Born on 3rd Base, Acts Like He Hit a Triple

Money doesn't make you mean. Absorbing other people"s cruelty towards you and adapting it as your own makes you mean.

You know how I feel.

Its a load of horse shit spoon fed to poor people to make them feel better about themselves.

I don't think conspicuous spending is really anything new. It'd be interesting to see also how education and other factors (aside from wealth) attribute to the outcomes in this test.

I don't think it's been done to death as much as hasn't been addressed. Realistically, America got lucky in the 1900's when the unions rose and again in the mid 30's when the gov't made it clear that the general population mattered beyond serving the vision of the elites. In other countries they had revolutions and liquidation of the entire upper echelons of society. Now we see folks deliberately running gov't poorly in America so to have an excuse to reduce it's size, or jumping on every mistake as an opportunity to say "see, gov't is evil, always, you should let ME run things".

Size of gov't was never really important, effectiveness is.

While communisim was never really more than a glorified dictatorship, people became disillusioned enough with their former ways of life to hand over power to people who terminated somewhere in the realm of a quarter billion human lives. A failure of leadership allowed all that to happen, and I'm not sure what they expected.

If paying good employees a few more bucks an hour, upgrading gov't systems [see: computers], and having sensible laws prevents all that, I say do it.

Just my opinion.

Rhetorical answer: if money doesn't make you mean, what the hell was Leona Helmsley?

It's not about money, it's about power, and America is about independance first....money second. Remember that we had Quakers and Frenchmen finance our Independance war because we were literally too poor to do it on our own. All of our success flows from that: if people have ownership of their lives, they take it more seriously. It's a very simple concept, and people who argue it are usually just out for themselves. From time to time Americans delude themselves into thinking that their money and power don't require any responsibility. Abuse power, and bad things happen, it's almost like some kind of law of nature or something. Then America gets a slap in the face and start acting like big kids again. If 2008 wasn't a big enough smack, I don't know what to tell you.

So good. SB! Heister, you need a wake up call man. Sure it took skill doing what you did, but you got a major head start too. Some of us got much less of a head start, but have done well, and guess what - it's cause we got lucky where we got born / lived / educated / specific jobs / timing etc. There is so much luck involved. I'm not saying poor/rich people are 'better/worse', but hard to argue against the basic tenants of what is suggested above...

I run into plenty poor/middle class assholes on the reg. I blame reality TV.

I think a lot of it boils down to wealthier people being out of touch with the poor. If you live in a golf community out in the boonies, it's pretty easy to assume all poor people are lazier and less driven than you are.

Brought to you by Goldman Sachs, so ironic and awesome at the same time.

But this is an excellent talk, thanks Eddie for posting.

I think the concept of public sector unions are and have been proven as ridiculous, but what is wrong with service sector unions?

I largely agree with all of Piff's observations, which concern a widely appreciated aspect of the human psyche that experimental psychologist Steven Pinker dubs "the Moralization Gap". Namely, that in a dispute between two parties, the "plaintiff" ("victim") will emphasize the deliberateness, or at least the depraved indifference, of the defendant's action, together with the pain and suffering the plaintiff endures. Conversely, the defendant will emphasize the reasonableness or unavoidability of the action, and will minimize the plaintiff's pain and suffering.

Compared to Piff, Pinker does an excellent job of capturing both sides of the self-serving bias:

A group of social psychologists invited a group of people to describe one incident in which someone angered them, and one incident in which they angered someone. The order of the two questions was randomly flipped, and they were separated by a busywork task so the participants wouldn't answer them in quick succession. The stories shared exhibited largely the same narrative structure:

The Perpetrator's Narrative: The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any reasonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it's unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apologized. It's time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones.

The Victim's Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator's actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should forget it.

In a number of follow-up experiments, psychologists attempted to answer the question: "Who should we believe?" And after thorough investigation, the answer turned out to be "neither". Both victims and perpetrators distort stories largely to the same extent but in opposite directions, each omitting or embellishing details in a way that made the actions of their character look more reasonable and the other's less reasonable. What's worse, people change their evaluation of something they've done to preserve the sanctity of the Lake Wobegon Effect, in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.

As Pinker contends, "The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone's self-deception is invisible to them." Thus, it's important that, even in matters when no reasonable third party can doubt who's right and who's wrong, we have to be prepared, when putting on psychological spectacles, to see that the evildoers always think they are acting morally.

An unfortunate side effect of our self-serving biases is that it gives rise to a phenomenon psychologist Roy Baumeister deems "the myth of pure evil", an archetype that is common in religions, horror movies, children's literature, nationalist ideologies and sensationalist news coverage. Pinker observes, "In popular culture, fiction evil takes the form of the slasher, the serial killer, the bogeyman, the ogre, the Joker, the James Bond Villain, or depending on the cinematic decade, the Nazi officer, Soviet spy, Italian gangster, Arab terrorist, inner-city predator, Mexican druglord, galactic emperor, or corporate executive." Yet, any well-read student of history recalls Hannah Arendt's writings about Adolf Eichmann for his role in the organizing the logistics of the Holocaust, in which she coined the expression "the banality of evil", to capture the ordinariness of the man and ordinariness of his motives.

