Tag Archives: honesty

The (non-)Ethics of Capitalism

Back in 2018, there was a survey on Gallup, about honesty and ethical standards, per profession

More than four in five Americans (84%) again rate the honesty and ethical standards of nurses as “very high” or “high,” earning them the top spot among a diverse list of professions for the 17th consecutive year. At the same time, members of Congress are again held in the lowest esteem, as nearly 58% of Americans say they have “low” or “very low” ethical standards. Telemarketers join members of Congress as having a majority of low/very low ratings.

One might wonder if there is a correlation between ethics and salary. Using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates data, one could easily get the average salary in the U.S. for some professions. For the others, one has to dig a bit more

Store all those information in a csv file, and then, add the honesty/ethics high-very high percentage,

download.file("https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/files/2025/08/gallup_ethics_salaries.csv", destfile = "data.csv")
df = read.csv("data.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

and we can get a plot.

plot(df$percent_high, df$avg_salary_usd,
     xlab = "Honesty/Ethics rated 'Very high/High' (%)",
     ylab = "Average salary (USD)",
     pch = 19)
# label points (may overlap a bit)
text(df$percent_high, df$avg_salary_usd, labels = df$profession, pos = 4, cex = 0.6)

At best, there is no link between salaries and honesty / ethics.