Building a Better America-One Wealth Quintile at a Time.
Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of "regular" Americans into these debates, by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to "build a better America" by constructing distributions with their ideal level of inequality. First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups-even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy-desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.
Duke Scholars
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- Social Psychology
- 52 Psychology
- 1702 Cognitive Sciences
- 1701 Psychology
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Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Social Psychology
- 52 Psychology
- 1702 Cognitive Sciences
- 1701 Psychology