Heavily drowned out by bad news from the military, epidemiology and climate science, a Zurich research team recently once again told mankind what it is about in the journal Nature Human Behavior. A few hundred people had played games under the supervision of a scientific team in which small amounts of money could be given to individual people. Most of them were generous, but then pulled on different strings when the game "Großer Räuber" began. You are invited to steal up to fifty percent of their income from sixteen others. Four fifths of the test subjects found nothing in stealing from a group, no matter how nice they had been to singular needy people.
Research has determined what intuition already suspects: When it comes to money, humanity is more reliable if the beggar crouches alone on the sidewalk than in situations in which she is experienced as an expression of a "fringe group problem".
Experience shows that people with lucrative property differ instinctively, as it were, from groups that occupy a less attractive place in the system of social production.
If the unlucky ones then still live far away, the lucky one doesn't hurt to think that many of them have to rummage through piles of rubbish as children.
Not just for the super-rich
The treatise “Generous with individuals and selfish to the masses”, which Carlos Alós-Ferrer wrote with Jaume García-Segarra and Alexander Ritschel (https://doi.org/gqbf), should not only study the super-rich, but everyone too who hope for social progress from financial inventions - be it more freedom through crypto currencies, be it more solidarity thanks to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
Because you are right when you think that money is a very important “symbolically generalized communication medium” (Niklas Luhmann) or even the “true community” (Marx). But if the evil that one wants to deal with is the group gating of people depending on their distance from the means of increasing money (old German: "class society"), one must not act like a doctor who has recognized that breathing is a central part of life , and then deduces from it that broken bones, AIDS or heart defects can be cured with breathing exercises alone. If you don't breathe, you are finished, like someone without money. But with this kind of insight, the more interesting worries are just beginning.