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Thursday, September 06, 2007
What Do Americans Think About Inequality? Part III
Why do Americans think inequality is a bad thing?
There are, at least, five distinct explanations. A. It's in the majority's self-interest to redistribute. B. The public thinks unequal market outcomes are undeserved. C. It believes in unconditional equality. D. It believes in redistribution according to need. E. It believes unequal market outcomes are inefficient.
A good paper on the subject argues that it's mostly B. The authors, drawing on 1998 survey data, found a strong preference for redistribution by dessert. Preferred conceptions of justice, however, varied by race and education. Educated whites had a stronger preference for redistribution, and racial minorities more likely to favor redistribution by need or unconditional equality. But:
Despite this heterogeneity in the value of distributing income according to desert, differences in demand for governmental redistribution turn out to be mostly driven by differences in the beliefs about the fairness of the market system. We find that differences in those beliefs are not only more powerful than differences in preferences, they are also a stronger determinant of political attitudes than the pre-fiscal income of individuals.
If much of the public believes that many market outcomes are unfair, what do they believe is a fair outcome? What makes someone deserving? For one, work and self-reliance seem to be quite important. Those who believe that poverty is caused by lack of effort tend to be unfavorably predisposed to redistributive policy. Unfortunately, according to this paper, these people are a majority.
Americans have much stronger beliefs that poverty is caused by laziness; sixty percent of Americans say the poor are lazy, compared to just 27% of Europeans. The authors argue that this could be an important explanation for the small size of the American welfare state compared to the average European welfare state. Our interpretation of these findings is that people are willing to help the poor, but they withdraw support when they perceive that the poor may cheat or fail to cooperate by not trying hard enough to be self-sufficient and morally upstanding.
Variations of this attitude are even present among the working class in the context of policies that would redistribute wealth to themselves. Stan Greenberg wrote about a focus group in 1996:
The grievances of the downscale electorate are rooted in behavior that offends these virtues. They see the world through this prism: those who support their personal efforts and those that undermine them; those who respect their virtue and those who disregard or take advantage of it; those who live by the same values and those who do not. It is the tension between virtue and grievance -- rather than between labor and capital -- that animates the working- and lower-middle-class electorate and that creates political energy. Political and economic messages will have to be rooted in this discourse about virtue if they are to capture the attention of downscale America.
The American public may have to be convinced that redistributive policy will benefit the deserving as most Americans understand the term, or that those who are receiving these benefits are considered deserving. Data on productivity, opportunity, and work hours could change people's minds, because the public may not know about them (I couldn't find any study that on this). Plenty of poor people and working class people are far from lazy. And the divergence between worker productivity and the median wage has two implications: most workers are not getting the fruit of their labors, and those rewards are going to people who didn't earn them. Figures on income mobility are also a great measure of circumstances beyond an individuals control that influence how much they make.
But cultural attitudes may not be the most significant barrier, since public opinion is, of course, firmly opposed to growing inequality. Public perceptions of the market and public policy -the means of reducing inequality- may be more important. After all, it's redistributive policy that's doesn't resonate enough. Why might this be, and what can we do about that? In Part IV.
Part I and Part II.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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