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I mean, it's interesting but a bit flawed. When you've got 5 coins total and you're saying someone has to be a loser. Why not do the experiment with 4 coins?
by tw04 9y ago
I mean, it's interesting but a bit flawed. When you've got 5 coins total and you're saying someone has to be a loser. Why not do the experiment with 4 coins? I don't think humans want equality "as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor" - that's a pretty poor summary of the findings.
What the findings DID discover, and shouldn't be surprising to anyone, is that 45% of people think it's unfair for you to take so much away from the person who "has money" that they end up with less than the person who you're supposedly helping.
- weberc2 9y agoI'm surprised that only 45% of people think this is unfair. That's a disappointingly low number.
- tw04 9y agoWell, I think that's because the premise of how they first acquired the money is that it was "completely random". So ya, if Bill Gates randomly started pulling names out of a hat and handing out money, I think people would tend to feel less bad about that money being redistributed than something that was actually earned.
- LyndsySimon 9y agoIn that circumstance, the money was earned - by Bill Gates. Why should stealing it from him make someone feel less bad than stealing it from someone else?
- jakelazaroff 9y agoGP is saying the reverse: that people shouldn't feel bad if the money that Bill Gates hands out randomly is redistributed again, since none of the people he gave it to initially had earned it.
- dabbledash 9y agoWhy do you think more people should think it's unfair? The participants are explicitly told that the initial positions were assigned randomly. It doesn't seem like the reversed hierarchy is any more unfair than the original.