Appeal to wealth

The dealership owner’s medical advice

“My uncle built a chain of car dealerships from nothing. He says cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis, and believe me, he’s done better in life than any doctor I know.”

The uncle’s success is real, and it’s evidence that he knows how to run a business. It has no bearing on what happens inside a finger joint. Whether knuckle-cracking causes arthritis is a medical question with medical evidence, and his income isn’t part of it. This is the clear-cut case.

The donor and the watering schedule

A community garden’s biggest donor, a successful investor, tells the volunteers they should water the vegetable beds every day at noon. When a volunteer mentions that the extension service recommends deep watering in the early morning, another says: “She didn’t get where she is by being wrong about things. Let’s do it her way.”

This one looks more respectable, because the donor’s money does matter here. She funds the garden, and it’s reasonable to listen to her and weigh her wishes. But her success in investing isn’t evidence about when vegetables should be watered, and on that question the extension service’s recommendation is the better-informed source. Deferring to her as a funder is one thing; treating her wealth as proof that she’s right about horticulture is the fallacy.

“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

A math teacher shows her class that lottery tickets lose money on average: each ticket costs $2 and pays back about $1 in expected winnings. A student calls out: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

This is the same error pointed the other way: a lack of wealth taken as evidence of being wrong. The expected-value calculation comes out the same whatever the teacher earns. David Hackett Fischer gives this proverbial retort as a “vulgar example” of the fallacy.

• X is wealthy (or successful).
• X says P.
• Therefore P is true.

Ewa Rosiak-Zięba reads the argument as a disguised version of an argument from a person’s credibility or expertise, with an extra, usually unstated premise doing the work:

The hidden premise, that wealth makes someone credible, is what fails. Where it’s replaced by a real track record in the field the claim belongs to, the argument becomes an ordinary appeal to expertise, and the questions that apply to an appeal to authority take over.

• Rich, therefore right: a wealthy or successful person’s view accepted because of their success.
• Not rich, therefore wrong: someone’s argument dismissed because they haven’t made money, as in the lottery example.
• Price as proof: “it costs more, so it must be better.” Rosiak-Zięba, citing earlier authors, argues that the name should cover arguments from money in general (prices, costs, willingness to pay), not only a person’s wealth.

The reverse of this error, treating poverty or a humble life as a sign of being right, is the appeal to poverty. The appeal to wealth can also be combined with other appeals: in one of Fischer’s examples, he notes, an appeal to wealth is “grafted on to” an appeal to popularity.

Where the name comes from, and how well studied it is. Crumena is Latin for a purse. The name hasn’t always meant the same thing. In Laurence Sterne’s comic novel Tristram Shandy, Walter Shandy “making use of the argument Ad Crumenam“ offers to bet twenty guineas against a crown that he’s right. Rosiak-Zięba reports that a Polish dictionary of argumentation gives two senses: treating someone’s wealth as a measure of their credibility, and bribery. This entry covers the first. Unlike ad hominem or the appeal to authority, the appeal to wealth has almost no scholarly literature of its own. It appears mainly in catalogs of fallacies: Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies, a study of errors in historical writing; textbooks such as Robert Lamm’s Dynamic Argument; and popular guides (Madsen Pirie’s The Book of the Fallacy, which says it “assumes that money is a measure of rightness”). Rosiak-Zięba’s article is a rare exception.

• The question is about making money, and the success is the track record. Rosiak-Zięba notes that in conversations about economic matters, arguments from someone’s financial success can be reasonable to expect. Even then, the relevant evidence is the skill behind the success, which a large fortune alone doesn’t show: it may have been inherited or lucky.
• The wealth itself is the subject. Whether someone can afford a purchase, repay a loan or fund a project is a question about their money.
• Money gives someone a say, not a right answer. A funder can reasonably decide how their money is spent. That’s authority to decide, not evidence about what’s true.

The test: is the wealth evidence of skill at this particular question, or just a mark of status?

Advice from someone who built the same business

Planning to open a bakery, Jordan asks a local owner for advice. She started with one small shop fifteen years ago and now runs four profitable locations. She tells him most new bakeries fail because they underprice wholesale orders. Jordan rewrites his pricing plan.

Jordan gives weight to a successful businesswoman’s view, but not because she’s well-off. Her success comes from years of running the same kind of business he’s starting, and her advice is about exactly that. Her profits are part of her track record on this question. This is the success is the track record condition. One successful owner can still be wrong, so her advice is a strong reason to check his prices, not a guarantee.

The landlord’s income check

A landlord asks an applicant for proof of income before signing a lease, and rents to the applicant whose income is three times the rent.

The landlord is judging by money, but the question is whether the tenant can pay the rent, and income is direct evidence about that. Nothing here treats the applicant’s income as evidence that they’re right about anything. This is the wealth itself is the subject condition.

Wealth is a visible sign of success, and success in one area is easy to take as a sign of good judgment in general. That is the same spillover the Halo effect describes for other traits: one salient quality colors impressions of unrelated ones.

Rosiak-Zięba offers a social explanation. Where money matters, many people want it and not everyone can get it, so people who can make it enjoy high social status, and that status lends their words weight.

It also helps that we see the people who got rich, not the many who made the same choices and didn’t. That makes a rich person’s methods and opinions look more reliable than they are (see Survivorship bias).

• Ask what the success was in. Is it the same field as the claim?
• Ask what the success shows. Skill, luck and inheritance all produce wealth. Only the first says anything about judgment.
• Evaluate the claim on its own evidence, as you would if an unknown person had made it.
• Separate influence from correctness. It can be sensible to go along with a funder’s wishes. It doesn’t make those wishes right.