Paul Bloom recently penned an article for the Atlantic entitled People Don’t Actually Want Equality that I found intriguing and which I think dovetails nicely with some points that have been central to the topics covered here.
Bloom opens his piece by noting that people from all sides of the aisle and all corners of the political landscape are talking about income inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor. All of them seem to wanting to change the structure of society to close these gaps by redistribution of wealth or income without bothering to see if inequality is really want they want to fix.
He goes on to say that
According to his analysis, Frankfurt contends that people are, in fact, bothered not by inequality but by one of several factors that walk hand-in-hand with economic inequality but that are not related to it. The first factor is that, in some cases, economic inequality is caused by structural or local injustices. The classic story of the theft of one person’s idea that gains a fortune for another person falls into this case (what I like to call the Facebook narrative). The second factor is that we would like to see everyone in society have a minimal level of subsistence. A society where are citizens were incredibly poor would be equal but no one wants it.
Paul Bloom cites his own research at Yale as help to clarify the distinction between ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’. He talks about a situation where two boys Dan and Mark are asked to clean their room in return for a reward of erasers. When confronted with the sum total of 5 erasers, they would rather chuck one eraser so that each had two if they felt each had contributed the same amount of work but were content in an unequal distribution if an independent assessment concluded that one of them did more.
These considerations mesh well with the premises of Equity Theory discuss in earlier in connection with the situation at Gravity Payments. People are not so concerned with inequality when someone is seen to have earned more. Inequality rankles the sensibilities of the outraged only when the fairness principle is violated.
A variation of the Ultimatum Game bears this out. In the traditional game, the responder will reject the proposer’s proposal unless the split is nearly 50-50, even though it harms the responder to do so. However, in variations of the game where the proposer is chosen by some contest or assessment of skill, the responder is much more willing to take an ‘unfair’ cut. The interpretation is that the responder recognizes the proposer’s superior skill and is willing to make concessions.
This also seems to be the psychology at play in the debacle of the early years of the Plymouth Colony. The prospect of communal farming, which, theoretically, should have resulted in near equality, lead almost to total ruin due to the issues of fairness. Only when each family stood on its own with its own land did the colony actually thrive.
So it seems that income inequality is not what people are concerned about. The rich can be rich as long as there is justification for why they are rich. The poor can also be poor as long as a minimum standard of living is meet.
Maybe we should start talking about income justification - just a thought.