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According to a study, rich people are more "unethical".
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CNN: Are rich people more unethical?It was a study done at University of California, Berkeley on how ethical richer and poor people are. According to the results, wealthier people are more likely to lie, cheat, have greedy tendencies, and other unethical things. Now, what I find interesting about this article, is that it breaks the common misconception that poorer people are more likely to do unethical things while the wealthier aren't. And the wealthy are the ones who rule the country in every nation, and pretty much controls everyone's lives. This isn't something people are ignorant towards, we have all heard people saying not to trust the rich. But a full on study is crazy. |
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I think you are looking at it the wrong way. While rich people are more likely to cheat and lie etc etc, it is not saying that they are more likely to commit an actual crime. I would still say that, in general, the poor are more likely to commit a crime.
For what it's worth, I'm quite rich, and I have never cheated on anyone ever...but I have been known to have a sterling poker face at times. |
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Well poorer people are gonna commit the crime, because that's in their environment. And many are influenced by that at a young age, they grow into that. But many wealthy people will have intention to do these things because of greed. Once you have money, you sometimes want more. Of course this is too simple, people are far too complicated. So there's more than one aspect to it.
But yes, there is a positive correlation with poverty and crime. |
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There's also many studies that point out that a society is happier when it is poorer but with a narrow gap between the poorest & the wealthiest than a society with a higher average wealth but a bigger bag between the top & the bottom.
Which further goes to show that capitalism is the worst thing to happen to humanity since feudalism.
Saying "the poor are more likely to commit a crime" is...well, it's meaningless. "Common sense" may cause to expect that to be the case, but popular opinion is wrong on many such topics. It's not poor folk who did in Enron for example. Undoubtedly poverty leads people into crime but so does simple greed. And there's few greedier than those who already have wealth, for some reason I can't even begin to comprehend.
Further more, GK mentioned "crime" for some reason? I don't know why, but the study wasn't on crime. It was on ethical behaviour. Just because something is legal does not make it moral, & nor are some illegal things immoral. Commiting a crime such as robbery to feed your family is considerably less immoral than legally running a predatory business which ends up with a near-monopoly & so forces prices up for regular people, for example. |
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 1 user thanked forkboy for this useful post.
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When it comes to crime, it seems to me that the poor commit crimes on a one-to-one basis. They steal a thing, or they stab a guy, whatever.
The Rich however commit more impersonal crimes such as fraud, tax evasion, and the like. Crimes that directly affect no-one, but indirectly affect many people at once, in a huge variety of ways. And the rich have access to legal defence that basically allows them to do almost anything they want and get away with it, a luxury the poor cannot afford. |
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According to a study, rich people are more "unethical".
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