IG NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZE 2026 [USA, MEXICO, CANADA] Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior.
REFERENCE: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. <doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118373109> WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Paul Piff
It’s also not necessarily conscious evil. Someone who is poor is more likely to recognize the effort required to acquire treats that are trivial for the wealthy. To the wealthy, the candy has essentially zero value, so they don’t recognize the harm caused by taking it from others.
I agree, and I think we’ve seen the same perspective blindness at a much bigger scale. Early in the covid lockdown, there was a proposal floating around to let people that had already been sick go back to working in regular contact with the public, because they would have good immunity.
It wasn’t until it made it out to public discussion that someone not rich finally pointed out that means telling people living paycheck to paycheck “Go get sick, then you can go back to providing for your family”. To people with surplus money, “stay home unless you are immune” is hardly a sacrifice at all, so there’s no motivation to put yourself in danger just to avoid that. The rich can live without going out to buy lattes for a few months, we’ll all tough it out together.
Meanwhile, the person making those lattes doesn’t have a financial safety net big enough to last a thousand years, and those same few months will be catastrophic.