“A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to baes his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
This is not at all equivalent. A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth. That’s at least in the most obvious way of reading this statement to me. I don’t think your suggested wordings are any better.
Possibly something like “All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would”? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.
Possibly something like “All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would”? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.
Actually, that’s semantically equivalent to rephrasing #1, and as such semantically contradictory to rephrasing #2.
A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth.
I figured someone might raise this objection. :)
Let’s define the “rich” person as owning 10,000,000 dollars, and the poor person as owning 1,000. If the rich person places a high proportion on his self-worth on how much money he owns (say, 80% of his self-worth) then 10,000,000+1 yields an increase of self-evaluation by 0.00000008. If, however, the poor person places .001% of his self-worth on how much money he owns, then 1,000+1 yields an increase of 0.00000001. So the rich person’s “self-worth score” in this scenario is increased by a factor of 8 as compared to the poor person’s.
Now, is it likely that poor people, lacking money, will place any but the weakest of weightings onto how they judge themselves as people based on the amount of money they currently possess? Is the opposite likely?
You fail to understand what rich and poor mean. While a rich person may be using dollars to keep score, a poor person is using them to stay alive.
Do you really think that someone with a million dollars could care about each one of them as much as someone who has only one dollar cares about his one dollar? That the million dollar owner could be more devastated by the loss of two of his million dollars than the one-dollar owner will be by the prospect of not eating if he loses his one dollar?
… the “Now” isn’t actually ‘saying anything’. There’s no assertions in the “Now” paragraph. It was the introduction of a new query to the dialogue: “How do the poor associate money with their estimates of self-worth?”
In other words; after my “Let’s” gave a hypothetical scenario with specific numbers in order to demonstrate that, “Yes, statement #2 could be true”, my “Now” raised the question of: “But is it actually true?”
Ok. In that case, the answer simply seems to be “yes, they will do so.” At least from personal experience, people in a very low income bracket are extremely happy to move up to a slightly higher income bracket, and the barely employed look down on the unemployed homeless while the homeless with jobs consider themselves better than the homeless without jobs. I don’t however know of any real data backing this up.
In that case, the answer simply seems to be “yes, they will do so.” [...] I don’t however know of any real data backing this up.
Would you be willing to agree with the notion that a non-trivial percentage of people might come to the conclusion that it either could go either way or that poor people “find ways to believe they are good people without money”?
This gets us back to the original topic—the 30% of libertarians who answered as 4% of progressives did and this automatically meaning that the progressives got the question “more right” than the libs. This despite any apparent effort to figure out which version of the question (and again, I only gave TWO variants) said person was answering.
At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation, and then positing that people would take that strained interpretation and then might think a thought based on that interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think. This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong.
I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.
At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation,
You know, the funny thing is that I don’t see it as ‘strained’ at all. And I don’t think it’s even that un-exceptional a belief—though it is a “callow” one. I can rephrase it again and see if it seems more “familiar” to you.
The poor stay that way because they don’t care about money.
The rich only get that way because they’re greedy.
It’s perfectly easy to be happy without money.
interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think.
And why, pray tell, would you believe that most people don’t think they have valid notions about how other people think? How often, for example, have you heard libertarians talk about (or get denigraded for adhering to) the notion of “picking yourself up off your bootstraps”? The Google Search term poor people don’t care about money yielded 227,000,000 hits.
This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong.
… and there’s the bias. :-) (One way or the other, someone here is biased and not thinking clearly.)
Now, I’ve given a great deal—at this point—of evidence to affirm my position.
If you really wanted to, I’d be more than happy to go through a list of events in the last few weeks where I have openly and directly disagreed with people who are “in-tribe” to me.
I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.
So you’re willing to bet money that context #1 would be nearly identical to the original phrasing, eh?
How about context #2? Moreover: how about if we were to ask how many people thought context #2 (absent context #1) was at least one way to read the original statement?
(I once again want to point out that context #2, by tying the concept of “value” to “this makes me a better person”, isn’t suited to questions of utilitarian evaluation. They can’t be. It’s a virtue-based statement, and it is a modal failure to require utilitarian framing for value-based norms.)
The Google Search term ‘poor people don’t care about money’ yielded 227,000,000 hits.
The Google Search term “poor people don’t care about money”, however, yields only 7 results for the exact phrase. Many of the highest-ranked results from the search withoute quote marks are indeed from conservative/libertarian sites, but not all of them (e.g., some prominent results are “Minnesota Republicans To Outlaw Poor People Having Money” and “Rush Limbaugh Says Poor Don’t Deserve Healthcare”) And the vast majority of the millions of results are from completely unrelated sites, as usually happens when you search for a phrase made of common words without using quote marks.
You’ve made some good points here, especially in regard to the fact that empirically a lot of people do seem to think that the poor don’t care about money, and could have been answering the question in that context. I have to update my estimate that the change would not be that large if phrased explicitly in a way that emphasized utility of a dollar. My previous estimate was around 70% that the numbers for both would stay within +/- 10 percent or so (so the liberal/progressive “incorrect” response would be some level below 14% and the conservative/libertarian “incorrect” response would be around 21-41%). Given your arguments I still suspect this is true but need to reduce my confidence by quite a bit, to around 55% or so. So I’d still be willing to put even money on this. But I probably need to think about this more and update further.
