Remora

Burn the rich or steal from the poor? You decide.

The bias towards one class or another in public discourse is usually simply a presumption, but an experiment by two British economists, which attempted to give a concrete measure of envy, has produced another result, one that allows us to quantify, to a certain extent, the bias of reporting.

Here is how Mindpixel reported on the experiment:

"The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Dr. Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of experiment, played with real cash, in which subjects could anonymously burn away other people's money -- but only at the cost of giving up some of their own.

Despite this cost to themselves, and contrary to economists usual assumptions, 62% of those tested chose to destroy part of other test subjects' cash. In the experiment, half of all the laboratory earnings were deliberately destroyed by fellow subjects. "

Mindpixel's final graf contains this summing up of the burners:

"The researchers found that those who gained the most additional money at the betting stage burned poor and rich alike, while disadvantaged laboratory subjects mainly targeted those subjects they saw getting what they perceived as undeserved financial windfalls."

Reason picked up on Oswald and Zizzo's article, too. It's science reporter, Ronald Bayley, reported on it under the headline, Burn the Rich. Since, of course, the experiment reports that both the rich (in terms of the experiment) and the poor burned each other's money, one wonders why the rich are singled out as the victims in the headline. Interesting, no? Even in Bayley's own column (which insinuates that here, at last, is the explanation for the opposition to the abolition of the death tax in Congress), the fact that the rich and the poor alike burned each other's money is clearly stated:

"Zizzo and Oswald found that nearly two-thirds of players happily paid for the privilege of impoverishing their fellow participants. Even as the price of burning went up, the percentage of people who chose to burn other players did not fall substantially."

Now, what the phrase fall substantially means is unclear. Did it fall at all? That the poor might resent the rich is a part of common sense wisdom. That the rich burn the poor is part of the common sense wisdom of the poor. And that Reason would only see the rich being victimized by the resentful (read liberals, Democrats, and left wing lowlifes) is also part of common sense wisdom. It is nice that all this common sense wisdom is vindicated.

Here is the article itself. (be careful. It is a PDF file). Zizzo and Oswald have labels for two classes of burnings, depending on the rank of the burner. One they call rank egalitarianism. Most of the burners who were poorer sacrificed to burn the rich. The other they call reciprocity. Their thesis is that the rich burners were simply responding to being burned.

"In the case of our money burning experiment, advantaged and disadvantaged subjects may,
because of the existence of the advantage, perceive the game differently. This different game
perception implies that subjects prime differently two social categories, one based on deservingness
and one on reciprocity. For disadvantaged subjects, what matters is the fact that advantaged subjects
got the advantage undeservedly, and they did not. Advantaged subjects may think not only in terms
of deservingness, but also in a different light, namely, in the light of the fact that disadvantaged
subjects will burn them. They may then want to reciprocate the �favour.'"

But how does this explain their earlier result, that the rich burn the rich? Moreover, hidden in the paper is an interesting paragraph about the behavior of the "undeserving" rich -- those who accrued money arbitrarily (in the experiment, money could be made by betting, but money was also randomly allocated at intervals, thus randomly favoring certain individuals). This paragraph is certainly not discussed in Reason:

"In the twin experiment run in Oxford, Zizzo (1999) crossed advantage and deservingness in a factorial design, and found that deservingness mattered. More specifically, he found significantly more negative
interdependent preferences in sessions where the advantage was induced unfairly than when it was
induced according to a relatively fair procedure. Moreover, in one condition of that experiment,
stealing was possible. Zizzo then found that there was substantially more stealing by advantaged
subjects if they had got the advantage undeservedly. One possible interpretation of this interaction
effect was that undeservedly advantaged subjects expected themselves to be stolen or burnt
significantly more, and behaved using a reciprocity logic, in defending their own gains significantly
more."

Ah, I wonder, oh I wonder, why this paragaph was ignored by Mssrs. the editors of Reason. Maybe the headline should have read, the Undeserving Rich will burn you. But of course, of course, those heirs 'deserve" their money, don't they? After all, they did make the effort to be born.

One final note: the reciprocity hypothesis seems, to us, a desperate maneauver to deny the evidence of the experiment itself. Oswald and Zizzo accord the egalitarian strategy a sequential primacy that exists psychologically, even if it doesn't exist empirically. That is, the rich could be striking in the expectation that they will be struck. However, one should notice -- or an old deconstructive veteran like myself notices -- the binary which is operating here. While the rich are operating on "intention" -- that is cognitively -- the poor are operating on "passion" -- the envy aroused by riches. Why, actually, don't we think that the poor are striking pre-emptively, like the rich? Especially as Zizzo's earlier experiment shows that the perception of the "unfair" accrual of wealth, which is prevelant among its benificiaries as well as among its victims, prompts further "unfair" action among its benificiaries. I.e., the undeserving rich steal. The unconscious bias of the experimenter consists in this: poverty denies one a full sense of self-interest. Thus, we interpret the actions of the poor, sacrificing to burn the rich, as envy, while we accord a sense of intellectual strategy to the wealthy who do the same thing. Oswald and Zizzo show themselves to be the worthy heirs of those nineteenth century economists who saw the laboring classes as so much betail, so much dangerous animality. An entity to be organized by the police, always liable to filch from the fortunate.

To put this another way -- we think the reciprocal thesis explains too much, is bounded by a circular definition, and is ultimately inseperable from passion itself. This passion expresses itself in the wealthy burning the wealthy -- surely, here, we aren't seeing a response to rank egalitarianism, but the play of pure power. Let's suggest to O. and A. a most non-Anglo explanation for their findings, one explored by Mauss in his classic essai sur la don: one of the attributes of being rich is the ability to destroy. Destruction is the ultimate luxury. This is as true among Manhattanites as among the Kwaikutl. Zizzo and Oswald might want to reference such classics, in this vein, as various Beverly Hillbilly episodes, the tv show Dallas, and the dot com parties of 1999.