No test measures intelligence. A test only measures you relative to the persons that wrote the test. – loosely quoting Asimov.
2007 is ancient history now. It is an interesting graph that one might correlate with a lack of meritocratic structure in society, but I’m on the low end cause I say this without looking up and reading the study. Pretty pictures evoke emotional blabbering bias and all that.
Nope. But if I believe it it’s true. That how it works now right?
Seriously, no chart but there seem to be plenty of examples and few exceptions. There are something like 2700 billionaires in the world. I certainly am not familiar with all of them.
But also I have seen opportunities to improve my financial standing in ways that are not ethical. I did not take them. I assume others do.
So in conclusion, it’s just observation. Do you disagree with the assessment or are you looking for proof?
Also in my defense, I said it was something I said, not something I could prove.
I have a counter anecdote!
Worked for a rich family as the sysadmin at their business. They would refuse to make unethical decisions. First manager’s meeting I sat we had a choice of screwing our clients, just a little, thereby making up on some money we were losing. Or, we could leave things as they were. VP looked around the table, “Well. Guess we have to do the right thing.”
I always got tickets to a charity ball at the beach. The family was top donors and wouldn’t show up. They were true believers in the Biblical admonition to STFU about your charity and just do it.
ask them how their family got rich
Guess there exceptions to every rule.
Anecdotes aren’t evidence, and we all have anecdotes, but a counter anecdote would be I have seen people who take unethical choices experienc reduced income due to loss of job offers, dismissal from existing jobs, criminal penalties, loss of contacts and relationships.
How about the gobs and gobs of people who have been fucked over by billionaires?
Let me phrase it this way: do you think Elon Musk is worth 40000 times the value of the median Tesla worker (2019 numbers by the way, he’s worth more now)? Gates? Bezos? Are they really worth more than the value they extract from their employees?
No? Great, we agree — there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
That’s a different argument. We are talking about whether ethics is a direct factor in income. Billionaires are outliers. In a population study of millions of people, or even a survey of hundreds, billionaires aren’t going to have any bearing on the outcome.
Yeah, agreed.
Even America’s sweet heart Taylor Swift. She’s a billionaire and her groupies wind up paying $1300 to see a show. Then I heard she’s writing a book. I mean how much do you need? She could be doing world tours for free, subsidizing ticket prices, I don’t know, starting up a competitive company to Ticketmaster.
Elon Musk levels of income could friggin cure diseases or hunger or something or at least make a huge dent. Think about it. If he liquidated his entire net worth and gave up on his Nazi empire building he could use $490B on a good cause and STILL be a billionaire.
There was one guy though. I forgot his name. He signed that pact that Warren Buffett created where those who signed, pledged to give away all or most of there wealth. I think like two did it after they died but this one guy gave it all away while he was (is?) alive.
Billionares would have no bearing whatsoever on the same type of research being discussed. See my other comment.
Yeah, I disagree with your assessment. You’re acting like oh there are only a few of them, but they control like 90% of the wealth in the world. How many billions of dollars do you think go into a single research topic? I’d also like to point out that it’s uber rich people who also make the decisions. I can’t prove that corporations prefer NOT to have a cure for diseases, because they make more money treating them, but I’m pretty sure IF they do, it ain’t a poor person making that decision.
For this research it doesn’t matter how much wealth they control if it’s not even a suburb sized group of people globally who are billionaires, median income for ethical vs inethical groups would probably not move any statistically significant amount
I think you’re missing the point.
I know you want to complain about unethical billionaires but the point here is about looking for a trend between ethics and income, not prevalence of unethical behaviour amongst billionaires