of his crippled competition horses in order to sell it at the price of a healthy animal, and who made millions off the backs of fired workers - is the rule or the exception.
* Piff et al., Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Mar 13;109(11):4086-91.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not reflect the position of The Restriction Digest Editorial staff, The Graduate Student Association at JHMI, or Johns Hopkins Medicine.