I agree that there’s a sense in which a dollar means more to a poor person than a rich, but that sense is not an economic one, but one of morality or cognitive science.
Consider the following thought experiment. Depending on a coin toss, you’ll become either rich or poor. Your decision is between granting $1 to the hypothetical version of yourself that’s poor, or to one that’s rich. Which do you choose? It seems like a perfectly clear-cut decision problem, with an equally clear-cut correct answer. There is also an obvious Counterfactual Mugging variant, where we won’t need to stipulate actual expected change in your rich/poor status and can consider granting money to your present (vs. different counterfactual) self, rather than different future self.
(This is meant as a focusing statement, not an objection to your comment.)
That’s just a rephrasing of the general intuition about the decision-theoretic optimality of giving a marginal unit of money to poor vs. rich people. It doesn’t change the fact that people are taught in economics that preferences are ordinal, making the claim in the survey economic nonsense and therefore uninformative about the answerer’s reasoning skills or economic knowledge.
A large number of causes could explain either answer: perhaps the respondent was parroting their economic “teacher’s password” when they said no, rather than answering the decision-theoretic analog.
Consider the following thought experiment. Depending on a coin toss, you’ll become either rich or poor. Your decision is between granting $1 to the hypothetical version of yourself that’s poor, or to one that’s rich. Which do you choose? It seems like a perfectly clear-cut decision problem, with an equally clear-cut correct answer. There is also an obvious Counterfactual Mugging variant, where we won’t need to stipulate actual expected change in your rich/poor status and can consider granting money to your present (vs. different counterfactual) self, rather than different future self.
(This is meant as a focusing statement, not an objection to your comment.)
That’s just a rephrasing of the general intuition about the decision-theoretic optimality of giving a marginal unit of money to poor vs. rich people. It doesn’t change the fact that people are taught in economics that preferences are ordinal, making the claim in the survey economic nonsense and therefore uninformative about the answerer’s reasoning skills or economic knowledge.
A large number of causes could explain either answer: perhaps the respondent was parroting their economic “teacher’s password” when they said no, rather than answering the decision-theoretic analog.