The Stealth Killers: Power and Money
By: Stacy Becker
Tags: Social Justice, Inequality, Empathy, Politics, Democracy

The Stealth Killers: Power and Money

Have you checked out the New York Times’s interactive graphic that lets you see where you are in the line for a COVID-19 vaccine? I’m standing near the end — only 278 million people ahead of me.

We know where there’s a line, there are line jumpers. Oh sure, we have painstakingly deliberated plans for who gets the still rare vaccines and new treatments such as the cocktails Trump received. We’re even starting to ration hospital beds. Watch — reports of line-jumpers will start to come out of the woodwork. The line-jumpers will be people with money and connections, as usual.

Now, Rudy Giuliani is a crazy man to be sure, but even his level of thick-headedness surprised me. After receiving treatment cocktails that are not available to the general public, he noted “If it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t have been put in a hospital frankly.” Still, he went on to say that masking and business closures are taking safety precautions too far now that COVID-19 is a “treatable disease.”

Tell that to healthcare workers.

More people died yesterday from COVID-19 than on 9/11, which we went to war over at a cost of nearly $2 trillion. After months of wrangling, Congress has yet to step forward with another relief bill to help the 13 million families at risk of eviction, the 100,000 permanently closed small businesses, or the 31 million people who lost a job or are underemployed due to COVID-19.

How can people in power be so blind, or care so little? Unfortunately for the rest of us, research is discovering that power and wealth can suppress empathy and ethical behavior, where power is defined as asymmetric control over valued resources. As Dachner Keltner of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, said,

“In this country, most of our political leaders — as well as those who influence them — are wealthy. And, in general, the wealthier they are the less interested they are in policies that help the needy.”

and

“What we’re finding is power diminishes all varieties of empathy.”

Jaw-dropping experiments

Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists have been exploring the effect of power and money on empathy and ethical behavior. The results from their experiments suggest that nothing is too trivial to be exempt from privileged behavior.

Undergraduate students of different backgrounds were shown pictures of kids with cancer. Students from lower-class backgrounds showed high compassion, whereas upper-class students showed little response.

Asked to write about a story that inspired them, high-power people were more likely to write about themselves than low-power people.

Strangers played Monopoly in pairs. A coin-flip assigned one person to be “rich” with some advantages: twice as much money to start with, twice the money passing go, and rolling both dice instead of one. The rich players banged loudly with bravado around the board and became ruder to their opponents. After the game, they believed they earned their success, even though the game was clearly rigged.

In California, where drivers are legally required to stop for pedestrians, researchers planted a pedestrian and observed a crosswalk. None of the drivers in the least-expensive-car category broke the law. Close to 50 percent of drivers in the most-expensive-car category did.

An experimenter presented participants with a jar of individually-wrapped candies, ostensibly for children waiting in a nearby laboratory, but informed them that they could take some if they wanted. Upper class people took the children’s candy more often than lower class people.

Participants played a “game of chance,” in which a computer rolled dice for them five times. Participants were told that higher rolls would improve their chances of winning a cash prize. In fact, the rolls were fixed to sum to twelve. Those in a higher social class reported rolling more than twelve more often than others.

The attitudes of the rich are different

Survey data give us a look at how money influences attitudes. The CATO Institute conducted a 2019 survey on American attitudes about poverty, wealth, and work. Researchers constructed indexes for attitudes that I call “self versus others” in the graph below. You can see that the greater the income, the more people feel disconnected from others.

“Just deserts” is an attitude that economic distribution should be based on what you produce, not what you need. The compassion index measures how much you care about the problems of others (reversed in the chart below to show lack of compassion). The higher your agency index, the more you feel your success is due to your own actions rather than external factors.

author’s graph created from CATO Institute data

An income of $200,000 a year may be a lot — it puts you in the top 10% of family income in the United States — but it’s not the super-rich. Another survey looked at policy preferences of a much richer group: those with average incomes of $1 million a year and average wealth of $14 million. This is a politically well-connected group. Half reported contacting high-level officials in the prior six months.

Their policy preferences did not always differ from those of the general public, but I created a graph of some that did.

author’s graph created from Democracy and Wealthy Americans survey

The most telling policy for me is the willingness to pay more taxes so everyone has healthcare. Of the policies in the graph, it may have the smallest difference between the general public and the wealthy, but it is the only one with direct individual consequences. The finding that the general public is more willing to pay higher taxes for the benefit of others by a margin of 18% (59% of the general public compared to 41% of the wealthy) astounds me.

A belief in independence from others

Why does this happen? Researchers don’t know for sure, but they have some hunches. Wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. But when you are poorer, as Keltner says, “when you face threats in life, the only way to survive your environment is to connect with other people. You reach out to people more. You form strong social ties. You need them, and they need you.”

When it comes to unethical behavior, one study suggests that “the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society’s elite, and the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing.” They postulate that a relative sense of independence may decrease the perception of risks of unethical acts and/or reduce the costs of dealing with the aftermath. A sense of independence may influence feelings of entitlement and inattention to how one’s actions impact others.

Scientists are also finding physiological responses. One study showed that a sense of power shuts down a part of the brain that helps us connect with others. Another line of research finds that the more your vagus nerve fires, the more compassion you feel.

Why we’re in big trouble

With this information, the lack of urgency on a COVID-19 relief bill seems more understandable, if no less reprehensible. More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. In 2015, the median net worth of Senators was $3.2 million.

As I argued in a recent post, independence in today’s world is an illusion. We are utterly dependent on one another, no matter our wealth or power. Facebook relies on its 2.6 billion users. Amazon can’t ship 1.6 million packages a day without a whole lot of customers, and a whole lot of employees. Elected officials in the federal government counted on their constituents to raise nearly $14 billion for the 2020 elections.

Complexity theory teaches us it is not the individual that matters, but the interactions between individuals that structure our world. Clinging to illusions of independence is not only arrogant, it leads to misunderstandings of how the world operates, and thus potentially wrong-headed solutions (or in the case of Congress right now, no solutions).

Whatever you believe about how wealth and power are created, or what it entitles you to, it is worthless if you are all alone.