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Tuesday, September 04, 2007
What do Americans Think About Inequality? Part I
It's a truism that Americans don't really seem to mind that inequality has increased so dramatically over the last three decades. After all, few policies have been enacted to reverse this trend, and American public opinion has generally become more conservative on fiscal policy. But in significant ways, public opinion studies don't support this truism. The public mostly opposes growing inequality, a fact that has held steady for the least three decades, with some variation in scope and intensity.
The issue has two parts, as Prof. Leslie McCall wrote in 2003: do Americans know, and do they care, about inequality? McCall found that, with some variation over time, a majority of Americans were both aware of and opposed to rising inequality. Yet during the period when Americans grew most intolerant of inequality -between 1992 and 1996- their political identification become more conservative.
...let me summarize the results in terms of whether they account for the large, unexplained increase in intense opposition to inequality that occurred in 1992 and 1996...Thus, on net, the population shifted towards groups that were more likely to be tolerant of inequality over the course of the 1990s...In sum, although we know much more about who 23 opposes inequality and who tolerates inequality in all four years, the substantial increase in intense opposition to inequality in 1992 and 1996 is still largely unexplained.
McCall also found that public knowledge of inequality is highly correlated with how much the media paid attention to it. And as media and political elites come to accept growing inequality, mostly as an inevitable byproduct of a growing economy, public concern tends to diminish as well.
Prof. Larry Bartels's 2004 study of public opinion also found that a significant portion of the public has mixed to negative feelings about inequality. However, public reasoning about inequality often fails when it comes to policy decisions. Many Americans who didn't like inequality still supported the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, whose benefits skewed highly to the wealthy. Indeed, even well-informed citizens, aware of what they would or would not gain, were still likely to favor a repeal of the estate tax.
At the same time, these results highlight the real limits of political education as a transforming force. In the case of the inheritance tax, even well-informed citizens who recognized and regretted the increasing gap in incomes between rich and poor in contemporary America were only about as likely to oppose repeal as they were to favor it. And less well-informed, less sophisticated people were correspondingly more likely to favor repeal, even if they recognized and regretted the fact that economic inequality has increased. Viewed from this perspective, the results in Table 7 suggest that, even if every person in America could be made to see that economic inequality has increased and made to feel that that is a bad thing, the overall distribution of public opinion about the inheritance tax would change very little.46
Bartels also found that support for the tax cuts may arise from an "unenlightened" sense of self-interest. People who felt that they were taxed too high -regardless of how much they would benefit from the Bush tax cuts- were much more likely to support the cuts.
In sum, the American public finds rising inequality objectionable, but supports parties and policies that would make it worse. Why do Americans have this schizophrenic attitude toward inequality? I'll bring together some of the answers to that question in part II.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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