The Rich Don't Care About You

I am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise that a new study shows that rich people have a lack of empathy.

The paper, published in October by the Association for Psychological Science, recounts three experiments conducted among students and employees of a large (unidentified) public university, some of whom had graduated from college and others who had not. In American social science, the definition of class is generally based on measures like income, occupational prestige and material wealth. In these experiments, class was determined either by educational level or by self-reported perceptions of family socioeconomic status.

In the first experiment, participants were asked to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions were being expressed. The more upper class the judges, the less able they were to accurately identify emotions in others.

In another experiment, upper-class participants had a harder time reading the emotions of strangers during simulated job interviews.

In the third one — an interesting twist of an experiment — people of greater socioeconomic status were asked to compare themselves to the wealthiest, most powerful Americans, thus diminishing their own relative stature. When asked to identify emotions by looking at 36 sets of emoting eyes, they did markedly better than their upper-class peers.

Fascinating stuff. I think it also shows why politicians have such a hard time enacting policies to help the less well off. Here's a chart I whipped up outlining the median wealth of Senators, Representatives, and average American families.



That's a striking difference. If wealthy people struggle psychologically to empathize with other people, is it any wonder that politicians seem so hell bent on slashing Social Security, Medicare, education, food stamps, and any program designed to help others? They know it's not going to have an impact on them, so why should they care?

I really have no idea what could be done to fix this.

Should the Social Security Retirement Age be Raised?

Ezra Klein changes his mind and says, "No."

Start with the basic rationale for raising the retirement age. As Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has argued, when Social Security was signed into law, the retirement age was 65 and life expectancy was 63. "The numbers added up pretty well back then," he said on Fox News. But that's misleading. That figure was driven by high infant mortality. If you were a white male who'd made it to age 60 in 1935, you could expect 15 more years going forward. If you're a white male who lives to 60 today, you can expect 20 more years going forward.

Moreover, those averages conceal a lot of inequality. In 1972, a 60-year-old male worker who made less than the median income had a life expectancy of 78 years. By 2001, he had a life expectancy of 80 years. Meanwhile, workers in the top half of the income distribution shot to 85 years from 79. Insofar as the argument for raising the retirement age is that "Social Security beneficiaries live a lot longer today than they did in 1935," it should be restated as: "Social Security beneficiaries tend to live somewhat longer today than they did in 1935, and that's much more true of rich beneficiaries than poor beneficiaries."

And so what? Lurking beneath this conversation is an unquestioned assumption: We live longer, so we should work longer. That's pretty intuitive to members of Congress, who seem to like their jobs and don't seem to like the idea of retiring. It's also pretty intuitive to blogger/columnists, who spend their time in air-conditioned rooms opining about pension programs. But most people don't work in Congress or in the media. They work on their feet. They strain their backs. They're bored silly at the end of the day. By the time they're in their 60s, they want to retire.

The bizarre thing about this debate (as with many other policy debates) is that the outcome of this debate will have a large impact on many poor people. Now, how many poor people are involved in the decision-making process? How many members of Congress would be negatively impacted by raising the retirement age or reducing benefits? That's not to say some of this might be necessary, but it is something to keep in mind whenever these people come back to us, the American people, and say that something needs to be cut.