To my great pleasure I got a perfect score on my first Anthropology test. I don't want to do any extra credit, I haven't got time, so if my tests continue to go well I won't need to. I swear, half my motivation to do well is sheer laziness.
Tonight we played an economics game with pennies. We were each given 12 pennies from a jar as our "wealth." We were instructed to go round the room playing a rock-paper-scissors game with 0, 1 or 2 pennies in one fist. If one person had zero in their fist and the other had two, two pennies changed hands. If one person had one penny and the other person had one penny, it was an even exchange. If one person had two pennies and the other had one penny, the person with two had to hand one over. We had to write down who we gave a penny to, who we broke even with, and who we won from, so it also functioned as an icebreaker for the class.
I settled on a strategy of always having one penny in my hand. I ended up with 10 when the game was over, which seemed okay to me. It was so much fun running around playing the game; socializing was the best part. Some people doubled their money by never putting a penny into their fist so that they would always gain money and not lose it. They were tremendously serious about making money. But the game wasn't really over!
Every third person suddenly "lost" all their wealth in a freak storm and had to put the pennies back in the jar. I was in this group. The woman behind me, who had accumulated 21 pennies, said she liked money too much to give any away, and I was too nice so that's why I lost. I wasn't annoyed by this comment, I found it really curious and interesting (and kind of sad, frankly). Well, it turns out that those of us who lost our wealth got to go round and collect double what we lost from those to whom we lost. Everyone headed straight for the gal who had 24 pennies, and the woman behind me, and so on. It was hilarious, the hoarders were so mad! I ended up with 10 pennies, back to where I was before the storm.
The statistics were funny, though. The top five penny holders prior to the storm and the redistribution were almost all still in the top five afterwards. The three lowest penny holders were still the three lowest, and had not changed amounts, either. "The moral of the story is supposed to be 'don't hoard, it may not be the smartest strategy in the long run,'" my professor said with a twinkle in his eye. "But it appears that in this class the moral is 'crime pays.'"
He actually had to tell the hoarders that they had to put their pennies back in the jar at the end of class.
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