It is this psychological quirk that emerges as the class conflict Piff describes. There is surely an unfortunate tendency of the successful or wealthy to overstate their cosmic importance. Also, though Piff doesn't mention this, there is an offsetting tendency of the less fortunate (a delightful change in diction, suggesting our increased self-awareness of the issue) to vilify their successful peers as "greedy" or "conniving". Ludwig von Mises observes, in his essay The Anti-Capitalist Mentality:

In order to console himself and to restore his self-assertion, such a man is in search of a scapegoat. He tries to persuade him­self that he failed through no fault of his own. He is at least as brilliant, efficient and industrious as those who outshine him. Unfortunately, this nefarious social order of ours does not accord the prizes to the most meritorious men; it crowns the dishonest, unscrupulous scoundrel, the swindler, the exploiter, the “rugged individualist.” What made himself fail was his honesty. He was too decent to resort to the base tricks to which his successful ri­vals owe their ascend­ancy. As conditions are under capitalism, a man is forced to choose between virtue and poverty on the one hand, and vice and riches on the other. He, himself, thank God, chose the former alternative and rejected the latter.

I believe it is helpful for Piff to demonstrate the tendency of successful people to fall victim to in-group favoritism and excessively tout their own positive traits and behavior. I do, however, wish that he would cultivate the balance to note the counter-acting perils of classist rhetoric that is brewing in "the 99%", which makes harmful use Baumeister's "myth of pure evil", depicting the wealthy as a group of depraved hedonists.

As an aside, I find the politicizing rhetoric in Piff's TED lecture to be unfortunately distracting from the otherwise valid and reasonable point. I can ignore what seems like a subliminal suggestion that the path to affluence is "rigged" in the same way his experimental Monopoly game, but the slide shown at timestamp 13:00 just strikes me as strange.

Given that he is lecturing to an OECD audience, using studies of OECD residents and citing income inequality statistics of OECD countries, I can't possibly understand what empirical observations would lead to the "positives" on the left and "negatives" on the right.

The free market societies, in which Piff observes the rich may fall victim to their own self-serving psychological biases, are, by any measure, more socially mobile, are the most economically prosperous, have progressive societies permitting enjoyable community life, have longer life expectancies, higher educational performance and greater physical health than their unfree, non-capitalist peers. Furthermore, they have lower rates of violence, fewer teenage births and less incidence of punishment. That they have higher rates of obesity and abuse of drugs is hilariously confounded by the access that wealth permits; and, indeed, their higher rates of imprisonment merely suggest legitimate, functional executive government.

Listening to this lecture, chock full of political rhetoric as it is, reminds me of reading an op-ed piece in the WSJ that I agree with: it's almost impossible to appreciate the sense of the argument behind your visceral reactions to empty rhetoric. I just wish Piff could take it upon himself to adopt a more Malcolm Gladwell-esque demeanor when explaining his findings. This just isn't going to resonate with anyone who doesn't already agree with him.

To some degree I have observed that a guy being an asshole and a girl being a bitch are tied to status, or the attempt to display such status. Why would some one hang with a douche bag? Because he probably has other characteristics that make up in stride for that negative personality trait. Girl's like assholes despite their assholeness, it is likely that they get away with being douchey because they are attractive/charismatic/successful. It is a display of superiority. That's why money makes people mean, they are because they can afford to be. They don't need to kiss anyone's ass.

My experience with "old money" is that they are usually the nicer, least flashy people I know. I used to work in affordable housing and my experience was that low income people tended to have an entitled attitude. But if a study says so then it must be true...

On old money: one distinguishing feature of what one would call "old money" in the US, or the aristocracy in Europe, is that they don't work and spend their time doing charity, suporting the arts, etc.... Not a lot of people are into that anymore. Most rich people are still on the treadmill so to speak. In that Monopoly experiment, the guys for whom the game is rigged are still actively playing the game.

You could argue people like Bill Gates or John Arnold have stepped away from the treadmill/game/rat race whatever, which is a great antidote to douchery. Once you're not actively trying to get ahead and hold on to what you have, you're likely to be a whole lot nicer.

I dislike poor decision makers so I dislike many people.

Anyone else notice that in his sample size all participant who were the "poor" students were of asian descent and more commonly within that culture they are less individualistic, greedy (eating massive amounts of pretzels), and less likely to trash talk or brag about their accomplishments?

I value the points he is trying to make, but I feel that his experiments were just different variations of confirmation biases..typical Berkeley garbage.

This talk, and its experiments, show how successful people tend to look at their success as a result of their hard work, neglecting all the good luck they had by being born into wealth. Of course, not 100% of people suffer from this, but the majority of people do. Not all poor people are poor because they want to. Most of them work hard everyday, and never get ahead, living paycheck to paycheck. That is the reality in the US, and it is sad. I think that if you work, you should be able to pay for your needs. I'm not talking Ferraris, or mansions here. And you should be able to cover for your medical needs, and a retirement. There is an inequality problem in the US, a big problem. And this problem affects all social classes as pointed out by the presenter. The 1% is being stupid by ignoring such a problem, in my opinion.

Who cares what rich people think, as long as they can't use the agency of the government to distort the market to their benefit, which in our crony capitalist world, they do all the time.

Also, natural monopoly is a myth : http://mises.org/daily/5266/