A Poor Rallying Cry

A study of inequality, of income or wealth, reveals uncomfortable truths. Namely that most Americans don’t mind inequality nearly as much as pundits and academics suggest. Graham Wright of Brandeis University did a research paper and found that polled attitudes about economic inequality don’t correlate very well with the desire for government to address it. There is even partial evidence, once controls are introduced into the statistics, that talk of inequality reduces the support for doing something about it.  One possibility is that a lot of talk about inequality gives the audience the impression that it is inevitable. thereby renders potential remedies less urgent.  Another speculation is that we are constantly evaluating the status of others. To the extent, analysts reiterate that some group of citizens doesn’t have as much. maybe they’re actually reminding us that those citizens hold a lower social status. Then without even knowing it, we think that they deserve less and think less of the needs that they would need. Another possibility is that talk about economic inequality increases political polarization. Which in turn would lower the chance of effective action. Or that criticizing American society may cause us to feel less virtuous, which in turn may cause us to act with less virtue. The reality is that income inequality has gone up a great deal since the early 1980s, and we haven’t done so much to reverse the basic trend. The potentially egalitarian effects of  tax increases under the past two Democratic presidents and Obamacare have been outweighed by globalization, which benefits most those individuals who can access global markets, and by increases in the returns to highly skilled labor. The reality is that government expenditures have not become radically more poverty-reducing over the last few decades, although we do send more resources to the elderly. Over that same period of time, we have published quite a few best-selling books about economic inequality. President Donald Trump boasted he was a billionaire, and his opponents tried to take him down by suggesting that he perhaps was worth only a few hundred million dollars. That's not exactly the kind of debate you would hope to hear among people. A variety of other research papers have been showing that inequality is not a major concern. Matthew Weinzierl of Harvard Business School did a study that shows that most Americans really are willing to accept enconmic inequality. From the psychology department at Yale University, a recent study by Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom shows that people do not object to inequality, rather it is unfairness that bothers them. For instance, consider the differences in pay, security and working conditions for tenured professors versus adjuncts; citation inequality is very high too. Maybe the academic critics of economic inequality don’t really care so much about the concept either.