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"THE rich are different from you and me,” Scott Fitzgerald once said.
“Yes,” replied Hemingway, “they have more money.”
Well, there’s more to it than that, Ernest. Or so Paul Piff and his colleagues will tell you. The rich are greedy and unethical:
"Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals.
"In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.
"Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed." (Paul K. Piff et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, January 26 2012)
They say upper class, but in this instance, class is simply money; they divvied people up using money and material possessions as markers, not whether they’d done cultural history at varsity or put condensed milk in their tea.
People driving luxury vehicles, for example, are more likely to drive right through a zebra crossing, ignoring pedestrians, than your ordinary car.
They’re more likely to steal candy from a baby (yes, literally, watch this). And if you make someone artificially rich-for-a-day by rigging the rules of Monopoly, they start behaving like they’re entitled (the good news is that if you artificially impoverish a real rich person in the same way, they start showing some altruism and community spirit, so it’s not an irreversible defect).
They behave as if the rules that govern the behaviour of the man and woman in the street, the person making less than seven figures a year, just don’t apply to them. They are in some way special and thus exempt.
That, I’m sure, is why top guys from a bunch of South African construction companies thought they could collude on prices for building World Cup stadia and get away with it.
A well-known business writer in this country has been calling for the country to understand this group of pals since April:
“Throwing construction company bosses into jail for collusion would be, to put it mildly, a step backwards. Jacob Zuma’s administration needs people in it, in the Cabinet too, who understand how to make profits, why they’re important and what they do for the country.”
Oh, yeah: let’s understand how to make profits – deceit and corruption are just some of the tools you’ll need…
In fact, he would have us believe that collusion like this is not just a slap-on-the-wrist kinda thing, it’s actively beneficial: “The fact is that much of the world’s industrial economy has been built by cartels [...] Sometimes it is impossible not to collude or, put another way, sometimes collusion may be in the national interest.”
Oh, right. This would be why the USA has Sherman Anti-Trust Laws which outlawed “cartel violations, such as price fixing, bid rigging, and customer allocation”; it would explain the EU’s competition law which states that it’s illegal to “Directly or indirectly fix purchase or selling prices or any other trading conditions”, right?
So the chaps, the Old Boys' Club, got together over a few bottles of Johnny Walker Blue and, purely in the public interest, with no thought of the millions each of their companies would make, agreed to share World Cup contracts among themselves (excluding smaller players, by the way – the very job creators we always say we should nurture) with the purest of motives - the public interest, I am sure was all that drove their decisions. Yeah, right.
This was corrupt behaviour, says Corruption Watch, calling for criminal charges against those involved: "where firms, through their employees and directors, participate in a bid-rigging cartel and engage in cover pricing to favour one or more firms in exchange for, for example a 'loser’s fee', this amounts, in Corruption Watch’s view, to an offence under Precca [Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act].
"Those individuals who participated in this corrupt activity can and should be charged with this criminal offence, to which criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, attach.”
If South Africa had allowed the firms concerned to get away with this, it really would be the thin end of the wedge, and we would have no business at all complaining about corruption in the public sector. There should not, there cannot be, one set of rules for ‘chaps like us’ and another set for ‘those crooks in government’.
We are inclined to come down more harshly on the state’s employees, for good reason: they are usually playing with tax money – our money – after all.
But public and private are two sides of the same coin: corruption which takes money off the community (you and me) affects the public purse indirectly in many ways, while cases like these see private companies colluding to alter conditions so they can skim off an unfair share of the public purse.
We should, we must, condemn and punish corruption in the private sector with as much rigour as we apply to the public sector. We must not allow the rich to think that they’re “different from you and me”.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
“Yes,” replied Hemingway, “they have more money.”
Well, there’s more to it than that, Ernest. Or so Paul Piff and his colleagues will tell you. The rich are greedy and unethical:
"Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals.
"In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.
"Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed." (Paul K. Piff et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, January 26 2012)
They say upper class, but in this instance, class is simply money; they divvied people up using money and material possessions as markers, not whether they’d done cultural history at varsity or put condensed milk in their tea.
People driving luxury vehicles, for example, are more likely to drive right through a zebra crossing, ignoring pedestrians, than your ordinary car.
They’re more likely to steal candy from a baby (yes, literally, watch this). And if you make someone artificially rich-for-a-day by rigging the rules of Monopoly, they start behaving like they’re entitled (the good news is that if you artificially impoverish a real rich person in the same way, they start showing some altruism and community spirit, so it’s not an irreversible defect).
They behave as if the rules that govern the behaviour of the man and woman in the street, the person making less than seven figures a year, just don’t apply to them. They are in some way special and thus exempt.
That, I’m sure, is why top guys from a bunch of South African construction companies thought they could collude on prices for building World Cup stadia and get away with it.
A well-known business writer in this country has been calling for the country to understand this group of pals since April:
“Throwing construction company bosses into jail for collusion would be, to put it mildly, a step backwards. Jacob Zuma’s administration needs people in it, in the Cabinet too, who understand how to make profits, why they’re important and what they do for the country.”
Oh, yeah: let’s understand how to make profits – deceit and corruption are just some of the tools you’ll need…
In fact, he would have us believe that collusion like this is not just a slap-on-the-wrist kinda thing, it’s actively beneficial: “The fact is that much of the world’s industrial economy has been built by cartels [...] Sometimes it is impossible not to collude or, put another way, sometimes collusion may be in the national interest.”
Oh, right. This would be why the USA has Sherman Anti-Trust Laws which outlawed “cartel violations, such as price fixing, bid rigging, and customer allocation”; it would explain the EU’s competition law which states that it’s illegal to “Directly or indirectly fix purchase or selling prices or any other trading conditions”, right?
So the chaps, the Old Boys' Club, got together over a few bottles of Johnny Walker Blue and, purely in the public interest, with no thought of the millions each of their companies would make, agreed to share World Cup contracts among themselves (excluding smaller players, by the way – the very job creators we always say we should nurture) with the purest of motives - the public interest, I am sure was all that drove their decisions. Yeah, right.
This was corrupt behaviour, says Corruption Watch, calling for criminal charges against those involved: "where firms, through their employees and directors, participate in a bid-rigging cartel and engage in cover pricing to favour one or more firms in exchange for, for example a 'loser’s fee', this amounts, in Corruption Watch’s view, to an offence under Precca [Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act].
"Those individuals who participated in this corrupt activity can and should be charged with this criminal offence, to which criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, attach.”
If South Africa had allowed the firms concerned to get away with this, it really would be the thin end of the wedge, and we would have no business at all complaining about corruption in the public sector. There should not, there cannot be, one set of rules for ‘chaps like us’ and another set for ‘those crooks in government’.
We are inclined to come down more harshly on the state’s employees, for good reason: they are usually playing with tax money – our money – after all.
But public and private are two sides of the same coin: corruption which takes money off the community (you and me) affects the public purse indirectly in many ways, while cases like these see private companies colluding to alter conditions so they can skim off an unfair share of the public purse.
We should, we must, condemn and punish corruption in the private sector with as much rigour as we apply to the public sector. We must not allow the rich to think that they’re “different from you and me”.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
