Entitlement

Perused an interesting article today by scientists at Berkeley. The article is entitled Are Rich People Unethical?

In the article the primary conclusion is: large sums of money may give people greater feelings of entitlement, causing those people to be the most averse to wealth distribution.   

Did you catch that?  When people earn lot of money they feel 'entitled' to it.  Of course, they ARE entitled to it.  Entitlement, by definition, means 'a guarantee of access to benefits based on established rights and law'.  Of course they should have access to their bank accounts and investment accounts.  Unless you think someone else should?

I probably paid for that study.  Ugh. 

Having 'discovering' this shocking finding (high earners have feelings of entitlement) - they then articulate the following, twisted logic:

• some earners earn more than others
• people that earn more feel entitled (the law affords them the benefit) to keep more
• therefore, high earners are adverse to having their wealth redistributed
• therefore, high earners are greedy (greed: intense desire to accumulate and keep for one's self)
• therefore, high earners support social inequality (social inequality: people are in different social classes)
• therefore, high earners are unethical (unethical: lacking morality, guilty of wrong behavior)
• therefore, something must be done about this

Do you see how they slide so effortlessly from measuring people's subjective feelings, to making assumptions about what they think and believe, to judging their motives and behavior? 

Wouldn't it be simply have been easier to hand out the following survey:

Are you a (choose one):
     
      Capitalist:    _________
      Communist: _________

The scientists summarized as follows:  "We hope to further study how we can curb these patterns."  Wow... save us all some money:  it's easy: pick one:  Socialism, Communism or Totalitarianism.  
 
Oddly - the researchers acknowledged some 'other findings' that tended to contradict their findings. 

• people in poor communities commit violent crimes to acquire money- meaning they too demonstrate a high sense of entitlement (to other people's money)
• 50% of wage earners do not contribute any federal income taxes yet feel strongly entitled to all sorts of benefits (provided by other people's money)

So - in summary:  high earners feel entitled;  low earners feel entitled;  non-earners feel entitled.  We needed to pay researchers at Berkeley to figure that out?

I probably paid for that study. Ugh.