I suspect, but am not sure, that your "real world" assessment is biased in almost exactly the way multifoliaterose is hypothesizing that most people are biased.
When someone is rationally willing/able to work for lower wages (assuming they aren't be forced into it by expensive systems of repression) it creates what economists call a comparative advantage which is an opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation. All the people who would have done the drudge work for wages that are low (but not that low) can switch to whatever their new comparative advantages are with more total wealth produced in aggregate, which can be traded back around.
Academics have noticed for years that comparative advantage is a real phenomenon, but also that it is not widely understood and is frequently denied even when explained. This seems a likely candidate for the kind of bias that multifoliaterose is writing about.
If I had any quibbles with the article, it would be that (1) the object level was ignored in favor of mere "topic introduction", (2) while drawing support from evolutionary hand waving rather than citation to strong experimental evidence, with (3) the assumption that it certainly is bias (rather than a reasonably accurate model of the world).
I would have liked to have read about the subject itself and thereby learned something, rather than reading about the tragedy of the developing world and why evolutionary hand waving is valuable. A good place to look for grounded material on the subject might be the literature that grew out of George M. Mason's classic work on "peasant culture". His 1965 paper Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good included this summary in the introduction:
I will outline what I believe to be the dominant theme in the cognitive orientation of classic peasant societies,* show how characteristic peasant behavior seems to flow from this orientation, and attempt to show that this behavior—however incompatible with national economic growth—is not only highly rational in the context of the cognition that determines it, but that for the maintenance of peasant society in its classic form, it is indispensable.[4] The kinds of behavior that have been suggested as adversely influencing economic growth are, among many, the "luck" syndrome, a "fatalistic" outlook, inter- and intra-familial quarrels, difficulties in cooperation, extraordinary ritual expenses by poor people and the problems these expenses pose for capital accumulation, and the apparent lack of what the psychologist McClelland (1961) has called "need for Achievement." I will suggest that peasant participation in national development can be hastened not by stimulating a psychological process, the need for achievement, but by creating economic and other opportunities that will encourage the peasant to abandon his traditional and increasingly unrealistic cognitive orientation for a new one that reflects the realities of the modern world.
I know that there exists almost 50 years of academic literature downstream of this statement, but I know little about its data, controversies, or leading authors. If someone was looking for academic results from which to borrow content (to popularize the material as "relevant to personal rationality" the way Kahneman & Tversky are being popularized by Eliezer) this might be a good place to look :-)
JenniferRM:
Academics have noticed for years that comparative advantage is a real phenomenon, but also that it is not widely understood and is frequently denied even when explained.
That's true, but on the other hand, economists often present the theory of comparative advantage in a way that's either disingenuous or shows their own lack of deeper understanding of what it actually says. What they usually omit -- either out of ignorance or for ideological reasons -- is that the principle of comparative advantage is fully compatible with various realistic ...
This is the first part of a mini-sequence of posts on zero-sum bias and the role that it plays in our world today.
One of the most pernicious of all human biases is zero-sum bias. A situation involving a collection of entities is zero-sum if one entity's gain is another's loss, whereas a situation is positive-sum if the entities involved can each achieve the best possible outcome by cooperating with one another. Zero-sum bias is the tendency to systematically assume that positive-sum situations are zero-sum situations. This bias is arguably the major obstacle to a Pareto-efficient society. As such, it's very important that we work to overcome this bias (both in ourselves and in broader society).
Here I'll place this bias in context and speculate on its origin.
Where this bias comes from
It's always a little risky to engage in speculation about human evolution. We know so little about our ancestral environment that our mental images of it might be totally wrong. Nevertheless, the predictions of evolutionary speculation sometimes agree with empirical results, so it's not to be dismissed entirely. Also, the human mind has an easier time comprehending and remembering information when the information is embedded in a narrative, so that speculative stories can play a useful cognitive role even when wrong.
Anatomically modern humans appear to have emerged 200,000 years ago. In the context of human history, economic growth is a relatively recent discovery, only beginning in earnest several thousand years ago. The idea that it was possible to create wealth was probably foreign to our ancestors. In The Bottom Billion, former director of Development Research at the World bank speculates on the motivation of rebels in the poorest and slowest growing countries in the world who start civil wars (despite the fact that there's a high chance of being killed as a rebel and the fact that civil wars are usually damaging to the countries involved)
Neither the developed world nor the countries that Collier has in mind are genuinely good proxies to our ancestral environment, but like the people in the countries that Collier has in mind, our ancestors lived in contexts in which growth of resources was not happening. In such a context, the way that people acquire more resources for themselves is by taking other people's resources away. The ancient humans who survived and reproduced most successfully were those who had an intuitive sense that one entity's gain of resources can only come at the price of another entity's loss of resources. Iterate this story over thousands of generations of humans and you get modern humans with genetic disposition toward zero-sum thinking. This is where we come from.
For nearly all modern humans, the utility of zero-sum bias has lapsed. We now have very abundant evidence that the pie can grow bigger and that win-win opportunities abound. Both as individuals and as representatives of groups, modern humans have a tendency to fight over existing resources when they could be doing just as well or better by creating new resources that benefit others. Modern humans have an unprecedented opportunity to create a world of lasting prosperity. We should do our best to make the most of this opportunity by overcoming zero-sum bias.