Natural Hypocrisy
This video offers a window on natural hypocrisy:
Most people believe that redistributing money within a nation is good, but that redistributing GPA within a school is bad, and if asked why these should be treated differently, have little to say. My point isn’t to say one can’t come up with reasons to treat these differently. One could, for example, argue that we prefer differing school signals to help employers sort people into jobs, to achieve higher productivity so that the pie is bigger when we redistribute money. My point is that most people can’t think of such reasons, making it pretty unlikely that such reasons are the cause of their opinions.
Some observations from this and my many class discussions:
Ask random colleges student random policy questions and they will feel compelled to come up with opinions.
Ask them for reasons for those opinions and they’ll feel compelled to come up with such reasons.
Such opinions strongly tend to support the status quo – mostly whatever is, is assumed good.
There is only a weak added tendency for students to offer similar opinions and reasons on similar policy questions. Opinions and reasons are not being generated by processes that tend to produce much added similarity.
Students are mostly satisfied to grasp at any plausibly policy-relevant difference to justify treating things differently, even when such differences don’t obviously “make a difference” to the issue at hand.
We humans are much better at coming up with reasons for opinions than at choosing coherent sets of opinions – we clearly have a powerful inbuilt capacity for hypocrisy.
Added 28Apr: Those who think it unfair to evaluate what students said on the spot, how much better do you think the reasons would have become if the students were given an hour to think about it by themselves? A week?
Added 6May: Megan McArdle weighs in.
It a question of the nature of earning. You earn GPA based on the exact same requirement as anyone else and the reward is depends on the work you put in the fill these requirement. The higher reward goes to those who work the harder and it would be fair to take that away from them.Now onto money, you cannot compare money to GPA because no matter how hard, how much and how well you work as a construction worker, you will never make as much as some who work in finance. And although you could say that the construction worker should have worked harder in high school, gone to college while working to pay his tuition and get better paying job, well :1. some people aren't just born with the brains to get through college, even high school in some cases.2. every single person in america applied your recommendations and went to college. Who the f**k would be building your houses ?
Some people are just born with an intellectual and/or financial advantage in life. They never had to work for that, they are born with it. It is only justice that, if these people use those gifts properly, they should get better paying jobs. Nobody can question that. But wouldn't be fair if these people also accepted the fact the some other are just killing themselves in working low paying jobs and could get a little share of the luck they never had to start with ?
Chase the lazies and the profiteers, not the generosity and justice of more and better redistribution !
You should also poll how much each individual student is working to contribute to the cost of their own tuiition. I bet the students who are working regularly to pay for their tuition understand what's at stake and are less willing to part with their gpa.....The students who are there on someone else's "dime" will just continue with that mindset. Unless their parents are rich from hard work and have already instilled the value of smart hard work and it's payoff.