Here is an interesting one to ponder – courtesy of Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoon.)
Here’s a horrible little game you can play at your next family gathering. I call it the Billionaire’s Money Question, and it’s a real eye-opener. All you do is pose the following hypothetical question to your family:
“Suppose you found a thousand dollars in cash that you knew had been lost by a billionaire. Now, because this is a hypothetical question, let’s assume that the billionaire would never be aware that he lost it, and there would be no way that anyone else would know if you kept the money. And let’s say you knew there would be no reward or other indirect benefit in returning the money. Would you give it back?”
Also assume the billionaire is not Bill Gates.
If you ask this question in a group, I suspect a lot of people would say they’d give it back. But if you ask people privately, you might be surprised to discover how many of your family members are crooks. The best case scenario is that they’re just too lazy to give back the money. Either way, it’s not good news if you drop your wallet at the family reunion.In my experience, most of the people who say they’d give back the cash are the ones who don’t need an extra thousand dollars. The ones who say they’d keep it usually have a good idea how they’d spend it.
A certain percentage of the population believes that God is watching them with one hand on a lightning bolt and the other on the trap door to Hell. About half of that group will also keep the money, under the theory that if God wanted the billionaire to have it, he never would have let him lose it in the first place.How about you? Would you keep it?
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/12/billionaires_mo.html
Hi CG,It’s funny that you say this since it’s so true and also a good way to find out who in your family would take from you :)IN Egypt some families put money out and see who takes it this way they know what member not to trust .. sick but it works :(Yes, God is watching and inside ourselves we know if it isnt ours then it’s not ours. Doesn’t matter how much money a person has, it still belongs to them and the rewards from God for giving it back is worth more than a thousand dollars :)LoveEve
“…. let’s assume that the billionaire would never be aware that he lost it, and there would be no way that anyone else would know if you kept the money….”Mr. Adams is free to assume whatever he chooses to assume. I couldn’t care less. I mean that quite literally: I could not care less. My decissions are not based on mr. Adams’ assumptions and I have no intention of letting them be. In the reality in which I live, they are devoid of realism.”And let’s say you knew there would be no reward or other indirect benefit in returning the money.”Mr. Adams can say whatever he likes to say about the quality of my knowledge. As already stated: I couldn’t care less.Yes, I would give back the money. Because what “knowledge” I have is totally different from mr. Adams’. :)Eve: :up:
There is an old saying (mine): “In general, the rich are the most dissapointing people on Earth. They have so much opportunity to do so much good and choose to do so little.” Also, morals are not necessarily all black or white. You should able to think of examples, such as: Is it wrong to steal from a thief? What if you stole in order to return what was stolen to its owner? Hence, my own answer. It depends…. on who the billionaire is and on what one would do with the money. Also, the few wealthy people whom I have known have not been very nice people. And, yes, that does matter.
mmmm..Mr Adam’s hypothetical proposition has ‘one or two holes’ in it’s logic – how could one know a billionaire had lost the money? -was there a card inside the wallet? Mr Adam’s does not say. Still, let’s go along with the hypothetical question and look for the underlying, simplified, answer. My hypothetical answer to the hypothetical question is “Yes, I would hand the wallet in to police”. But, hypothetically, let us suppose that I am a ‘down and out’, living on the edge of starvation (we will have to also assume that I live in an uncaring society and that I am kept alive, just, by living off what others ‘throw away’), suppose also that I did the ‘right thing’ and handed the wallet in to the police, suppose also that the police regarded my ‘find’ with suspicion and decided to accuse me of ‘theft’.Well now, in that hypothetical scenario I have raised several ‘supposes’, but you may see what I am driving at. Suppose I threw away the wallet and just kept the money. In the hypothetical circumstances that I portray I would be able to eat well for a while, always assuming shop keepers who, one must also suppose, knew of me and my ‘down and out’ situation did not ‘reach for the phone’ on perceiving that I was able to pay for the food. In this hypothetical situation would the ‘moral argument’ be on my side? In principle it would not be, although the principle itself might well be ‘elastic’ enough, if hypothetically, I had found a fifty pence coin (or a dollar bill)on the sidewalk, picked it up and kept it.So, is it all simply a question of ‘personal circumstances’, or the ‘amount’ of the find or the ‘size’ of the loss then? There is an English law that covers ‘stealing by finding’. No one knows what would happen if all the people who ever pick something ‘lost’ up from off the floor, ranging from pence to pound, from nickels to dollar were witnessed and reported. My guess is that the entire Court Sysem would collapse from sheer weight of numbers, but that is only my guess, loosely based on my uncompleted knowledge of ‘Human Nature (in general).Well, that’s a lot of ‘hypotheticals’ I have thrown into this very interesting question (from Mr Adams via Capegirl) but I should tell you of two real life situations that happened, one involving myself, the