The Rich and Powerful Who Abuse the System: the contempt topic

[Erik of Hazelfield]

In Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens, he defined imperialism as a system in which people were governed not by themselves but by someone else far away. There was something about the simplicity of that statement that struck a chord with me, and I realised you can define capitalism in much the same way - it’s a system in which some people do the work while others get the profit from that work.

In contemporary economical advice we often hear things like “build your own money making machine” or “put your money in the stock market and make it work for you” but the terminology is all wrong. The money does no work, it’s the employees of the companies you’re investing in that do it. We need to acknowledge this truth and change our language around these things. 

Full disclaimer: I do invest my savings on the stock market, and I have no idea how to abolish capitalism or if it’s even desirable. But I can’t help thinking it’s wrong that we let people sit on their asses and collect money off other people’s work. 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

10 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

one last thing, you mentioned time. Again, there are some really hard workers who really do put in 12-14 hour days where they're working like crazy. You know I've argued in the career thread that's not actually a good thing, but I know what it's like to be there. However, a lot of these people claim to work really long hours, but probably do like 4 hours of real work on a given day. I doubt 1% of CEOs and top corporate figures work anywhere nearly as hard as someone working construction or in a meat packing plant and those folks get paid way less and are held to a much higher standard. 

Complete tangent to the thread, but I’m interested in what you qualify as “real work”.  

One thing I’ve learned over time is that there are things that I did not value as a younger person (I.e., small talk at work) that are actually “real work” and are super important as you start to manage people (up and down).  It is an important part of my day (which I actually set aside as a calendar block) to find time to connect with different groups of people.  It’s much easier to care about people that you know on a personal level and not as the person who sends you sort of mediocre drafts or horrifying assignments.  But to do that, you have to invest the time.  That is work, and it counts just as much as time spent thinking creatively, time spent implementing ideas, time spent in analysis, etc.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Complete tangent to the thread, but I’m interested in what you qualify as “real work”.  

One thing I’ve learned over time is that there are things that I did not value as a younger person (I.e., small talk at work) that are actually “real work” and are super important as you start to manage people (up and down).  It is an important part of my day (which I actually set aside as a calendar block) to find time to connect with different groups of people.  It’s much easier to care about people that you know on a personal level and not as the person who sends you sort of mediocre drafts or horrifying assignments.  But to do that, you have to invest the time.  That is work, and it counts just as much as time spent thinking creatively, time spent implementing ideas, time spent in analysis, etc.  

I think what you've described makes sense if it happens occasionally. For example, if I ran a company I'd be happy to pay for team building exercises and call it work if it happened every so often. What I don't view as real work is when someone says they put in long hours, but half their day is goofing off, they get paid handsomely for doing so and then they complain about lower level workers not giving proper effort. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Remember how during the pandemic there were "essential" workers?  Would have been cool if a take away was treating them better or recognizing that what they do is hard.  

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think what you've described makes sense if it happens occasionally. For example, if I ran a company I'd be happy to pay for team building exercises and call it work if it happened every so often. What I don't view as real work is when someone says they put in long hours, but half their day is goofing off, they get paid handsomely for doing so and then they complain about lower level workers not giving proper effort. 

Look, I shouldn’t (and don’t) count the time I spend faffing around the board as “work.”  But what to you IS work?  Like I said, I’ve had to revise my thinking as I get a broader perspective and some maturity.  Am curious what you are counting as “working” versus “goofing off”?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Look, I shouldn’t (and don’t) count the time I spend faffing around the board as “work.”  But what to you IS work?  Like I said, I’ve had to revise my thinking as I get a broader perspective and some maturity.  Am curious what you are counting as “working” versus “goofing off”?

Work to me is the time of day you spend at your job where you're having to do something difficult, stressful and/or requires you to be incredibly focused as a starting point. So for example, my last job, I was the most productive person when it comes to revenue generated, I was in the office for 40-50 hours a week, but on most days I really did like 2-3 hours of actual work. Every job I've ever had since graduating college has been like this with most of my bosses being even lazier than I was. 

[Ormond]

32 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Work to me is the time of day you spend at your job where you're having to do something difficult, stressful and/or requires you to be incredibly focused as a starting point. So for example, my last job, I was the most productive person when it comes to revenue generated, I was in the office for 40-50 hours a week, but on most days I really did like 2-3 hours of actual work. Every job I've ever had since graduating college has been like this with most of my bosses being even lazier than I was. 

Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but it almost sounds like you believe the only parts of a job that are "work" are the parts one doesn't enjoy.

I think many people (including myself) do their best work when they are the least stressed. And though it gives a sense of accomplishment to do something difficult, the more practice one has both the less difficult and the less stressful a particular part of one's job is, and I really don't think that makes well practiced tasks "not work".  I think enjoying a task usually leads to being more succesful at it, and that makes one's work better. 
 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but it almost sounds like you believe the only parts of a job that are "work" are the parts one doesn't enjoy.

Not at all. I'm merely saying that if you're at your job for a really long time, but don't actually do anything close to the level of work you expect of people much further down the chain your work should be heavily scrutinized, especially if you're massively over compensated. 

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I think many people (including myself) do their best work when they are the least stressed. And though it gives a sense of accomplishment to do something difficult, the more practice one has both the less difficult and the less stressful a particular part of one's job is, and I really don't think that makes well practiced tasks "not work".  I think enjoying a task usually leads to being more succesful at it, and that makes one's work better. 

I agree. In my perfect world people would work way fewer hours while making a lot more money. Well in my perfect world we'd phase out money, however, I'm not winning that argument here. But to the point I think you could actually get so much more productivity if you had a smarter work force that believed in what they were doing while not needing to spend so much time at their job. People would be so much happier overall. Instead we have a system that breaks most people's spirits and we're told to accept it. 

[Martell Spy]

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but on most days I really did like 2-3 hours of actual work. Every job I've ever had since graduating college has been like this with most of my bosses being even lazier than I was. 

I had a tech job where the expectation was about 2 hours or work a day, but 8 hours of clock time. Actually, I think you could get yourself fired if you really made a problem for the bosses by finishing your weekly quota in 10 hours and pestering them for more. We played pool a lot, there was a table in the cafe. And I personally enjoyed the work, there just wasn't a business need for more to be done.

Authority is the difference between a worker and a manager not working and/or goofing off. And that's what makes the whole Musk working 100 hours thing so ridiculous. He could be wanking off in the closets 98 of those hours. He owns all the closets and can forbid anyone from entering. He enjoys torturing workers and counts this activity as part of these self-reported working hours.

 

[SeanF]

Statistics can be surprising.

At global level, you need $936,000 , net, to get into the top 1%, which most people would call "comfortable" rather than rich.

$100,000 takes you into the top 10% worldwide, which few people would call either rich or comfortable.

Edited September 15, 2023 by SeanF

[Heartofice]

14 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Statistics can be surprising.

At global level, you need $936,000 , net, to get into the top 1%, which most people would call "comfortable" rather than rich.

$100,000 takes you into the top 10% worldwide, which few people would call either rich or comfortable.

In the UK, that puts basically everyone who bought a house in the 80s or 90s in the top 1%, if we are talking about worth. 

One of the big skews here is that actually most people who make a shit load of money do not do it through a salary, that the real main way to get rich is to own things. The whole Pinketty Capital thing pretty much holds up in that regard, we've seen a very big shift away from wages to asset inflation and that leaves pretty much most people behind if you are stuck having to actually have a job. You need to basically own stuff, be that property, shares, or assets.

I've worked with a number of financial clients and met some quite well off people, and almost 100% of them did it, not through any job they had, but because they used their money to buy more and more property. That might be a particular problem in the UK but I'd say it's happened across the developed world. It can be pretty infuriating if you are under 50 and struggled to get on the property ladder your whole life, working hard to increase your salary, only to have much of it taken away via taxes, to see people who basically got lucky in life, get very wealthy by almost not working at all. 

So I don't think CEOs are really the problem here, the problem is the entire system wages vs assets, which I was hoping would change a bit when inflation went nuts. 

Edited September 15, 2023 by Heartofice

[SeanF]

Just now, Heartofice said:

In the UK, that puts basically everyone who bought a house in the 80s or 90s in the top 1%, if we are talking about worth. 

One of the big skews here is that actually most people who make a shit load of money do not do it through a salary, that the real main way to get rich is to own things. The whole Pinketty Capital thing pretty much holds up in that regard, we've seen a very big shift away from wages to asset inflation and that leaves pretty much most people behind if you are stuck having to actually have a job.

I've worked with a number of financial clients and met some quite well off people, and almost 100% of them did it, not through any job they had, but because they used their money to buy more and more property. That might be a particular problem in the UK but I'd say it's happened across the developed world. It can be pretty infuriating if you are under 50 and struggled to get on the property ladder your whole life, working hard to increase your salary, only to have much of it taken away via taxes, to see people who basically got lucky in life, get very wealthy by almost not working at all. 

