I'm not surprised by the general direction of these results but I am a little surprised just how far off-target most people perceptions of income inequality. BTW, I dislike the term "inequality" because it falsely implies that equality should be the norm and any deviation from it needs special justification. I prefer to talk about "differences" rather than "inequalities".
I think you're trying to be facetious but there is a lot to be said for that term. Income and wealth diversity creates people willing to pay high prices for innovative goods. Without such people, new products never get a market foothold and manufacturers never get the experience needed to drive costs toward something affordable to the mass market.
Facetious is not the word you are looking for. I am agreeing with Max that the use of income inequality denotes that the expected base state is equal income, which is not the correct expectation. At the same time I am poking fun at the people who celebrate diversity in all things except outcome measures where diversity is evidence of oppression.
Yes, me too. It upsets the attempt to make complete sameness of income or wealth a moral default while poking a bit of fun at those who love the term "diversity."
The underlying primitive and almost universal subconcious bias in not about rnequality. It is about life being zero sum. It follows that if you are twice as wealthy as me, it is not because you produce more. It is because the "system" is rigged in your favor and I need to steal it back aka "redistribution".
This suggests to me that there might well be reverse causality even in the perceptions model. That is, people who are unsatisfied and prone to unhappiness, who want things to be other than as they are perhaps due to feeling an external locus of control in their lives, will select an excuse to justify overthrowing things. If income inequality is the socially desirable thing to attack, that becomes their standard to march under. If something else becomes more fashionable later, they will switch to that. The underlying reality doesn't matter, just perceptions of what is bad. Assigning "bad" to the perception is just as uncoupled from reality as the perception itself.
Not a fan of the GINI coefficient: It's based on the ethically false assumption that wealth should be evenly distributed among the members of a society.
A GINI coefficient of 0 could be utterly unfair: One member of the population could be producing all the wealth; the others could be using that one as their slave.
A much better metric of social fairness would be to measure the average differential between the value that individual action generates for the benefit of others and the average value that an individual receives that was generated by others.
The link at the bottom of the post correctly leads to a page where you can get the PDF, but the link in the second paragraph associated with the name of the paper leads to a "page not found" error.
The paper is indeed interesting. One unexplored question that I wish someone would address is what would happen if people who thought they were near the median income but were significantly below it suddenly became aware of how poor they were.
I'm not surprised by the general direction of these results but I am a little surprised just how far off-target most people perceptions of income inequality. BTW, I dislike the term "inequality" because it falsely implies that equality should be the norm and any deviation from it needs special justification. I prefer to talk about "differences" rather than "inequalities".
I rather like "income diversity." :)
I think you're trying to be facetious but there is a lot to be said for that term. Income and wealth diversity creates people willing to pay high prices for innovative goods. Without such people, new products never get a market foothold and manufacturers never get the experience needed to drive costs toward something affordable to the mass market.
Facetious is not the word you are looking for. I am agreeing with Max that the use of income inequality denotes that the expected base state is equal income, which is not the correct expectation. At the same time I am poking fun at the people who celebrate diversity in all things except outcome measures where diversity is evidence of oppression.
Yes, me too. It upsets the attempt to make complete sameness of income or wealth a moral default while poking a bit of fun at those who love the term "diversity."
Envy is a sin.
(Such) sin is ineluctable. Its absence is not human.
Pardon the double negative.
The underlying primitive and almost universal subconcious bias in not about rnequality. It is about life being zero sum. It follows that if you are twice as wealthy as me, it is not because you produce more. It is because the "system" is rigged in your favor and I need to steal it back aka "redistribution".
PS: The zero sum bias persists because Adam Smith's invisible hand is invisible and the heavy hand of government is not.
This suggests to me that there might well be reverse causality even in the perceptions model. That is, people who are unsatisfied and prone to unhappiness, who want things to be other than as they are perhaps due to feeling an external locus of control in their lives, will select an excuse to justify overthrowing things. If income inequality is the socially desirable thing to attack, that becomes their standard to march under. If something else becomes more fashionable later, they will switch to that. The underlying reality doesn't matter, just perceptions of what is bad. Assigning "bad" to the perception is just as uncoupled from reality as the perception itself.
There is something to what you say. I might add the components of status anxiety, low frustration intolerance, and unrealistic expectations.
Not a fan of the GINI coefficient: It's based on the ethically false assumption that wealth should be evenly distributed among the members of a society.
A GINI coefficient of 0 could be utterly unfair: One member of the population could be producing all the wealth; the others could be using that one as their slave.
A much better metric of social fairness would be to measure the average differential between the value that individual action generates for the benefit of others and the average value that an individual receives that was generated by others.
The link at the bottom of the post correctly leads to a page where you can get the PDF, but the link in the second paragraph associated with the name of the paper leads to a "page not found" error.
The paper is indeed interesting. One unexplored question that I wish someone would address is what would happen if people who thought they were near the median income but were significantly below it suddenly became aware of how poor they were.
I haven't read the paper, but it sounds like it depends on people being able to understand diagrams with distributions. Bad assumption.
Much more valuable is the part where people are asked whether they are above or below average in income. That, people can understand.