This is not at all equivalent. A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth. That’s at least in the most obvious way of reading this statement to me. I don’t think your suggested wordings are any better.
Possibly something like “All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would”? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.
Actually, that’s semantically equivalent to rephrasing #1, and as such semantically contradictory to rephrasing #2.
I figured someone might raise this objection. :)
Let’s define the “rich” person as owning 10,000,000 dollars, and the poor person as owning 1,000. If the rich person places a high proportion on his self-worth on how much money he owns (say, 80% of his self-worth) then 10,000,000+1 yields an increase of self-evaluation by 0.00000008. If, however, the poor person places .001% of his self-worth on how much money he owns, then 1,000+1 yields an increase of 0.00000001. So the rich person’s “self-worth score” in this scenario is increased by a factor of 8 as compared to the poor person’s.
Now, is it likely that poor people, lacking money, will place any but the weakest of weightings onto how they judge themselves as people based on the amount of money they currently possess? Is the opposite likely?
That, then, becomes the nature of the question.
You fail to understand what rich and poor mean. While a rich person may be using dollars to keep score, a poor person is using them to stay alive.
Do you really think that someone with a million dollars could care about each one of them as much as someone who has only one dollar cares about his one dollar? That the million dollar owner could be more devastated by the loss of two of his million dollars than the one-dollar owner will be by the prospect of not eating if he loses his one dollar?
I don’t follow how your paragraph starting with “Let’s” says anything along the lines of your paragraph starting with “Now”. Can you expand?
… the “Now” isn’t actually ‘saying anything’. There’s no assertions in the “Now” paragraph. It was the introduction of a new query to the dialogue: “How do the poor associate money with their estimates of self-worth?”
In other words; after my “Let’s” gave a hypothetical scenario with specific numbers in order to demonstrate that, “Yes, statement #2 could be true”, my “Now” raised the question of: “But is it actually true?”
Ok. In that case, the answer simply seems to be “yes, they will do so.” At least from personal experience, people in a very low income bracket are extremely happy to move up to a slightly higher income bracket, and the barely employed look down on the unemployed homeless while the homeless with jobs consider themselves better than the homeless without jobs. I don’t however know of any real data backing this up.
Would you be willing to agree with the notion that a non-trivial percentage of people might come to the conclusion that it either could go either way or that poor people “find ways to believe they are good people without money”?
This gets us back to the original topic—the 30% of libertarians who answered as 4% of progressives did and this automatically meaning that the progressives got the question “more right” than the libs. This despite any apparent effort to figure out which version of the question (and again, I only gave TWO variants) said person was answering.
At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation, and then positing that people would take that strained interpretation and then might think a thought based on that interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think. This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong.
I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.
You know, the funny thing is that I don’t see it as ‘strained’ at all. And I don’t think it’s even that un-exceptional a belief—though it is a “callow” one. I can rephrase it again and see if it seems more “familiar” to you.
The poor stay that way because they don’t care about money.
The rich only get that way because they’re greedy.
It’s perfectly easy to be happy without money.
And why, pray tell, would you believe that most people don’t think they have valid notions about how other people think? How often, for example, have you heard libertarians talk about (or get denigraded for adhering to) the notion of “picking yourself up off your bootstraps”? The Google Search term poor people don’t care about money yielded 227,000,000 hits.
… and there’s the bias. :-) (One way or the other, someone here is biased and not thinking clearly.)
Now, I’ve given a great deal—at this point—of evidence to affirm my position.
If you really wanted to, I’d be more than happy to go through a list of events in the last few weeks where I have openly and directly disagreed with people who are “in-tribe” to me.
So you’re willing to bet money that context #1 would be nearly identical to the original phrasing, eh?
How about context #2? Moreover: how about if we were to ask how many people thought context #2 (absent context #1) was at least one way to read the original statement?
(I once again want to point out that context #2, by tying the concept of “value” to “this makes me a better person”, isn’t suited to questions of utilitarian evaluation. They can’t be. It’s a virtue-based statement, and it is a modal failure to require utilitarian framing for value-based norms.)
The Google Search term “poor people don’t care about money”, however, yields only 7 results for the exact phrase. Many of the highest-ranked results from the search withoute quote marks are indeed from conservative/libertarian sites, but not all of them (e.g., some prominent results are “Minnesota Republicans To Outlaw Poor People Having Money” and “Rush Limbaugh Says Poor Don’t Deserve Healthcare”) And the vast majority of the millions of results are from completely unrelated sites, as usually happens when you search for a phrase made of common words without using quote marks.
You’ve made some good points here, especially in regard to the fact that empirically a lot of people do seem to think that the poor don’t care about money, and could have been answering the question in that context. I have to update my estimate that the change would not be that large if phrased explicitly in a way that emphasized utility of a dollar. My previous estimate was around 70% that the numbers for both would stay within +/- 10 percent or so (so the liberal/progressive “incorrect” response would be some level below 14% and the conservative/libertarian “incorrect” response would be around 21-41%). Given your arguments I still suspect this is true but need to reduce my confidence by quite a bit, to around 55% or so. So I’d still be willing to put even money on this. But I probably need to think about this more and update further.