So I don't think CEOs are really the problem here, the problem is the entire system wages vs assets, which I was hoping would change a bit when inflation went nuts. 

It likely will.  Property prices rose by 206%, between 1997 and 2007, in the UK.  Then, interest rates were kept at 0-1% between 2008 - 2022.  Now that interest rates have returned to normal, I expect that there will be a lengthy correction in property values.  At the same time, wages are starting to rise quite rapidly.

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

It likely will.  Property prices rose by 206%, between 1997 and 2007, in the UK.  Then, interest rates were kept at 0-1% between 2008 - 2022.  Now that interest rates have returned to normal, I expect that there will be a lengthy correction in property values.  At the same time, wages are starting to rise quite rapidly.

That is my hope, though I suspect it will likely be a temporary blip and there will be efforts to try and revert things back to how they were. Property deflation will cause a lot of problems for people and there will be uproar if people realise house prices don't go up and up forever. 

Plus I can't see there being much appetite in industries for allowing wages to go up, I'm sure things will be done to prevent that happening too much. 

You would hope that interest rates might fix at current levels, and lessons would be learned, but I'm not confident.

[baxus]

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Work to me is the time of day you spend at your job where you're having to do something difficult, stressful and/or requires you to be incredibly focused as a starting point. So for example, my last job, I was the most productive person when it comes to revenue generated, I was in the office for 40-50 hours a week, but on most days I really did like 2-3 hours of actual work. Every job I've ever had since graduating college has been like this with most of my bosses being even lazier than I was. 

Do you think you'd be able to "do something difficult, stressful and/or requires you to be incredibly focused as a starting point" for 8-10 hours a day? I'm a software developer, and based on experience I've gained over 12 years of my career so far I can tell you that I certainly can't do that. Even if I could, I'm not being given a chance to with all the meetings spread throughout the day. Don't get me wrong, I understand there are "good" meetings, the ones needed to keep everything running smoothly, but I've almost come to tears at how much of my time was wasted in various kinds of pointless meetings.

[Erik of Hazelfield]

About rich people and privilege, I guess most of you have heard about the Monopoly experiment conducted by Paul Piff at Berkeley about a decade ago. He let two test subjects play Monopoly except the game was obviously rigged - one of them got twice the amount of money to start with, collected twice the amount of money when passing go, and got two dice to roll at every turn, making them go around the board faster and collecting even more money. He observed two things:

1) they started behaving more rudely towards their “poor” opponent, and 

2) afterwards, when asked why they won, they tended to discuss the choices they made, their strategy of buying this or that street, and forgetting about the fact that the game was very obviously rigged.

TED talk below:

The other link I wanted to share on this topic is the Pencilsword masterpiece comic “On a Plate”: 

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate

It simply seems incredibly hard for people to see and acknowledge their own privileges.

[BigFatCoward]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

In the UK, that puts basically everyone who bought a house in LONDON or certain parts of the SE in the 80s or 90s in the top 1%, if we are talking about worth. 

 

FIXED.  

[Rippounet]

I believe it's linked to the "fundamental attribution error."

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In social psychology, fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is a cognitive attribution bias where observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors.

Maybe Ormond can chime in. Anyway, as I understand it, this bias is a bitch, because it's very difficult to avoid:
- The human attention span is quite limited and we can't at the same time be focused on a task and have a good grasp of our environment. So if you're doing something requiring cognitive efforts, you're unlikely to notice environmental factors that will help or hinder you.
- Although it's easy to think of it as stupidity (see: Dunning-Kruger), we need to overestimate our individual agency to be functional ; being over-attentive to environmental factors over which you have no grasp can only lead to paralysis - or doing research ha ha.

Anyway, yes, the rich systematically attribute their success to their own merits. Even if they know they slightly overestimate their agency, they will see it as "risk-taking," in the sense that they are not afraid to test the limits of their agency.

Where it gets really tricky is that the fundamental attribution error is cumulative because of what's called the "Pygmalion effect."

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The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse.

Simply put, focusing on your agency and your successes (rather than on your lack of agency and on your failures) does improve one's performance. It's probably the source of the idea of "positive thinking."

