Is being Bad what makes you Poor?

Now, before diving into this post, let me make one thing clear - I am basing this all on my personal experience, which I readily admit is less than scientific.

Basically, I've noticed that my wealthier friends tend to be more honest, faithful, and all around better people than my not so fortunate money-wise friends, who tend to be schemers or ultimately end up betraying me in some petty way, usually in issues involving money, but sometimes just through gossip or the like.

My theory, then, based on this very limited data-pool, is that nice people tend to make more money than mean people. In other words, people don't turn to crime and general dishonesty because they are poor, they are poor because they are dishonest.

Now, I realize that there are certainly exceptions to this rule, like Madoff, but I'd wager that if you had some sort of scientific way to measure things like "kindness and generosity" versus "deceitful and greedy", and you used this method to take a survey of people from lower, middle, and upper classes, you'd find that the middle and upper classes were composed of the kind and gentle folks on average while the lower classes were, on average, petty and cruel. Again, its a wild assumption based on a limited data pool, but maybe there is something to it?

What do you all think? Am I being classists/arrogant here, or are there people in your own lives that confirm this theory? Or deny it?

EDIT: Maybe the title should be changed to something less inflamatorry, like "Is Karma a valid Economic Principle".

Also, allow me to give a real-world example: Botswana and Namibia. Both countries share similar geographic regions, and utilize similar resources for their wealth generation. But while Botswana bases its economy off of ecotourism, Namibia bases its wealth off of exploitation of natural resources, including poaching and destructive mining operations. I sincerely believe that Botswana's GDP per capita is five times greater than Namibia's simply because of the fact that the Botswanans chose to be kind to animals and the environment (a.k.a. they are nice people), while the Namibians chose to be exploitative and petty (a.k.a. they are not kind).

Same thing goes for the USA. Back in the 90s when America was nice to the world, our economy was booming, but enter a decades worth of war and belligerence and our economy tanks. Karma is in effect here.

edited 30th Oct '11 11:58:18 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

I think poverty and (blue-collar) crime go together because crime drives the business out of the area, leaving the poor people with less access to transportation in an area with a paucity of legitimate business. Rinse and repeat.

No. That's fucking stupid. Coming from a poor background tends to determine whether or not you're going to be poor the rest of your life, due to lack of access to education.

Your guess about kindness is fucking stupid, by the way; the CE Os of corporations tend to act like sociopaths because they're so divorced from the consequences of their actions. (There have been studies on such things, though, mostly taking scans of the human brain while doing some sort of test. But social status didn't play much into what I'm remembering.) There's a reason we have the OWS movement going on right now. It ain't because the rich are incredibly altruistic.

Yours is an insanely limited experience pool, and not indicative of the larger picture.

edited 30th Oct '11 11:27:51 PM by AceofSpades

Public education in the US is shitty, but it's shitty across the board, and even the most lackluster schools have a few gems mixed in if you know how to find them. Upbringing, however, is certainly a factor where education is concerned. I'm reading a book called Toxic Childhood right now that goes into the matter in some depth at the end of each chapter. It's mostly focused on the UK, but as a US resident, it's none too foreign to me.

Yeah, agreeing with Ace. while "niceness" does factor into business (Mainly in the form of customer service) it is by no means a predictor of success. Take walmart. Walmart shafts its employees consistently, undercuts competitors near their stores, jacks up prices on what isn't on sale, and generally uses very dishonest practices to make money hand over fist.

Walmart is also "Nice" to customers in the sense theyll gladly roll over company policy and make employees look like morons just to please a customer who screams like a child till they get what they want.

Unless you know lots of business leaders, your "theory" has no backing whatsoever. Because you're likely conflating "the guy who owns the local grocery chain and donates to his local church" with "the guy who runs bank of america and burns more on an ad campaign about loaning money to small businesses then he likely loans to small businesses"

edited 30th Oct '11 11:41:09 PM by Midgetsnowman

Books on succeeding in business do make frequent mention of aiming to please, but anything involving beating out the competition - including within the same company, for folks who aren't executives yet - are guides to pure ruthlessness.

The middle class is probably the most decent of the bunch. IIRC, the lower middle class is easily the most charitable, but I don't remember where I read that.

edited 30th Oct '11 11:46:08 PM by DomaDoma

Books on succeeding in business also frequently highlight that networking is everything. Why?

Half of the game of succeeding in Business (or hell, any profession) is the ability to bullshit your way through appearing a pleasant, friendly person who actually gives a shit about other people. This is why sociopathic personalities fare so well in business, because theyre one of the types most suited to the art of appearing genuinely interested and engaged in what you have to say even when they dont give the slightest whiff of a shit.

