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>the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people Is this a symptom/cause of the crab-bucket mentality? It is here in Uruguay, as

>the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people Is this a symptom/cause of the crab-bucket mentality? It is here in Uruguay, as well, and I hold it myself, to my own detriment. Is there a name for this? I want to read about it and see if I can change my mind, grow a bit. Thank you

snovv_crash 5y ago
Another name for it is Tall Poppy Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hashimotonomora 5y ago
It’s interrelated. It’s part resentment, part mediocrity, part laziness. If the only way the rich got rich is by screwing over people, then I’m justified in not working hard, not being ingenuous, not being diligent because what good does it make anyway.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  And if people get rich with just a bit of hard work, that's a convenient kudgel to beat poor people over the head with. Clearly, they were too lazy or stupid to get rich. It kind of all falls apart when even the relatively wealthy (like me) recognize there isn't much reason for them to be so much more successful than the people they grew up with.
kragen 5y ago
I don't know to what extent you can disentangle cause and effect in human psychology. Certainly if you believe rich people are evil, you will feel justified in tearing them down, so you will tend to tear them down more, in which case it's a cause of the crab-bucket mentality. But you might also just feel a lot of envy for rich people and consequently engage in motivated reasoning that leads you to believe that they are evil, in which case it's an effect. (Negative feedback systems in general do this weird interchange of cause and effect. An op-amp's inputs are kept at the same voltage because they're its inputs. It's a real mindfuck, in a good way.) More generally, throughout history, most people who got rich did get that way by screwing over other people; I mean that's literally how warfare works, by harming the opposing forces enough to get them to submit, and in feudal systems (and quasi-feudal systems like the Argentine system) that's how you gain power and wealth. Feudal nobles and partisan politicians are whoever was historically best at harming the opposing forces. Most of human history isn't that, of course, because everyday life always works by cooperation and goodwill, but most of the parts of history that got written down were people competing to hurt each other. The crab-bucket mentality is very helpful to politicians because it prevents upstart businesses (and regions, and cities) from creating alternative centers of power that could compete with the established order. Capitalism was the decisive break with that tradition, in which people compete by doing the most good for their customers instead of harm to whoever their enemies are at the moment; but nothing in capitalism prevents powerful and rich people from hurting whoever they see as their opposition, except that it's unprofitable to spend too much on hurting them, and if you choose poorly they may be able to hurt you back, which is even more unprofitable. And whoever is powerful can use that power for harm, too, and being human, they usually do. Still, by changing the criterion for wealth from doing harm to doing good, capitalism changed the incentives enormously.
- 8note 5y ago
  Capitalism really gave the wealthy a reason to not hurt the up and coming, by requiring the newcomers to pay tribute to the old rich. It's not doing good per se(since capitalism doesn't care if you're doing good or bad, just profitably), just that you can't benefit without also benefiting some already wealthy folks. Thus, the wealthy folks are incentivized to allow the new rich to propser
  - kragen 5y ago
    In a competitive market, if your customers don't think your products do them good, they won't pay for them, so you won't be profitable. If they don't think they do them much good, they won't pay much for them, so you'll be less profitable. Of course this isn't perfect --- they might be wrong about whether you're doing them good, like Lucky Strikes, and you might have stolen your products or dumped toxic waste or something. And there are lots of principal-agent problems, where the person making the buying decision has no incentive to care whether it turns out to be a good one. And the wealthy get a disproportionate vote. But it's probably a better criterion for whether you're doing good than anything else we can evaluate in real time in practice. Although getting bank loans is pretty important, and getting wealthy angel investors is essential for some businesses, you can totally get rich by bootstrapping and selling to poor people. No already wealthy folks need be involved --- except where those wealthy folks are politically powerful, but that's a question external to capitalism. Procter & Gamble sold soap and candles. Walmart sells to almost nobody but poor people. ExxonMobil started out, roughly speaking, as Standard Oil, whose main product was originally kerosene used for lighting and heating people's homes, and now is gasoline, used by everyday people to drive their cars around. (Rockefeller was no exemplar of capitalism, of course; he spent most of his life trying to destroy it because it wasn't profitable enough.) Berkshire Hathaway is generally considered to be the paragon of modern capitalism; it started out as a cotton textiles company, and nowadays its businesses are mostly things like GEICO (car insurance), Dairy Queen (fast food), Fruit of the Loom (cheap underwear), Acme Building Brands (bricks), Shaw Industries (cheap carpet), and Flying J (truck stops). If all wealthy people stopped buying from all of these businesses at once, they'd hardly notice. It's certainly true, though, that the possibility of buying shares in new businesses reduces the opposition to upstarts. But public ownership is by no means fundamental to capitalism!

snovv_crash 5y ago

Another name for it is Tall Poppy Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

hashimotonomora 5y ago

It’s interrelated. It’s part resentment, part mediocrity, part laziness. If the only way the rich got rich is by screwing over people, then I’m justified in not working hard, not being ingenuous, not being diligent because what good does it make anyway.