Now all this wouldn't be so bad if it hadn't become reflected in ideology. At some point, some traits of the bourgeois education seeped into the popular mind, and the potential of believing in your own agency became exaggerated. It became a kind of "magic thinking" for the masses, sidelined social sciences (which were big on analysing environmental factors), and eventually allowed to "blame people for their own failures" on large scales, thus blaming the poor for their own poverty by always setting the same bar for everyone - in spite of the obvious inequalities at birth.

In actuality, "environmental factors" (broadly speaking) are considerably more important than individual willpower when it comes to shaping one's life and future - individual human agency is ridiculously limited. But outside universities it's become uncommon to think like that because being aware of the way causality actually works is fucking depressing. Therefore, our societies pay far more attention to rare examples of individual success (the Gates, Musks, and Bezoses of the world) than to the complexities of determinism.
This goes a long way toward explaining our current predicament in which we have become so focused on our individual life and individual agency that we have trouble grasping large-scale causalities and generating collective action. And the problem with returning to a more cooperative approach is that it entails a higher sense of morality - which, in our individualistic societies, will often be perceived as a deprivation of liberty.
 

Edited September 15, 2023 by Rippounet

[Ormond]

43 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I believe it's linked to the "fundamental attribution error."

Maybe Ormond can chime in. Anyway, as I understand it, this bias is a bitch, because it's very difficult to avoid:
- The human attention span is quite limited and we can't at the same time be focused on a task and have a good grasp of our environment. So if you're doing something requiring cognitive efforts, you're unlikely to notice environmental factors that will help or hinder you.
- Although it's easy to think of it as stupidity (see: Dunning-Kruger), we need to overestimate our individual agency to be functional ; being over-attentive to environmental factors over which you have no grasp can only lead to paralysis - or doing research ha ha.

 

I am not at home right now but in Chicago for the 50th wedding anniversary of my college roommate. So I don't have textbooks to refer to. However, many researchers now think the "fundamental" in "fundamental attribution error" isn't accurate worldwide because there are cultural differences in it. People in less individualistic cultures are not as susceptible to it as people in inidividualistic cultures. The USA, Australia, and the UK are the most individualistic countries in the world, though most western European countries are also above average.  There are individual differences everywhere, of course, but on average people in India and China are less subject to automatically attributing people's status or outcomes solely to their internal attributes than people in North America and western Europe are. 

https://www.monacolaclasse.com/post/double-shot-an-attribution-error-based-on-cultural-values-and-norms-on-the-way-to-discrimination#:~:text=In particular%2C differences in attribution,in terms of personal attributes.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

In actuality, "environmental factors" (broadly speaking) are considerably more important than individual willpower when it comes to shaping one's life and future - individual human agency is ridiculously limited.

The other side of this coin is that there is a trend of dismissing individual willpower and to blame far too much on 'environmental factors' and I think it's important to find the balance between those things. 

I've seen a lot of discussion of the merits of 'meritocracy' and there have been a lot of criticisms of it as an idea going around. So far from what I can tell the main component of that is that we don't actually live in any sort of real meritocracy because privilege spans generations and is transferred down, and people do not recognise the sheer number of barriers in place for people who have very little. 

Having said that, I think we also don't recognise cultural factors enough, and how far life expectations influence someone's 'success', at least financially. For instance why do some immigrant communities do far better than others, and better than native populations when it comes to education and wealth attainment. When the expectation is that you work your ass off at school and go on to get a good job, and you save money and then you send your kids to a better school and you pass down your standards to them, then it isn't surprising to see that success. 

So while I think that environmental factors play their part, 'Willpower' is probably a bigger factor, and that isn't just based on the individual but everyone surrounding them. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, baxus said:

Do you think you'd be able to "do something difficult, stressful and/or requires you to be incredibly focused as a starting point" for 8-10 hours a day? I'm a software developer, and based on experience I've gained over 12 years of my career so far I can tell you that I certainly can't do that. Even if I could, I'm not being given a chance to with all the meetings spread throughout the day. Don't get me wrong, I understand there are "good" meetings, the ones needed to keep everything running smoothly, but I've almost come to tears at how much of my time was wasted in various kinds of pointless meetings.

Yes, because I've been there, having to do it with one day off a month and that was still a day I had to do some work shit. There would be some lazy days, but other times I had to get to work at 4AM and left the office after midnight and spent 90% of the time busting my ass. It's in part why I advocate for people not having to work like that. But OTOH, some days I'd be at the office watching the news for six hours, taking notes on the coverage and checking social media to see what was getting attention. I don't think that was specifically hard work even if it ate up a bunch of time. The only actual work I did during those periods was coaching, handling some phone calls and planning various events.