A few years ago, there was a somewhat famous article about a bagel man who sold bagels on the honor system. You can read it here. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/06BAGEL.html?pagewanted=all
For this essay, here’s the salient quote: “He also says he believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He reached this conclusion in part after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors — an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service and administrative employees. Maybe, he says, the executives stole bagels out of a sense of entitlement. (Or maybe cheating is how they got to be executives.)”
Now, I’m not one to defend dickheads, but I had an interesting experience today that made me rethink the above assumption.
When I was living in LA and scraping by, I never got soda when I grabbed lunch at work. If you’re looking to save money, soda is a good place to start. It’s not the least bit healthy, it’s expensive, and when you stop drinking it for a while you don’t miss it. But, I had a frequent experience back then that’d go something like this: Order a water, go to the soda fountain, note to self that it would be very easy to put soda (or SOME flavoring) in water, reject that option). At least in my recollection, this sort of thing had a serious moral character to it. I still remember, for example, that once my car had been impounded, and the man at the garage accidentally underbilled me for $100. I remember having a genuine moral crisis. I could’ve really used the money, but at the same time, I didn’t want to screw over the garage guy who was probably as broke as I. So… dammit… I had him bill me the remaining $100.
Today, I am much more well off than then. Without going into numbers, I probably make ~10x what I did in the time I’m describing. Mind you, my income was pretty damn low back then, and I’m not accounting for inflation, but the point is that I’m quite a bit more comfortable now. I have an espresso machine. I shop at Whole Foods. You get the idea.
As it happens, I still get water instead of soda. Mostly this is because I’ve lost the taste for it, but it also bugs me on principle that a company can charge you 2 bucks for a little syrup and CO2 bubbles. I found myself at the soda fountain again, and had the same train of thought. “I could put a little lemonade or something in this water, which would make it a little better.” Although I didn’t do it, I noted that I was mostly refusing out of habit. That is, the decision didn’t have the same moral character as it once did for me. I thought about this a bit, and I came up with an idea that might offer an alternate explanation for the bagel man’s story.
I realized that when I was less affluent, “stealing” the 2 bucks worth of soda was more serious. 2 bucks isn’t a lot of money, but when you’re watching your budget carefully, you’re often thinking about matters in the vicinity of two dollars (e.g. this item is $1 a pound, that one is $1.50). Now that I’m a bit better off (thank you all, dear readers, for that!), I’m unlikely to change my views of anything over a matter of $2.
Suppose we then talk about a quantity: cost of an item per income. I’ll call it c for short.
For an individual fast food franchise, c probably doesn’t change for soda over time very much. However, for an individual buyer, it does. Between the age of 25 and 30, the c for a soda for me personally probably fell about about 90%. That is, it went from important to negligible.
So, even though I know intellectually that it’d be the same “crime” to take a little soda as it was back then, I didn’t emotionally feel a moral quality to it. This may be because I’ve grown evil, but I am inclined to think it has more to do with the change in c. Because c is smaller, the crime seems smaller as well.
We all agree that it’s not really a crime to steal, say, a single grain of rice from someone. We all agree that it IS a crime to steal truck full of rice from someone. But, it’s worth noting that the value of a rice grain scales with the affluence of the buyer, and so our view of morality is in some way lensed by affluence.
If the compunction about theft has anything to do with c, ironically, needing something less might (in certain situations) make you MORE likely to steal it.
Interesting that you use your own income as the provider of moral weight in this equation. Personally, the income / profit margin of the ‘victim’ has always mattered more to me. As in, it would be more of a crime to steal a single grain of rice from someone who only had a small bag of rice, compared to stealing a truck of rice from someone who had (practically) infinite reserves of rice.
I agree, and I think that’s still at core why I wouldn’t do that. But, I wonder if “under the hood” for a lot of people, the above is part of the story. I’m guessing it also only applies in cases, like with the soda or bagels, where it’s hard to get caught and where you don’t personally know/see the effect.
I guess it’s a balance between risk, cost : wealth ratio of yourself, cost : wealth ratio of the victim, and probably some form of morality constant (being your own threshold for when the crime is acceptable).
Interesting take on the matter-it sounds very logical to me (and gives people more benefit of doubt rather than just saying executives are cheaters) but would be hard to test in the real world.
Oddly enough I was thinking along similar lines this morning. In my experience, poor people can be some of the most generous people. Perhaps this is because, when you have so little, you recognize how important and valuable receiving a gift can be?
I found this a really interesting little post. Quite important too! I’m pretty sure that there are lots of similar analyses you could do to taxes and budgets at the federal level as well…..
