Current Events > the very wealthy are selfish dicks who don't support redistribution

(+) Yeah! (+)

nah that's actually not quite a fair portrayal of this research, but it is fascinating

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3395213

Importantly, we experimentally controlled for the influence of beliefs about the source of
income inequality by informing the spectators about the rule for allocating the unequal earnings.
Specifically, spectators were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the Merit treatment,
inequality in earnings between the two workers was determined by their relative performance on
the task. In the Luck treatment, the initial assignment of earnings was determined by chance alone.
We also implemented a third condition, the Mixed treatment, in which earnings were assigned
based on workers relative performance, but there was also a 20% probability that a workers
performance was downgraded (and spectators knew this). This condition more closely reflects real-world situations of income inequality, as successes and failures are typically the result of both
luck and effort.

Another important aspect of the redistribution task is that it captures distributional
preferences without the confounding influence of material self-interest. Although choices in this
task had real monetary consequences for the workers, they did not affect the earnings of the
spectators. This is crucial when comparing groups of individuals with different financial
backgrounds, as an extra dollar may mean less to a rich compared to a poor person due to
diminishing marginal utility of money. Together, choices in the redistribution task provide us with
a behavioral measure of distributional preferences when the source of inequality is known, and the
treatment variation allows us to explore how distributional preferences are shaped by the source
of inequality...

In addition to the gap in attitudes toward redistribution between the top 5% and bottom 95%,
we report four main findings. First, the top 5% have different distributional preferences than the
bottom 95%, as they accept significantly more inequality. Interestingly, the difference in inequality
acceptance between the two groups is largest when the source of inequality is pure luck. When
workers earnings are based on merit alone, both the top 5% and bottom 95% redistribute relatively
little and the gap in distributional preferences between the two groups is smaller. Thus, while both
groups have a similar share of meritocrats (i.e., people who view inequality as fair when it is
brought about by differences in effort), wealthy individuals are more likely to choose according to
a libertarian fairness view (i.e., a larger share of the top 5% considers unequal earnings as fair even
when the inequality is caused by luck).

Second, we do not find that differences in socio-demographic background between the rich
and the general population explain the gap in preferences for inequality (e.g., the top 5% tend to
be older and more highly educated). Yet, our results suggest that the personal experience of social
mobility is a major driver of the difference in distributional preferences. Affluent individuals who
grew up in a wealthy household have relatively similar distributional preferences as the average
American. In contrast, those who climbed the income ladder have a higher tolerance for inequality.
Similarly, we find that the gap in distributional preferences between the top 5% and bottom 95%
is driven to a large extent by the higher share of (successful) entrepreneurs and individual investors
in the wealthy sample.


the two bold parts were the most interesting findings to me, there is a lot more there though
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Yeah I've heard of similar experiments and research in the past.
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There's gonna be some miscreant who says wealth is directly in proportion to effort, just watch.
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Guide posted...

There's gonna be some miscreant who says wealth is directly in proportion to effort, just watch.

I don't know about "effort" but you can make the argument that a lot of people earn more because they are better at capitalism.

The guy who works at Burger King for 70 hours a week puts more effort in than the guy who earns $2,014,000 a year trading high-art paintings.

But who is smarter?
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