from Amazon
Friday, April 29, 2011
What is the ideal wealth distribution?
A simply fascinating study by Dan Ariely of Duke University. I loved listening to everything he was saying, and then loved the next thing he said even more.
One percent of the U.S. population owns approximately 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. That’s a distribution that most Americans don’t know about, Dan Ariely of Duke University discovered in a recent study. Respondents of all demographic categories mistook Sweden’s even wealth distribution for that of the United States. Host Noah Adams speaks with Ariely about his study.
...
ADAMS: Now, you showed people three pie charts, I understand. And those charts showed the distribution of income in different countries. But you didn’t give it away. You didn’t tell them which countries they were looking at.Prof. ARIELY: That’s right. So - and we actually have a very equal distribution, which doesn’t exist anywhere. We had the distribution of the U.S., and then we had a distribution that was based on Sweden, but we actually made it even more equal than Sweden itself. And we say, which of those would you like to live in?
ADAMS: Americans, you found, prefer Sweden, the way it looked in that pie chart.
...
So, for example, if the average was 92 percent preferred the Swedish distribution; for Democrats, it was 93 percent; and for Republicans, it was 90 and a half percent.
Actually, that transcript was truncated. He had another one that asked about whether you’d rather live in a country where if you were rich you’d stay rich and if you were poor you’d stay poor (or at least, were much more inclined to remain like that), or if you’d rather it have more “luck” (that if you were rich, you’d have a reasonable chance of being poor, and vice versa), and how that broke down based on people’s current wealth level.
(I heard the episode on Apr 26, but that episode says Apr 16. There’s a link to the podcast there, so maybe it has the extended version I heard.)
Just really great stuff.
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