Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money

by Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Take just one of many studies that highlight human irrationality when it comes to money. A study published in the French Annales d’Economie et de Statistique is called “Are People Willing to Pay to Reduce Other’s Incomes?”5,6 The experiment involved grouping subjects into clusters of four people each, who were all given equal sums of money. The four had to gamble in random, computerized games that were arranged so that two of the four always came out ahead while the other two lost money in each round. Richer or poorer, each subject was then given the opportunity to spend some of his or her money to reduce the take of the fellow subjects. Doing so would not only fail to make the individual subject richer, but it would actually cost between two and 25 cents for every dollar of his or her fellow players’ money that was destroyed. The researchers were certain that no rational person would spend money merely to impoverish others. They were shocked to find that even at the top price of 25 cents for every dollar burnt, 62 percent of the participants paid for the privilege of making their peers poorer. One obvious conclusion of this study is that wealth is relative. Within the closed system of that game, burning your friend’s wealth is making you richer—relatively richer. At a cost of only 25 cents, destroying a dollar of your friend is almost a bargain.

This is a sad commentary and explains a lot of liberal thinking.