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Better America

In: Other Topics

Submitted By Omune
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Building a Better America—One
Wealth Quintile at a Time

Perspectives on Psychological Science
6(1) 9–12
ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1745691610393524 http://pps.sagepub.com Michael I. Norton1 and Dan Ariely2
1

Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, and 2Department of Psychology, Duke University, Durham, NC

Abstract
Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of ‘‘regular’’ Americans into these debates, by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to ‘‘build a better America’’ by constructing distributions with their ideal level of inequality. First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.
Keywords
inequality, fairness, justice, political ideology, wealth, income

Most scholars agree that wealth inequality in the United States is at historic highs, with some estimates suggesting that the top
1% of Americans hold nearly 50% of the wealth, topping even the levels seen just before the Great Depression in the 1920s
(Davies, Sandstrom, Shorrocks, & Wolff, 2009; Keister,
2000; Wolff, 2002). Although it is clear that wealth inequality is high, determining the ideal distribution of wealth in a society has proven to be an intractable

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