On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Keith, re
>
>> Let's play a game of trust. I give you £10. The rules of the
>>game are that you can keep it, or give it away to an anonymous person
>>whom you will never meet. If you decide to do that, the money will be
>>quadrupled to £40. Then your anonymous beneficiary may either send £15
>>back, or keep the lot.
>
>I would always give the money away. I might get some back but would have
>more pleasure picking someone who could use ten quid [I realize that a
>quid and a pound are not quite the same].
>
Exactly, I was going to respond with the same comment. It is a telling
commentary that the article doesn't demonstrate any indication of
the economists being capable of conceiving of this way of thinking,
which I would suggest is the response of the majority: I don't
particularly care about such a relatively small amount of money,
I'm fine thankyou, but here I am being offered the opportunity to
provide a gift to someone else, who cares what the result is for
me. It is so sad that the researchers can't understand why people
don't behave the same way when the other recipient is simply a
computer and not a live human. This truly illustrates the dehumanizing
effects of an economics education which have been documented here
before. With a computer, I am not providing any benefit to anyone,
I am simply engaging in gambling, something for which I have utterly
no interest. Now, if the sum were say greater than $25,000, I might
pause, but I think fairly shortly I would decide to respond the
same way, unless I were perhaps in a situation where the money
could provide specific relief of some form to a friend or relative
in urgent need, in which case the prospect of providing a gift to them
would win out over benefitting a stranger of unknown circumstances.
After all, this is not money I have earned, it is simply a windfall,
so I am losing nothing by giving it away, but I am in fact gaining
something more valuable than money by the act.
All of which goes to prove once again that (not all, Ed, but sadly)
a great number, apparently the majority of contemporary research
economists, are idiots.
-Pete Vincent
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