People with more money 'struggle with generosity,' expert says | Hacker News Reader

People with more money 'struggle with generosity,' expert says

cnbc.com

> Because their money is what differentiates them from their friends, they start believing that their money is why they have friends.

Is that an irrational belief? There do exist people who use other people for their money. It is a small portion of people, but they still exist. However nobody is using a poor person for their money.

Being stingy about small amounts of money gets rid of the fake friends and mostly does not affect the real friends (because nobody actually cares about $5 for a coffee). For a poor person there is no need to do this so they don't.

In many countries poor people are being milked for money more than any other social class. Too poor to afford your own washing machine? Go to the laundromat, pay hundreds of dollars every year. Can’t afford to buy food in bulk? Buy small items at a premium. Can’t get good quality durable clothes / footwear? Buy lousy ones that you replace more often and that cost you more. Tons of other examples.

I know you probably want to say that rich people will not directly take advantage of poor people, but there are so many systems that are rigged against the poor.

I'm not saying poor people don't get taken advantage of - just that they are less likely to be taken advantage of in this specific way.

There are no end to bad people in the world. Its not that one group is taken advantage of and another is not, just that different methods are more effective against different groups.

It might be interesting also to consider why people with less money tend to be generous by nature and wave off small debts on account of a culture of mutual support. Bret Deveraux in the series about farming[1] has the insight that ancient and medieval subsistence farming operated at the absolute limit of survival on purpose, for the simple reason that any possible surplus would be taken away anyway by the tax collector and his henchmen to finance the king's endless wars. That's why the area of cultivated land for instance was kept at or near the absolute minimum.

This had the result that a single farmer was not able to cumulate any kind of a buffer of surplus against a lean year. As a countermeasure the subsistence farmers developed a culture of mutual help and solidarity, where it simply was not socially acceptable not to help the neighbor, who had lost their crops. As long as at least some of the members of the community had a decent yield, the whole community survived.

Reading this was very eye opening to me and it at least sounded plausible. ACOUP is often mentioned here, deservedly. This was one of the best gems I have found.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

One the one hand, I understand that folks who have more money than their peers don’t want to be taken advantage of — it’s a real thing and a legitimate concern.

On the other hand, the example they provided with the software engineer might also be that the person is on the spectrum and doesn’t know better (not unique to having more money) or is just a hyper-logical engineer and wouldn’t think of doing it another way (maybe this is just a nice way to describe autism, but still…).

I know plenty of wealthy people who spread their wealth fairly aggressively via things like over-sized tips, pay it forward at drive-throughs, trading buying rounds at a higher ratio, generous but appropriate gifts, throwing nice parties, donations to charity, supporting members of museums, etc.

The folks who seem the most paranoid in my experience are the people who inherited it and never bothered to learn anything about money management. Since they don’t know how they got their golden goose, and they don’t know how likely they are to keep it, they just adopt a paranoid stance as a defense.

> On the other hand, the example they provided with the software engineer might also be that the person is on the spectrum and doesn’t know better (not unique to having more money) or is just a hyper-logical engineer and wouldn’t think of doing it another way (maybe this is just a nice way to describe autism, but still…).

Alternatively - different groups have different cultural norms around money and how to behave with it. I don't really think you have to bring autism into it. Fact is as a society we are not one homogeneous culture - there are tons of minor variations all with their own cultural norms. What's rude to one group is polite to another and vice versa.

This looks like rationalization made from Twitter anecdotes, or something totally geographically-based.

I have exactly the opposite experience: when I was young and poor, people would remember every cent I owed and vice versa. I'm still mad over the 25 cents this guy Isaac borrowed in 6th grade. I remember a friend coming to my house after 2 years because I owed him the remaining 10 bucks from a guitar I had bought. Well, sorry, Bruno. Being older and actually having some money, me and my friends just buy stuff for each other all the time.

On the other hand, I don't think I have Venmo here, so there's that. Can I ask for money in Pay Pal?

No, you will find quite extensive social studies done on this, weirdly with usually no echo in the press. One that had echo was that they gave 10k to a selection of people, and those had to choose wether or not to share those 10k with a random someone they didn't know. The amount shared diminished the more wealthy people are.

Other studies are done on wealthy people, and it was also found that self made men where way more generous than nepo babies. Which is coherent with the monopoly study: people with unfair advantages tends to fall deep into the fondamental attribution error.

I'd be curious to see how many studies controlled for relative emotional value of money, eg. by looking for differences in behavior for all groups at various values.

One could hypothesize that people might be more willing to share an unexpected "windfall", the perception of which could feasibly scale with one's emotional perception of wealth.

No, it was tested with games and stuff, having wealth reduce cooperative behaviors https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01973533.2018.14...

It should be noted that wealth is a proxy for status and for power, so it might not be wealth itself that reinforce sociopathic/anti-cooperative behaviors, but status or power, but it is hard to dissociate.

Similarly, there are also studies that show that poor people give a greater proportion of their income to charity, and are more likely to donate a greater portion of an unexpected windfall to a stranger.

I think you have to take scale into account with these things. A person with a $100 giving $10 is like buying someone breakfast. In a way it’s just so small an amount that its dismissive and not really perceptible as “a waste”

A person with $10M giving $500k is half as generous, but they aren’t just buying a breakfast and you can’t just dismiss that amount as easily.

When I first started making a lot of money I was extremely generous but I realized quickly that it still goes quicker than you realize. So I’m not sure if that’s part of this perception or not.

stigma around egregious self-serving behavior has been decimated in "Buy your own happiness" America .. suggested corollary

Reply on news.ycombinator.com