This seems like you’re formalizing the idea of relative value. If your income is sufficently large, the difference between a free item and an item which costs x (for small x) is negligible. Thus people who are sufficently rich can’t discern between taking a free item or taking a sufficently cheap item.
I was thinking while reading that article about how I don’t carry cash anymore. So I’d have to weigh how much I really want a bagel with how much I am willing to go across the street to a bank that isn’t mine, withdraw $20 and pay a $2.50 surcharge, pop over to a convenience store so I can buy a pack of gum so I can get a $1 bill, and then return to the office. That would be a $4.50 bagel (since I don’t chew gum). I’d have to be freaking ravenous to go through all that!
There’s another point. I’m well off enough that I would never spend an hour just to save $4.50, and if my rent increased by $4.50 a month, I wouldn’t think anything of it. However, I would never pay $4.50 for a bagel. So the “meaning” of a dollar depends not only its percentage of your annual income, but on how disproportionate the cost is to your perceived value of the thing you’re buying is. I’m sure there’s an equation for that.
It’s always a knee-jerk reaction to point and blame the rich people as being “bad”, and we get plenty of stories about it, which is why I enjoy hearing theories positing the opposite scenario; that they’re really just decent people like the rest of us who are making a mistake (which I believe is true). But I think the bagel-story is only one facet of this knee-jerk reaction.
It is very believable that they are engaging in value-relativism and deciding that the few dollars for the bagels are not worth having a moral dilemma over, but this seems more like an excuse, a rationalization, for cheating.
It seems more likely that there are other forces at work here. I think Dan Ariely’s on-point when he points to how people are more likely to cheat when something is steps removed from money; perhaps the executives, being much more accustomed to working multiple steps removed from money, have difficulty seeing the bagels as being only one step removed. Ariely also points to social factors and how people are more willing to cheat when it is engage by someone within their group; if the boss is willing to take a bagel without paying for it, the other execs are more likely to take bagels without paying for them and so cheating becomes socially acceptable.
It seems less a cost-benefit analysis in terms of dollars or moral value and rather the curious intrinsic irrationalities that are reinforced by circumstance and world-view.
Dammit – you just made me stop believing in Jean Valjean.
It’s partly about what people are used to. The Bagel man would make nothing in our office because we have a toaster and the company buys bread to keep it’s employees happy (from a cynical perspective, it’s a long way to town for lunch and we have no canteen – the free toast probably makes itself back in extra work minutes). If he were to leave his bagels most people would probably assume they were part of the free toast and not pay out of ignorance than dishonesty.
This has some implications for the “executives steal stuff” line. The execs of a company probably enjoy some perks – they may well have a secretary/PA who brings them coffee/tea, this may extend to bagels. They probably aren’t used to paying for these hot drinks either they have a free coffee machine or the secretaries will claim it back on expenses rather than sorting it out with cash in hand – expenses are hard to claim back from a wooden box! This is by no means justifying the actions, but it does explain how it happens without designating the “evil” tag.
I would like to add a short little moment I remember talking to an old friend about a topic very close to this. My friend had at one point felt lazy and decided that instead of going to the store, he decided to help himself to one package of his roommate’s ramen noodles. The roommate proceeded to flip out and lecture him on boundaries and accused him of being a thief. My friend didn’t quite understand what the big deal was, after all, it was a single package of ramen. I had to explain to him that when times get hard that you’re eating ramen, that one package may seem insignificant to you, but that’s a hard earned meal for them. I convinced him to buy his roommate dinner to make up for it.
.. miss that kid though, he was so dopey, but I’m glad he’s no longer staling my ramen.
This parallels a conversation I was having with a coworker about upcoming raises in our office and how we perceive the better-paid staff to have an ugly sense of entitlement. I proposed that it’s actually not because they’re enormous assholes, but rather that they’re engaging in something similar to what Ricardo above labels “value-relativism.”
For the low-end contract worker at the company making $23k/yr, a raise of $2k/yr probably sounds acceptable. (It did to me when I got it.) That’s just under a 10% raise and means ~$150 extra every month. For the high-end department head making six figures, that can seem almost the same as no raise at all. They take home ~$8k a month and they’re supposed to care about an extra $150?
We see this attitude played out again and again: when it comes to bonuses (calculated based on salary), the reaction to the company Christmas gift (often regarded casually by the top and sold by the bottom to pay bills), even when the company moved and workers were told they needed to start paying for parking. Having money seems to adversely affect both the appreciation of generosity or the reception of costs due to a skewed perspective…from being unevenly loaded down with too much cash…those wankers.
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