Our motivation: Economic growth, globalization, technological shifts and structural change are often met with worries about economic inequality in the public debate. Starmans and her co-authors add valuable nuance and substance to these debates by contrasting inequality with unfairness and showing how the two are not necessarily the same.
Abstract: There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness.
Reference:
Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, och Paul Bloom. 2017. ”Why people prefer unequal societies”. Nature 1(April): 1–7
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