Does money make people selfish? Right-wing? Meritocracy fans? Redistribution opponents? Morally self-serving?
No!
A new paper used the quasi-experimental nature of lottery wins and twin births to estimate that the relationship between wealth and attitudes is largely noncausal.
The only significant effect was that people became ever so slightly more opposed to taxes on wealth, real estate, and inheritances. There aren't even effects on winners' kids' political participation.
So the only effect is for the most self-serving of policy views. Funny, that.
Now, representativeness. Was the sample like the rest of the Swedish population?
Yes, pretty much. Survey respondents, parents, and their children, look to be representative, as others have found.
Now, you might be asking: How else have these large, register-linked, lottery studies been used?
Glad you asked, because they've been used for many outcomes. Let's look at some examples.
Lottery samples have shown us that the average effect of wealth on crime is bupkes.
Lottery samples have shown us that people reduce their labor supply in response to winning. This level of reduction is, as @karlbykarlsmith pointed out, the amount expected by barebones neoclassical economics.
These lottery studies are the highest around. They're large, they usually include non-winners, and they come with good measurements, making them prime studies for informing us about wealth effects.
Amy Wax got in trouble for remarking that she'd not seen a Black student in the top quarter of a Penn Law class.
Thanks to hacked Columbia data, we can see that she was...
Probably right!
In the decade before her statement, there were just two top-25% Black students.
It is *totally* plausible that she never met these students. And it's also plausible that she rarely saw Black students in the top *half*, because each year, the number of them was just 1-4.
But, despite being 8% of the class, they were ~40% of the bottom 10%-ranked students:
Note: Penn is on-par/slightly less elite than Columbia, so it's likely that the Black students there were somewhat *worse*, as the article notes, making her claims more likely.
This all comes from @zagrebbi's latest article. It's well worth a read!
Big day if you think Roe v. Wade was correctly decided.
My favorite part (note that I've only read 150 pages so far) was Thomas explaining that, no, the Founding g Fathers did not adopt the English feudal system.
This fact was clearly lost on the other side.
The Court's reliance on a random remark from a case that ultimately didn't even produce lasting changes raises the question of whether that sort of thing even matters.
Why shouldn't I cite the Dred Scott case as the law of the land?
- His license is suspended
- He was once a soldier for a Mafia family
- He's telling me about his time in Rikers
- He's showing me YouTube videos
- He's telling me his theories about Jews
He's telling me about gang wars he was in ad a kid.
He's wondering why all the Chinese girls are lined up - for an audition?
He says to go to Mother's Ruin for latin prostitutes.
All of this entirely unprompted.
"Yeah, these African guys, yeesh"
"I couldn't fuck that whore because I got the erectile dysfunction."