When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interacting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank incomprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think abut a dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss' plate. Misunderstandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equality Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psychologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned, and clashes between them have been common in economic history. .Steven Pinker
About This Quote
Another one of the famous quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith, this one is about how people often don't understand just how much money their actions have on others. The vast majority of the time when you're in a relationship with someone, it's because you want to be just like them. That's why we get upset when we get paid less than our friends at work. We get upset when we get treated like a dog.
When we get treated like a piece of livestock, we naturally get upset. However, if your friend gets paid more than you and treats you like a dog, then it's only natural that you feel upset. The point here is that we do often think in terms of Equality Matching and Market Pricing and not Equality Matching and Market Pricing respectively.
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