Making the best of a bad job

Interesting analysis program on the denigration of lower paid jobs. An interesting point about increased social mobility is that it increases the stigma of those who don't move up, and that for 'good' jobs to be promoted (e.g. for macro policy reasons) then there need to be 'bad' jobs to contrast with. If everyone should strive to be above average, what does that mean for the other 49%?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qlmlg
David Goodhart considers whether the declining status of basic jobs can be halted and even reversed.

Successive governments have prioritised widening access to higher education to try to drive social mobility, without giving much thought to the impact this has on the expectations of young people who, for whatever reason, are not going to take that path.
But even in a knowledge-based economy, the most basic jobs survive. Offices still need to be cleaned, supermarket shelves stacked, and care home residents looked after.
The best employers know how to design these jobs to make them more satisfying. Are politicians finally waking up to the problem?

The Money-Empathy Gap

New research suggests that more money makes people act less human. Or at least less humane.

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index1.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index2.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index3.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index4.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index5.html

• Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. 
• In a country that likes to think that class doesn’t matter, these social scientists are beginning to prove just how determinative money is.
• Nor does it attempt to apply its conclusions about the selfishness and solipsism of a broad social stratum to every member within it: Gateses and Carnegies have obviously saved lives and edified generations, and one of the biggest predictors of a person’s inclination to donate to charity is how much money he has.
• studies of ethical behavior indicate a strong correlation between high socioeconomic status and interpersonal disregard. It’s an “additive” effect; the fever line points straight up. “People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs,” he says. Piff’s research also suggests that people who yearn to be richer or more prominent make different choices than those more content with their present level of material comfort.
• Americans across the board can have a high tolerance for inequality if they believe it is meritocratic. The research by Piff and his colleagues points to a different possible explanation for the income gap: that it may be at least in part psychologically destined. This in turn raises the ancient conundrum of chicken and egg. If getting or having money can make you hard-hearted, do you also have to be hard-hearted to become well-off in the first place? The bulk of the new research points decisively in the direction of the former
• “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.” When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers’ regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering
• In experiments she published in the journal Science in 2006, Vohs “primed” her subjects to think about money, which is to say she planted the idea of money in their minds without their knowledge before observing their social interactions compared with a control group. ..... Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group. In a conversation in her office in May, Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious—just disinterested. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic,” she said. “I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.”
• Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people antisocial. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency....Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. 
• “Money,” says Vohs, “brings you into functionality mode. When that gets applied to other people, things get mucked up. You can get things done, but it does come at the expense of people’s feelings or caring about them as individuals.”
• The corollaries to this poverty work are potentially explosive: Wealth may give you a better brain. It may make you a more strategic thinker, a savvier planner... And the cognitive benefits of affluence may accrue incrementally, speculates Dovidio, so that very rich people have better brain functioning than moderately rich people. These hypotheses are at the untested frontier of the new science: “I think in ten years we’ll have a compelling story on this,” says Dacher Keltner, the psychologist who oversees the work of Piff and his colleagues. But already the outline is becoming clear. Princeton University psychologist Eldar Shafir has shown that in environments of abundance, people make better financial decisions—it’s not that rich people tend to be better educated and can afford better advice, but that people living paycheck to paycheck don’t have the mental space to make the smartest long-term moves. The efficiencies of the affluent brain may trigger the shutting down of what the researchers call “pro-social” impulses and lead people toward the kinds of behaviors that a hedge-fund manager I spoke to characterized as “ruthless.
• This is Hazel Markus’s main research interest: the mind-sets of class. She and her colleagues have found, broadly speaking, that the affluent value individuality—uniqueness, differentiation, achievement—whereas people lower down on the ladder tend to stress homogeneity, harmonious interpersonal relationships, and group affiliation
• The American Dream is really two dreams. There’s the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there’s the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus’s work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken. (Research shows that the rich tend to blame individuals for their own failure and likewise credit themselves for their own success, whereas those in the lower classes find explanations for inequality in circumstances and events outside their control.) But the truth is much more nuanced. Every American, rich and poor, bounces back and forth between these two ideals of self, calibrating ambitions and adjusting behaviors accordingly. Nearly half of Americans between 18 and 29 believe that it’s “likely” they’ll get rich, according to Gallup—in spite of all evidence to the contrary

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed | Ian Robertson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed | Ian Robertson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

• power is one of the most potent brain-changing drugs known to humankind, unconstrained power has enormously distorting effects on behaviour, emotions and thinking.
• Researchers at Tilburg University showed that people made to feel more powerful cheated more when they believed themselves to be unobserved. Power also made ordinary people more hypocritical when making judgments about moral dilemmas, being much more strict in applying rules to others, but much more lax in applying them to themselves. Even tiny amounts of artificial power, in other words, increased both immorality and hypocrisy.
• Paul Piff of the University of Berkeley found in a US-based study that, compared with lower class people, upper class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, to show unethical tendencies in decision-making, to take valued goods from others, to lie in a negotiation, to cheat in order to improve their chances of winning a prize, and to endorse unethical behaviour in a work situation.
•  It has become a cliche to explain the behaviour of bankers in terms of greed, but cliches are not always wrong. Power and money both act on the brain's reward system, which if over-stimulated for long periods develops appetites that are difficult to satisfy, just as is the case for drug addiction. We call these appetites greed and greedy people are never satisfied. That is the challenge for politicians and regulators.

Ten things you need to know about tax | Money | The Guardian

Ten things you need to know about tax | Money | The Guardian

extracts:

• 'Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation," US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
•  Philosopher Peter Singer addresses this issue in his book on American politics, The President of Good and Evil. "It makes no sense to talk of the money you would have if the government did not levy taxes," he writes. Imagine, he suggests, you're working for a car manufacturer and get $1,000 a week, $200 of which is taken in taxes. Why can't I donate that $200 to the donkey sanctuary or use it to destroy my septum with illegal drugs, professor? Well, says Singer, your car company could not make cars without a legal system that protects mining rights, private ownership of land, accepted currency, transport systems, energy production, an educated labour force, patent protection, judicial resolution of disputes, national defence, protection of trading routes
• Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon once estimated that it is such social capital ? or the social environment in a wealthy country such as the US or UK ? that enables its residents to generate 90% of its income.

Inter generational fairness

Is the granny tax that unfair? | Money | The Guardian
But let's first ask why people in retirement are awarded better income tax breaks than those who are working? There was a fascinating analysis in the Financial Times last weekend of the economically "jinxed generation" – and they're not pensioners. It found that today's adults in their 20s will be the first generation who won't be better off than their parents. What's more, the disposable income of people in their 60s is now higher than people in their 20s, for the first time ever. We've created a society where the non-working retired earn more than working people – and that's before adding up the largely unearned wealth tied up in the houses of those in their 60s.

Work less, so can live more, and more can live

The idea of a shorter working week is something which should be much more discussed. While anathema in our growth based systems, at some stage do need to ask when enough is enough. It's a true point that despite technological advances improving productivity, we work more. Furthermore in times of hardship and unemployment, work sharing would indeed seem like a civilized solution, and one that could be win-win: more free time as a result of helping others, l and an improved society as the social divisions are reduced, surely good?

The fundamental problem is I think psychological. The role of possessions and improvement in our personalities in modern consumer culture is so strong, restricting this would be hard for people to handle, provoking material influenced moral indignation and quandary. But for many reasons it might be time to learn how to work to live, not live to work, and reduced working his might play a role in this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/08/cut-working-week-urges-thinktank.