God, what a nation of Calvinists we are! I don’t know what obstacles someone has had, I wouldn’t dream of assuming I understood just by looking at someone. Why are Americans so susceptible to this?
Aarøe and Petersen conducted survey experiments in the United States and Denmark to investigate whether stereotypes shaped Danish and European attitudes. They randomly exposed some participants in both countries to canned information suggesting that a welfare recipient was lazy, others to information suggesting that a welfare recipient was motivated to find work, and others to no substantial information about the recipient. They then asked people to evaluate social welfare benefits.
On average, Americans were considerably more likely to associate welfare with laziness than Danes. But what’s interesting is that these stereotypes were largely overwhelmed by the canned information when it was available. When the man on welfare was described in the following terms:He has always had a regular job, but has now been the victim of a work-related injury. He is very motivated to get back to work again
the differences between Americans and Danes disappeared. Both were largely willing to support social welfare measures. As summarized by the authors:
(1)… individuals in two highly different welfare states — the United States and Denmark — have different default stereotypes about whether welfare recipients are lazy or unlucky; (2) … these differences in stereotypes create differences in support for welfare benefits to a recipient when no clear information about the recipient is available; (3) but … the effects of these default stereotypes are crowded out when direct information is available and, hence, support among Americans and Danes becomes substantially and statistically indistinguishable — despite a lifetime of exposure to different welfare state cultures.
As with all social science experiments, the difficult part is in figuring out how well the experimental results match up with the ways that people process real political information in the real world. Still, these are quite striking findings.
The Republicans have decided that Mitt Romney’s “givers and takers” slogan doesn’t work all that well anymore. So they’ve come up with some new shorthand, “earners and spenders.” It’s pretty obvious as to who is whom. The 1% has also put together a nifty new pie chart showing the expenses of an “average” business. 25% is spent on wages and salaries. 21% on health care for workers. 13% on energy. The biggest expense is regulatory compliance at 39%. That is an astonishing number. Either the “average” company is so deviant in it’s daily business practices that it takes extraodinary regulatory oversight for compliance. Or the pie chart maker is a liar. But as uninterested in and susceptible to myths the general public is in how their economic system actually functions does it really matter?
Clearly, imho, the correct choice is “liar” (***). Let’s see: 25 +21 + 13 + 39 added up to around 98% last time I looked.
Are we supposed to believe that this “average” business had expenses for such items as raw materials, travel, amortization and depreciation, water and sewerage, new capital investment and production equipment purchases, financing of debt the company owes, set aside funds for stock options transactions by management, place of business rental or real estate taxes on place of business ownership, etc., etc., that add up to less than 2% of all business expenses?
I doubt it.
(***) Of course, the correct answer might be “both”. Some companies might be both extremely deviant in their compliance obligations and liars on all other matters at the same time.
Also, there’s no way that health care costs amount to 84% (21/25ths) of the cost of wages and salaries.