Loren Grush covering a recent study for The Verge:

America’s well-educated and wealthy elite don’t like giving their money to others — unless sacrificing a small amount creates a big payoff for someone else, a study published in Science suggests. Otherwise, they’re opposed to giving up a lot of their own money to make everyone’s earnings as equal as possible. In other words, the elite don’t want to part with too much of their own income.

Between the click-bait headline and the incessant need to pile on the rich, famous, and wealthy, you may be able to catch some vague reflection of a genuine argument in this article. However, the author uses statistics to strengthen a preconceived point of view, and the author uses that preconceived point of view to rain on someone’s parade.

This is why I have such a hard time stomaching The Verge and any of the Vox Media publications. They have some incredibly smart people creating some incredibly smart pieces of work, but in those articles is a deeply entrenched worldview which needs to be read through. Further, the Vox Media conglomerate deals in absolutes: If I don’t agree or share even a remote part of their worldview, I’m an idiot and not even worth debating with. In most ways, this is no better than the hard-right crap Fox News pumps out.

The respondents in Science’s study are concentrated on efficient, effective forms of wealth distribution, not “the elite don’t want to part with too much of their own income.” The “wealthy elites” — Yale Law students who supposedly represent the wealthy in our society, but who often attend Yale due to circumstances which have nothing to do with wealthy parents — don’t want to give money away if 90% of their gift ends up in the hands of an unintended person.

This has nothing to do with “not wanting to part with their income” and everything to do with “not wanting someone taking away a large portion of their gift to a person in need”. They want to get rid of the middleman.

This entire “I hate the rich” attitude The Verge has is getting tiring.