The latest Bloomberg Businessweek features a fascinating article based in part on research from Duke professor Dan Ariely. It shows that most Americans would prefer a society with a more equal distribution of wealth than we have today.
?Ah, ha!? the progressive reader exclaims. ?The people agree with us. We need to do more to ensure economic equality.?
Not so fast. While Drake Bennett?s article suggests that the public?s ?ideal distribution? of wealth would create ?a nation where the wealth distribution looks not like the U.S. but like Sweden, only more so,? Bennett also notes strong public opposition to the steps government would need to take to get to that ideal distribution:
What’s more, most economists would agree that the degree of wealth equality that the study’s respondents identified as ideal would be disastrous, because it would seriously retard growth?sapping incentives to work and innovate, perhaps even requiring coercive measures mandating that the poor save rather than spend their money on necessary consumption.
“It’s probably a good thing that the public underestimates how much wealth inequality there is,” says Bryan D. Caplan of George Mason University, since “they tend not to understand the ways that wealth inequality is good.”
Why the disconnect between our desire for more economic equality and our opposition to the steps necessary to make that equality possible? Bennett doesn?t really seek an answer, but the first place to look is trade-offs. ?Economic equality? might sound great as an abstraction, but people faced with the reality of the measures needed to reach that goal are much more likely to subordinate equality to the alternative goal of increased prosperity for all.
