EMAIL DETAILS

Americans Want to Live in Sweden
with 11 comments

By James Kwak

The chart below is from a short paper by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely
(author of Predictably Irrational) (hat tip Huffington Post). The top
line is the actual U.S.wealth distribution. The second is what
Americans think the wealth distribution is. The bottom line is what
Americans think the wealth distribution should be.


Yes, in the real world, the wealth held by the bottom two quintiles
together simply vanishes on a chart like this.

It’s based on a survey done in 2005–before the financial crisis, and
just about at the peak of housing boom-induced euphoria. The results
are consistent across income groups, gender, and political
affiliation. There are small differences, but they are swamped by the
basic results.

There are two other great charts (including the U.S.-Sweden
comparison), but in the interests of respecting fair use I’ll send you
over there.

This is one of the themes brought up in Winner-Take-All Politics by
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Americans really think that society
should be considerably more equal than it is, and that attitude has
not shifted appreciably during the past thirty years. Yet our
political system produces policies that make America more and more
unequal, predominantly by cutting taxes for the very rich. Hacker and
Pierson’s point is that there has not been an ideological shift toward
conservative positions in the country at large (at least not on this
issue). Instead, it’s the game of politics that has changed, so policy
has become more disassociated from the preferences of the people.