Ergo, know the right people and earn their favor, go further. Easier to do this when you can fake emotional engagement.

edited 30th Oct '11 11:48:59 PM by Midgetsnowman

The genuine article isn't too shabby for the job, either. (But sociopaths definitely have an advantage over genuinely nice people as lawyers and politicians, because those guys' success implies another person's failure by definition.)

I agree with what Ace, Enkufka, and Midgetsnowman have said above. Perhaps you're confusing being well-mannered with being a good person. The upper classes generally have a more "refined" or "cultured" manner, since they have the time and money to bother with appearances more. However, politeness doesn't imply kindness.

Yes, there are higher rates of violent crime in poor communities, but the causation is the reverse of what you've suggested: Poverty drives people to crime and makes it harder to raise children well, so the cycle is perpetuated.

As for the rich, ruthlessness is a great way to get ahead, (distant) second only to being born rich. It also seems like the rich often have a callous disregard for the well-being of other people, possibly because it's easier to think that way when you don't have the same problems.

To answer your question, you're being extremely classist and displaying remarkable unawareness of human nature and the nature of class relations under capitalism. Those sort of attitudes toward the poor are a major excuse used to justify continued inaction on poverty (in the United States, at least).

edited 31st Oct '11 12:07:49 AM by Enthryn

Hm, I always wondered: why are poor people so much more likely to smoke? That's about five dollars a day assuming the sin tax isn't too punishing, and it's not like there's anyone living and literate who doesn't know smoking is a dumb thing to do.

Enthryn, I'll note you don't say you agree with me despite the fact that we do agree on many of the fundamentals. You see what partisan politics does to us?

edited 31st Oct '11 12:15:43 AM by DomaDoma

I'd like to see some sort of evidence to support the claim that the business world is dominated by sociopaths, because that seems to be tossed around a lot but never backed up.

Also, please do not take offense! I said on average for a reason - I'm sure that there are a lot of exceptions to the rule, this is not meant to be a personal attack against any posters who aren't wealthy. If you disagree, then please offer some evidence to the contrary - keep this as objective and scientific as possible.

That's not really karma, Stars. That's spending a crapload on our military and deregulating our businesses and banks that tanked us. Also, Bush and his administration basically saying "fuck you" to every foreign power for whatever reason. I'm sure Bush is a really nice guy in person, but that doesn't always translate into playing nice with foreign powers.

That is two spectacular kinds of off-topic there. We've got threads for the first one, but we haven't had a Bush foreign policy one in a bit. You can make it if you want.

But if we weren't spending money on war, we'd be much better off. Even if there isn't some sort of cosmic balancing scale, the principle of karma could still be in play - the idea being that nice deeds eventually accumulate into advantages that generate wealth, like a saintly version of The Butterfly Effect.

Say a person gives a homeless man some spare change. Even if there's no real economic benefit to the act of kindness, it still puts the donor into a positive mood, and the donor begins to think of themselves as a kindly person. Thinking that you are a nice guy often enough will make you into a genuinely nice person, and nice people are better at important business and career skills like networking and sales. So if a small act of kindness can lead to more opportunities for a single person, why not for an entire class, nation, species?

@Doma: Okay, I agree with most of what you said, too. The remarks of the posters I mentioned were just closer to what I was going to say myself, which is why I mentioned them. Not sure what you're saying about partisan politics (which I agree is bad, I just don't see how it's relevant).

@OP: I'm not suggesting that the business world is dominated by sociopaths; rather, acting in a sociopathic manner is a way to get ahead, so one would expect more sociopaths in the business world than elsewhere on average, even if only slightly.

edited 31st Oct '11 12:34:12 AM by Enthryn

The issue with the OP is that it claims to the Victorian myth that the poor is made up of “their own fault.” Being poor are not the general result of making wrong decisions: many people tend to be born poor or force into being poor. It is a lottery of the cruelest. The poor may face problems trying to rise above poverty in terms of lack of infrastructure to support them and the lack of distribution of wealth. We are facing a rising gap between the rich and poor that must be dealt with!

As for the notion of the rich to be more “good,” the upper classes tend to be able to afford to present themselves better. I should point that I am not calling all rich people “infidels” but alas there is a problem when a tiny sector of the population owns the majority of wealth. We British are at the moment annoyed that some of our CEOS process huge sums of bonuses after failing to help the economy, especially the bankers. On record not all bankers are bad. Just a sadly powerful Vocal Minority of them.