DangitBobby 5y ago
And if people get rich with just a bit of hard work, that's a convenient kudgel to beat poor people over the head with. Clearly, they were too lazy or stupid to get rich. It kind of all falls apart when even the relatively wealthy (like me) recognize there isn't much reason for them to be so much more successful than the people they grew up with.

kragen 5y ago

I don't know to what extent you can disentangle cause and effect in human psychology. Certainly if you believe rich people are evil, you will feel justified in tearing them down, so you will tend to tear them down more, in which case it's a cause of the crab-bucket mentality. But you might also just feel a lot of envy for rich people and consequently engage in motivated reasoning that leads you to believe that they are evil, in which case it's an effect. (Negative feedback systems in general do this weird interchange of cause and effect. An op-amp's inputs are kept at the same voltage because they're its inputs. It's a real mindfuck, in a good way.) More generally, throughout history, most people who got rich did get that way by screwing over other people; I mean that's literally how warfare works, by harming the opposing forces enough to get them to submit, and in feudal systems (and quasi-feudal systems like the Argentine system) that's how you gain power and wealth. Feudal nobles and partisan politicians are whoever was historically best at harming the opposing forces. Most of human history isn't that, of course, because everyday life always works by cooperation and goodwill, but most of the parts of history that got written down were people competing to hurt each other. The crab-bucket mentality is very helpful to politicians because it prevents upstart businesses (and regions, and cities) from creating alternative centers of power that could compete with the established order. Capitalism was the decisive break with that tradition, in which people compete by doing the most good for their customers instead of harm to whoever their enemies are at the moment; but nothing in capitalism prevents powerful and rich people from hurting whoever they see as their opposition, except that it's unprofitable to spend too much on hurting them, and if you choose poorly they may be able to hurt you back, which is even more unprofitable. And whoever is powerful can use that power for harm, too, and being human, they usually do. Still, by changing the criterion for wealth from doing harm to doing good, capitalism changed the incentives enormously.

8note 5y ago
Capitalism really gave the wealthy a reason to not hurt the up and coming, by requiring the newcomers to pay tribute to the old rich. It's not doing good per se(since capitalism doesn't care if you're doing good or bad, just profitably), just that you can't benefit without also benefiting some already wealthy folks. Thus, the wealthy folks are incentivized to allow the new rich to propser
- kragen 5y ago
  In a competitive market, if your customers don't think your products do them good, they won't pay for them, so you won't be profitable. If they don't think they do them much good, they won't pay much for them, so you'll be less profitable. Of course this isn't perfect --- they might be wrong about whether you're doing them good, like Lucky Strikes, and you might have stolen your products or dumped toxic waste or something. And there are lots of principal-agent problems, where the person making the buying decision has no incentive to care whether it turns out to be a good one. And the wealthy get a disproportionate vote. But it's probably a better criterion for whether you're doing good than anything else we can evaluate in real time in practice. Although getting bank loans is pretty important, and getting wealthy angel investors is essential for some businesses, you can totally get rich by bootstrapping and selling to poor people. No already wealthy folks need be involved --- except where those wealthy folks are politically powerful, but that's a question external to capitalism. Procter & Gamble sold soap and candles. Walmart sells to almost nobody but poor people. ExxonMobil started out, roughly speaking, as Standard Oil, whose main product was originally kerosene used for lighting and heating people's homes, and now is gasoline, used by everyday people to drive their cars around. (Rockefeller was no exemplar of capitalism, of course; he spent most of his life trying to destroy it because it wasn't profitable enough.) Berkshire Hathaway is generally considered to be the paragon of modern capitalism; it started out as a cotton textiles company, and nowadays its businesses are mostly things like GEICO (car insurance), Dairy Queen (fast food), Fruit of the Loom (cheap underwear), Acme Building Brands (bricks), Shaw Industries (cheap carpet), and Flying J (truck stops). If all wealthy people stopped buying from all of these businesses at once, they'd hardly notice. It's certainly true, though, that the possibility of buying shares in new businesses reduces the opposition to upstarts. But public ownership is by no means fundamental to capitalism!