Money might buy a legal team, but it can’t buy a conscience.
A set of experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley suggests wealthier individuals are more likely to cheat, lie and break the law than their less wealthy counterparts.
There’s an obvious philosophical disconnect between capitalist Wall Street and the more socialist Occupy movement, but I believe much of the ill will levied against the financial elite is in reaction to the personal behavior and attitudes that capitalist ideals promote.
Unfortunately, being a good capitalist often puts one at odds with being a good person.
Obviously, people have different qualifications for being a good person, but most include concepts of honesty, fairness, charity and empathy. Many of these concepts conflict with capitalist ideals that encourage us to look out for our own self-interest at all costs.
The Berkeley experiments offer a glimpse of some of these behaviors. One experiment asked subjects to roll a computerized dice and report their scores afterward. Higher scores would result in more chances of winning a $50 Amazon gift card.
Unbeknownst to the subjects, the game was rigged, with everyone’s rolls adding up to 12.
Subjects who reported income greater than $150,000 per year were more likely to claim a score of at least 12 than their less wealthy counterparts.
This experiment offers an interesting perspective on the actions of the wealthy, but determining the exact causes and motivation of this behavior is difficult.
I wouldn’t be surprised if economics and business professors praised the cheaters from the dice game since they were potentially gaining a financial advantage over their competitors.
This kind of thinking creates a rift between the financial elite and the less wealthy. The experiment suggests those with lower incomes tend to place a higher value on personal honesty while more of the rich are willing to trade their integrity for cash.
Individuals with lower incomes might also be more concerned with being caught cheating.
It’s no secret the wealthy have access to better legal representation, and often the threat of a high-priced legal team can prevent arrests even in everyday crimes like shoplifting.
This legal inequality might be responsible for the wealthy’s above-average cheating rate.
Illegal business practices are often even easier to get away with as long as the crime carries no risk of jail time.
Monetary fines are a terrible way to discourage unethical or illegal business practices because as long as breaking the law makes enough to pay off the fine and still turn a profit the fine is treated as just another cost of doing business.
Traffic tickets are similarly ineffective against the wealthy. While $100 or $200 could mean a family can’t pay rent this month, it’s only a minor inconvenience to the extremely wealthy.
In Finland and some other European countries, speeding fines are proportional to the offenders’ income rather than a flat rate as in the U.S. Last year, a man was fined about $200,000 for speeding, but he also made more than $11 million in 2002. A proportional fine system makes sure the rich are deterred from breaking the law — just like the rest of us.
Some may think a proportional fine system is unfair to the wealthy, but for someone like Mitt Romney — who made $21.7 million in 2010 — you’ll have a hard time convincing him with a $200 fine since he makes roughly that every five minutes of his life.
 
Andrew Shockey is a 21-year-old biological engineering junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.
 
 
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Contact Andrew Shockey at [email protected]