Finally I should state this: those industries of a good karma can benefit all morally, socially and economically in the long run. Sadly though our current capitalist system is set on the short term goals with a high notion of greed. This is why for example oil is still a resource we fight over a lot while more green power has not been developed. It is also why palm oil still comes from unsustainable places even with the massive increase of sustainable palm oil sites: the unsustainable can be gathered quickly. We must find a way to teach people to consider and remember the long term way or else face further economic problems.

I think cause and effect is being mixed up in the OP. Poor people learn to be more ruthless because they need to while people who are more well off don't have to worry about things like that (perhaps you could call them naive).

Also, somehow I doubt that the wealthy people you're talking about are the super-wealthy that everyone else is talking about. There's sort of a difference between being the CEO of a big company making millions of dollars and just being a middle class person who doesn't have to worry much about their food budget.

edited 31st Oct '11 1:10:24 AM by Clarste

Well my family is in the 1%, though we are probably in the 99th percentile of said 1%, if that clarifies things a bit about my own situation.

You may be right about the whole "necessity drives people, not morals" part, though it seems to me that the best explanation is that its a bit of both "I do this because I have to" and "I have to because I do this". To a certain extent, maybe both views have merit?

Take my old roomate, for example. Nice enough fellow, but when he couldn't pay rent, things turned sour fast. Thing is, he couldn't pay rent because he was too lazy to bother working, even after I found him a job (which he turned down, because he was lazy). Now, what caused him to turn into a psychopath and sell some of my things when I left town for a few days, and then try to pass it off like someone had burgled our place? Was it because he needed the money, or did he need the money because of his natural disposition to avoid work? Which was the chicken, and which was the egg, in this scenario?

He probably had issues long before he met you. But to say he's a bad guy just because he's poor is fucking ignorant. Being in the lower classes increases the likelihood of you turning to crime, but it is not the sole arbiter of your morality. (Things like parents and the friends you make also feature, and I would say would be more strongly.)

To blame it on his class is ignoring his upbringing, the factors that make crime seem easier and more profitable to engage in, and the possibility that he just might be a huge douche regardless of those other factors. (Please note that being a jerkass douche does not necessarily mean you're a psychopath. Psychopath is a genuine inability to care or see how other people might be important. This roommate of yours might be a douche to you but be genuinely respectful of his grandma and other little old ladies.) But class alone does not make a person any less kind or selfish than any other person, and to say that it does makes you both ignorant and casually bigoted.

And here's the flaw with your question; There's tons of people I've met who are very nice. They're middle class rather than rich. The idea that the level of kindness influences your wealth ignores the fact that it's generally an accident of birth whether or not we're born into a position of affluence. Lots of rich people inherit their wealth rather than accrue it through their lives. Lots of poor people remain poor, even when they work hard and are kind and respectful to everyone around them.

edited 31st Oct '11 1:41:42 AM by AceofSpades

Having been lower middle class and then flat-out lower class for both of my life, I can say that all of the poor people I've personally known have been generally decent folk who, while not saints, tried to be good people. (And my mom specifically is well-known for being friendly and liked in the community.) And they were poor because they had lousy-wage work and no education/experience to land anything better, not because they were lazy.

Of course, I've also known jerk and/or lazy poor people, too. Every social class has its fair share of lousy and decent people; the upper class are just more superficially refined about being lousy. Nor is being mannered exclusive to the rich; I've encountered people offline who end up surprised that I'm lower-class. (Well, outside of my Sophisticated as Hell moments, I admit.)

In at least some cases, crime in poverty can be attributed to people who honestly have nothing to lose - if you are jobless, homeless, starving, living on the streets why would you fear the consequences of crime? People who have nothing to lose have little to fear.

And I've read of at least one case of a man committing robbery just so he could be sent to jail - because in prison he at least had food to eat and a roof over his head.

That said, your original post is forgetting that anecdata does not equal universal fact, and correlation is not causation. I know people who are wealthier than me. I know people who are poorer than me. I see no discernable difference in niceness between them. Your experience is not a universal one. (And assuming that people who are in poverty are bad is not exactly going to persuade the poor to be nice to you.)

"what is this I don't even...". That's basically what my response to this is.

Sophisticated != nice.

@OP,

~sigh~

No, it's not. Calvanism lied to you. A system of lies, is all that is.

Lets just say that OP's experience does not seem to be representative. Of course there are some poor people who are poor because they are irresponsible and lazy. There are also rich people who are rich because they are sociopathic and ruthless. And there are lots of quite decent people living in poverty. Heh, take any school teacher in my country. So unless you are going to suggest that being "bad" makes you a school teacher...

edited 31st Oct '11 4:45:26 AM by Beholderess