Here, most people would also say no—they’d want the “bonus” for children to be equal for low- and high-income families, but they do not want the “penalty” for lacking children to be the high for same and low income.
Again, this is by no means necessarily irrational. The effects of government policies are by no means limited to their immediate fiscal implications. People typically care much more—and often with good reason—about their status-signaling implications. By deciding to frame its tax policy in terms of “X is good and normal, but Y is even better” rather than “Y is good and normal, but X should be penalized,” the government sends off different tremendously powerful signals about the status that it ascribes to different groups of people.
Average folks can be terribly innumerate when asked questions of this sort, but they’ll clue onto the status implications of different alternatives instinctively. These concerns may well be important in practice—even if a myopic view focused solely on the accounting issues would dismiss them as sheer bias. Of course, it’s arguable to what extent this particular example is about realistic status-related concerns, but that’s a question to be answered with non-trivial reasoning, not outright dismissal.
One of the best pieces of evidence for this theory is an incident that occurred during the development of online role-playing game World of Warcraft. While the game was in beta testing, its developer, Blizzard, added a “rest” system to the game to help casual players develop their characters at a pace slightly closer to that of the game’s more serious players, who tended to devote much more time to the game and thus “leveled up” much more quickly.
The rest system gives “rested experience” at a gradual rate to players who are not logged into the game. As initially implemented, characters who had available rest experience would acquire experience points for their character at a 100% rate, diminishing their rest experience in the process. Once you were out of rest experience, your character was reduced to earning experience at a 50% rate. Because rest experience accumulated slowly, only while offline, and capped out after about a day and a half, players who logged on to the game every day for short periods of time were able to earn experience points most efficiently, lowering the extent to which they were outpaced by heavy players.
But while the system was achieving its goal, almost all of the game’s testers hated it, no matter how much they played. They felt like they were being penalized for playing too long, which just didn’t seem fair.
Blizzard fixed it by changing the rested rate to 200% and the normal rate to 100%, without changing the actual number of experience points earned.
They just relabeled the percentages, told everyone that that was what they were doing, and then everyone stopped complaining and was perfectly happy with the system.
On the other hand, when the contradiction is pointed out to test subjects afterwards, they agree that it doesn’t make sense. That implies that status implications aren’t ultimately that big of a deal.
Heh… another comment that’s just occurred to me:
Again, this is by no means necessarily irrational. The effects of government policies are by no means limited to their immediate fiscal implications. People typically care much more—and often with good reason—about their status-signaling implications. By deciding to frame its tax policy in terms of “X is good and normal, but Y is even better” rather than “Y is good and normal, but X should be penalized,” the government sends off different tremendously powerful signals about the status that it ascribes to different groups of people.
Average folks can be terribly innumerate when asked questions of this sort, but they’ll clue onto the status implications of different alternatives instinctively. These concerns may well be important in practice—even if a myopic view focused solely on the accounting issues would dismiss them as sheer bias. Of course, it’s arguable to what extent this particular example is about realistic status-related concerns, but that’s a question to be answered with non-trivial reasoning, not outright dismissal.
An alternate hypothesis: people are loss-averse.
One of the best pieces of evidence for this theory is an incident that occurred during the development of online role-playing game World of Warcraft. While the game was in beta testing, its developer, Blizzard, added a “rest” system to the game to help casual players develop their characters at a pace slightly closer to that of the game’s more serious players, who tended to devote much more time to the game and thus “leveled up” much more quickly.
The rest system gives “rested experience” at a gradual rate to players who are not logged into the game. As initially implemented, characters who had available rest experience would acquire experience points for their character at a 100% rate, diminishing their rest experience in the process. Once you were out of rest experience, your character was reduced to earning experience at a 50% rate. Because rest experience accumulated slowly, only while offline, and capped out after about a day and a half, players who logged on to the game every day for short periods of time were able to earn experience points most efficiently, lowering the extent to which they were outpaced by heavy players.
But while the system was achieving its goal, almost all of the game’s testers hated it, no matter how much they played. They felt like they were being penalized for playing too long, which just didn’t seem fair.
Blizzard fixed it by changing the rested rate to 200% and the normal rate to 100%, without changing the actual number of experience points earned.
They just relabeled the percentages, told everyone that that was what they were doing, and then everyone stopped complaining and was perfectly happy with the system.
On the other hand, when the contradiction is pointed out to test subjects afterwards, they agree that it doesn’t make sense. That implies that status implications aren’t ultimately that big of a deal.