other involving our youngest son. There is no direct connection between these two events, other than the fact that they both refer to ‘lost property’.Some 25 years ago I was dashing along a platform at Waterloo Station (one of the major train stations in London). It was the commuter ‘rush-hour’ and the train was about to leave so I was actually running to get into it before it pulled away. As I raced along the platform I spied a fat wallet lying on the ground. I skidded (literally) to a halt. I picked up the wallet, looked around, my thoughts racing -what to do? -Take the wallet to my home town and hand it into the police there? Or -Take to the wallet to the police somewhere inside the vast station compund itself and miss the train (not another one along for an hour or so)? In a flash I spotted a railway guard (not a security guard, a person who flags the train to go, when the doors are all closed) standing nearby and ran to give him the wallet, saying “Please hand this in, I found it on the ground over there, I have to catch my train”. He looked me in the eyes and said “I’ll do that” and I leapt onto my train. I have never had any reason to suppose he did not hand it in to the police, but of course I cannot know the outcome.The second example of finding ‘lost property’ happened to one of our sons. He was walking by a television studio, near where he lived, and saw bank notes scattered in the ground. The value came to £40 ($75). He handed them into the police. Let me explain what happens in such circumstances. The procedure is that when one hands money in, the police record all details including,in the case of paper money, the bank note numbers. A claimant would have to provide the police with those same numbers, when claiming the ‘lost property’ from the police. If the ‘lost property’ is not claimed in 30 days then the finder is entitled to the find, in this case the money (banknotes) itself. Thirty days did elapse and the police wrote to our son accordingly, telling him that he was entitled to the money (note, our son did not ‘chase’ or ‘follow up’ to the police, he had forgotten about the incident until he received their correspondence inviting him to collect the ‘lost property’). He had to take his passport along as proof of his identity (for that is the normal procedure in such cases) and the property became his.In both cases I and, many years later, our son, did what we thought was ‘right’ to do and of course what we did was not ‘hypothetical’ or bounded with ‘suppose’, it was just the way it was. Thank you, Capegirl, for posting such an interesting and thought provoking question. It begged answers but although one would like to think that there is only ever a simple, single, answer (in theory), life is full of variables,(and I posed some ‘hypothetical’ ones earlier) is it not?Happy Christmas and a very Happy New Year,~lokutus~ 🙂
Ha ha! I just read some of the comments on Scott Adam’s post and I think Lokutus’ son is one of people who commented (he also mentioned something about turning money into a police station knowing full-well that the odds of someone pitching up to claim it would be NIL).I, for one, would return the money. Mainly because I don’t think $1,000 quite cuts it for me. It would have to be a lot more than that to contemplate theft 🙂 Besides can you really enjoy ill-gotten gains? I wouldn’t be able to! I think whether one would keep the money would depend on two factors: Morality and Need. If I were desperate enough for the money I would keep it despite knowing that it was wrong. I guess this would also be the mentality of the drug addict in stealing from their parents. If you are desperate enough then the need would outweigh any moral factors. So it’s not an easy question to answer and I don’t think that one could draw a hardline on the matter because there might be extenuating circumstances.JCL.
23 February 2006:I came back to this page, only to see if Capegirl had written any further blogs. I have just read JCL’s 29 December 2005 Comment. It is a little confusing, for me, because it looks as if JCL believes that my son had posted a Comment here. Any reader will see that I, lokutus, posted the lengthy Comment (none of my sons blog in the Opera Community). I may have misunderstood JCL’s opening sentence and I should not have to respond but of course I must do so. I assume JCL is not referring to Scott Adams when he says “”he also mentioned something about turning money into a police station knowing full-well that the odds of someone pitching up to claim it would be NIL)..I must simply say -read my lengthy Comment again.My son turned the find into the police station because that was the right thing to do. lokutus
Just take the money and run!Finders keepersLosers weepersRobin Hood Rules Remember – money, like manure, should be spread around encouraging young things to grow.Maybe karmically the person who finds the $1,000 was meant to, and would be able to put it to better use than the billionaire.God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform and stealing is VERY different from this hypothetical scenario created by whoever it was that started all this psychobabble.Stealing is a conscious act, whereas finding (especially when one does not know to whom the found item belongs) is an act of God, or fate, whatever.LOVE AND PEACE
As soon as you said, “no way that anyone else would know if you kept the money.” I thought, but God knows. Since it’s God’s rules we need to live by, there really is no question about what a person should do. What a person will do, however, is another story. If I were tempted to take the money, I would be thinking that it wouldn’t do any harm at all, no one would lose, and I would gain, but the problem is that afterwards I would lose a lot of self respect because I know it’s wrong, I know it violates my own God-based ethics. I would be the loser.