Closet Egalitarians

Earlier this year, the economist Michael Norton from Harvard Business School and Duke University’s behavioral economist Dan Ariely published a study with the title “Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time”. In it, they asked a representative online panel two simple questions:

1. What is the distribution of wealth in America today?

2. What should the distribution of wealth be like?

Respondents to the survey predicted that the top 20% of Americans controlled close to 60% of overall wealth, and that the bottom 40% of Americans controlled close to 10% of wealth. When asked to outline their ideal wealth distribution, respondents came up with an almost egalitarian scheme that would give the top 20% control over 30% of wealth, and give the bottom 40% around 25% of wealth.

The results were rather surprising, even to the two researchers: Both wealth distributions were far off the statistical data that they had gathered about actual wealth distribution. In contemporary America – the land of opportunity, of the American Dream, Hollywood and social mobility – the top 20% control over 80% of wealth. The bottom 40% control less than 2%. That’s two percent of wealth, for forty percent of the population – a staggering level of inequality that has been growing rather rapidly since the mid-1970s.

What do you make of those numbers? Norton and Ariely conclude that we tend to be overly optimistic about social mobility (especially in the United States) and often under-estimate the level of inequality in the world. At the same time, we intuitively reject excessive inequalities. When asked about our moral intuitions, the vast majority of us are closet egalitarians.

Those numbers are specific to the US and cannot be superimposed on the British context. But a recent non-representative Guardian poll (indicating that 88% of respondents support Occupy LSX) provides indication that our intuitions are not all that different. In the UK, the top 10% control one hundred times as much wealth as the bottom 10%, according to the National Office of Statistics data.

Here, too, a large majority of people are shocked to realize how wide the socioeconomic gap between rich and poor has become – and is at least vaguely sympathetic to a movement that has arisen in response to these inequalities. They are concerned about the effects of that gap on those who struggle in their daily lives, and on society at large – a concern that is evident in conversations around the Occupy LSX camp every day, with passerby’s, tourists, bankers, and the scores of people who stop for a quick chat and leave with a deeper sense of awareness of the enormous strains of inequality.

We, too, are closet egalitarians. But increasingly, we are coming out of the closet. Current levels of inequality have simply become economically, politically and morally unsustainable.

Some of us are anti-capitalist, some are anti-corporatist, some are anti-corruption, we are participatory democrats, left libertarians, social democrats, liberal socialists, or environmental activists. But on the question of inequality, we speak with one voice.

By Martin Eiermann