[Vision2020] How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles

[Art Deco]

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February 20, 2012, 9:00 pmHow to Get the Rich to Share the MarblesBy JONATHAN
HAIDT <http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jonathan-haidt/>

Suppose scientists discovered a clump of neurons in the brain that, when
stimulated, turned people into egalitarians. This would be good news for
Democratic strategists and speechwriters, who could now get to work framing
arguments about wealth and taxation in ways that might activate the
relevant section of cerebral cortex.

This “share-the-spoils” button has been discovered, in a sense, but it may
turn out to be harder to press than Democrats might think.

Pretend you’re a three-year-old, exploring an exciting new room full of
toys. You and another child come up to a large machine that has some
marbles inside, which you can see.  There’s a rope running through the
machine and the two ends of the rope hang out of the front, five feet
apart. If you or your partner pulls on the rope alone, you just get more
rope. But if you both pull at the same time, the rope dislodges some
marbles, which you each get to keep. The marbles roll down a chute, and
then they divide: one rolls into the cup in front of you, three roll into
the cup in front of your partner.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

This is the scenario created by developmental psychologists Michael
Tomasello <http://email.eva.mpg.de/%7Etomas/index.html> and Katharina
Hamann at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. In this situation,
where *both* kids have to pull for anyone to get marbles, the children
equalize the wealth about 75% of the time, with hardly any conflict. Either
the “rich” kid hands over one marble spontaneously or else the “poor” kid
asks for one and his request is immediately granted.

But an experiment must have more than one condition, and the experimenters
ran two other versions of the study to isolate the active ingredient. What
had led to such high rates of sharing, given that three-year-olds are often
quite reluctant to share new treasures? Children who took part in the
second condition found that the marbles were already waiting for them in
the cups when they first walked up to the machine. No work required.

In this condition, it’s finders-keepers. If you have the bad luck to place
yourself  in front of the cup with one marble, then your partner is very
unlikely to offer you one, you’re unlikely to ask, and if you do ask,
you’re likely to be rebuffed. Only about 5% of the time did any marbles
change hands.

But here’s the most amazing condition — a slight variation that reveals a
deep truth. Things start off just as in the first condition: you and your
partner see two ropes hanging out of the machine. But as you start tugging
it becomes clear that they are two separate ropes. You pull yours, and one
marble rolls out into your cup. Your partner pulls the other rope, and is
rewarded with three marbles. What happens next?
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyThe Hamann Tomasello
apparatus

For the most part, it’s pullers-keepers. Even though you and your partner
each did the same work (rope pulling) at more or less the same time, you
both know that you didn’t really collaborate to produce the wealth. Only
about 30% of the time did the kids work out an equal split. In other words,
the “share-the-spoils” button is not pressed by the mere existence of
inequality. It is pressed when two or more people *collaborated* to produce
a gain. Once the button is pressed in both brains, both parties willingly
and effortlessly share.

Tomasello has found<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7360/full/nature10278.html>that
chimpanzees doing tasks similar to this one do not share the spoils,
in any of the conditions. They just grab what they can, regardless of who
did what. They don’t seem to keep track of who was on the team. Tomasello
believes that the “share-the-spoils” response emerged at some point in the
last half-million years, as humans began to forage and hunt cooperatively.
Those who had the response could develop stable, ongoing partnerships. They
worked together in small teams, which accomplished far more than
individuals could on their own.

So now let’s look at a key line in President Obama’s State of the Union
address: “we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and
everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of
rules.” The president is making three arguments about fairness in this one
sentence, but do any of them press the “share-the-spoils” button? If you
think that the economy is like a giant marble dispenser with a single rope,
then you’d probably agree that if everyone does their “fair share” and
pulls on the rope as hard as they can, then everyone is entitled to a “fair
share” in the nation’s wealth. But do Americans perceive the economy as a
giant collaborative project?

My parents were teenagers in New York City during the Second World War. The
home front really was a vast and sustained communal pull. My mother
remembers saving up nickels and dimes to buy a war bond. She lingered by
her aunts and uncles, waiting for them to finish packs of cigarettes, so
that she could grab the foil wrappers for the aluminum recycling campaign.

My parents were part of the generation that went through the depression, a
world war, and then the cold war together. This generation accepted federal
controls on wages during the war as being necessary for the common good. In
the years after the war, the combination of high taxes on top earners,
social norms against exorbitant pay, and an increasingly sturdy safety net
brought income inequality down from a peak in 1929 to a long valley from
the 1950s through the 1970s. It’s a period known as “the great compression.”

The compression went into reverse in the 1980s, and since then, inequality
has risen to levels approaching those of 1929. Democrats have long sounded
the alarm about rising inequality, but for decades they got little traction
among the electorate. It’s only in the last few months, since Occupy Wall
Street popularized the concept of the 1 percent, and since we all learned
that Mitt Romney pays less than 14% in federal taxes, that the nation’s
attention has been focused on the earnings of the super-rich. Will the
Democrats’ new emphasis on fairness be enough to rally the nation to raise
the top tax rates? Will Obama’s new progressivism press the right moral
buttons?

America is in deep fiscal trouble, and things are going to get far worse
when the baby boomers retire. Normally, when a nation faces a threat to its
very survival, a leader can press the shared-sacrifice button. Churchill
offered Britons nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” John F. Kennedy
asked us all to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle” against
communism. These were grand national projects, and everyone was asked to
pitch in.

Unfortunately, President Obama promised he would not raise taxes on anyone
but the rich. He and other Democrats have also vowed to “protect seniors”
from cuts, even though seniors receive the vast majority of entitlement
dollars. The president is therefore in the unenviable position of arguing
that we’re in big trouble and so a small percentage of people will have to
give more, but most people will be protected from sacrifice. This appeal
misses the shared-sacrifice button completely. It also fails to push the
share-the-spoils button. When people feel that they’re all pulling on
different ropes, they don’t feel entitled to a share of other people’s
wealth, even when that wealth was acquired by luck.

If the Democrats really want to get moral psychology working for them, I
suggest that they focus less on *distributive* fairness — which is about
whether everyone got what they deserved — and more on
*procedural*fairness—which is about whether honest, open and impartial
procedures were
used to decide who got what. If there’s a problem with the ultra-rich, it’s
not that they have too much wealth, it’s that they bought laws that made it
easy for them to gain and keep so much more wealth in recent decades.

Sarah Palin gave a speech last September lambasting “crony capitalism,”
which she defined as “the collusion of big government and big business and
big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.” I think
that she was on to something and that she was right to include big
government along with big business and big finance. The problem isn’t that
some kids have many more marbles than others. The problem is that some kids
are in cahoots with the experimenters. They get to rig the marble machine
before the rest of us have a chance to play with it.

*Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia
and a visiting professor at the N.Y.U.-Stern School of Business. He is the
author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and
Religion.”*

*The research reported on in this article was published in 2011 in Nature,
476, p. 328-331. (Hamann, K., Warneken, F., Greenberg, J. R., & Tomasello,
M. Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in
chimpanzees<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7360/full/nature10278.html>
.)*

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