hypocritexposer
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A story on the study and one for some analysis.
How Children Outgrow Socialism
by Dan Ferber on May 27, 2010 4:13 PM
Children start off like Karl Marx, but they eventually become more like a member of the International Olympic Committee. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that children's views on fairness change from egalitarian to merit-based as they grow older. The results help explain why society rewards high achievers with high pay, and they could help educators better motivate children.
The find comes thanks to an economic experiment known as the dictator game. Researchers led by experimental economist Alexander Cappelen of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen recruited youths aged 10 through 18 from schools near Bergen. Each child was paired with another student he or she didn’t know and then given a chance to earn real money by repeatedly noting the appearance of a particular three-figure number on a computer screen filled with large tables of numbers. Some students performed better at the task and thus earned more money. At the end of the game, the money earned by the pair was pooled, and one of the two students—the dictator—was asked to divvy up the cash with his or her partner in a way that he or she deemed fair.
Age determined how evenly the children divided up the earnings. About two-thirds of the youngest children, aged 10 to 11, split the pot evenly regardless of their own or their partner’s achievements. Older teenagers, however, split the pot based on achievement. Among 18-year-olds, for example, only 22% split the pot evenly with their partner, whereas 43% kept more for themselves because they felt like they’d earned it, the researchers report in tomorrow's issue of Science.
The results suggest that concepts of fairness become more merit-based as children grow up and as they participate in activities like sports and school that reward achievement, Cappelen says. "Adolescence is a very important period for shaping children’s fairness views.” The results could also help educators set up reward systems that the students themselves consider fair, he adds, which could lead to more harmonious classrooms and better student performance.
“I think it’s an interesting and important study,” says behavioral economist James Konow of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. But he is not as convinced as the authors that concepts of fairness are shaped by experience.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/05/how-children-outgrow-socialism.html?rss=1
“The adults are in charge now.” That was a much-repeated phrase after the 2008 election all around the Left. It never seemed right to me; like when you’d overhear a thirteen-year old girl calling a boy “immature.” But now there is scientific evidence of something I suspected long ago.
It doesn’t make sense that the party who stresses personal responsibility could really be less mature, than the party of entitlement. The entire Democrat platform is structured to give away things that most adults find for themselves.
Republicans thinks people are better of finding their own way in the world, the Democrats want a government who pays for college, gives them an allowance, and helps out with the groceries and rent. Things that we consider privileges, they consider rights. (Is the Left’s push for public transit really about the environment, or is it more like borrowing dad’s car on date night?)
The new health care bill will force health insurance companies to cover adults unable to leave their parents, which certainly doesn’t seem mature. On the bright side, 27 year old “children” still living with mom, will no longer have to make the difficult choice, between paying for Health Care, or unlimited texting.
Our protests are definitely more mature. At Tea Parties, we often pick up the trash that was left behind from the Earth Day rally. Leftist protests are full of screaming, rock throwing, and the ultimate end when the protesters drop on the floor and refuse to move, like a spoiled kid who has decided that he will not go to bed. Of course when the police finally take the protestors into custody they start kicking and screaming in full-on tantrum mode.
The left loves their name-calling too. For the eight years of the Bush Administration, we were exposed to every variation of Nazi that could be added into the name of a Republican. Leftists spent the better part of those years treating names in the Administration like the Daily Jumble. It reminded me of the way a high school kid purposefully misspells a teacher’s name, into something vaguely pornographic. To this day, the comments of the Huffington Post are strewn with references to Rethuglicans, Repugnants, and Repukes.
In the eyes of leftists, it was the previous Administration that acted childish. Meanwhile the Democrats have run up the National debt like a college kid, who got his first credit card on five-dollar pitcher night. The previous Administration was by no means fiscally conservative, but compared to the Democrats they look tighter than a European calculating a gratuity.
The adage goes: If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you must be a Teacher. All this was verified for me in the May 28 issue of Science Magazine. A study (brought to my attention by Lene Johansen) was performed by Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, Erik Ø. Sørensen, and Bertil Tungodden of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. They used a Dictator Game, where one child is allowed to split prize money with their team-mates. They found that older children don’t split the money evenly, proving that children lose their socialist tendencies as they mature. According to the abstract, as children “enter adolescence, they increasingly view inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not luck, as fair.”
While this experiment suggests that Socialism is based on childish notions; it also illustrates the reason why it will never work. As Children grow up they want to keep what they’ve earned. Apparently, normal kids grow out of Socialism around the same time they realize it’s stupid not to score soccer games.
There is something innate to human nature that everyone wants the most for himself. Few Leftists think they’re making too much. The problem, seen through Leftist glasses, is there are some people making more than they do, and people who don’t have as much. The solution of course (based on a childish supposition) is to take from the people with too much, and give it to the people who don’t have it. Even out the cookies so everyone has the same.
Socialists continue to cling to a childish version of fairness. Just like your teacher told you in school: If you didn’t bring enough for everyone, than you’re not allowed to have any for yourself.
It’s time we all grow up.
http://biggovernment.com/tslagle/2010/05/29/study-normal-health-children-outgrow-socialism/#more-126242