Better America - 2590 Words

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†¦show more content†¦Norton, Harvard Business School, Soldiers Field Road, Boston, MA 02163, or Dan Ariely, Duke University, One Towerview Road, Durham, NC 27708 E-mail: mnorton@hbs.edu or dandan@duke.edu 10 Norton and Ariely Building a Better America Fig. 1. Relative preference among all respondents for three distributions: Sweden (upper left), an equal distribution (upper right), and the United States (bottom). Pie charts depict the percentage of wealth possessed by each quintile; for instance, in the United States, the top wealth quintile owns 84% of the total wealth, the second highest 11%, and so on. Americans Prefer Sweden For the first task, we created three unlabeled pie charts of wealth distributions, one of which depicted a perfectly equal distribution of wealth. Unbeknownst to respondents, a second distribution reflected the wealth distribution in the United States; in order to create a distribution with a level of inequality that clearly fell in between these two charts, we constructed a third pie chart from the income distribution of Sweden (Fig. 1).2 We presented respondents with the three pairwise combinations of these pie charts (in random order) and asked them to choose which nation they would rather join given a ‘‘Rawls constraint’’ for determining a just society (Rawls, 1971): ‘‘In considering this question, imagine that if you joined this nation, you would be randomly assigned to a place in theShow MoreRelatedDoes Immigration Contribute to a Better America1093 Words   |  5 PagesDoes Immigration Contribute to a Better America? Ever since this country was first discovered and settled, people from countries all over the world left their homelands and migrated to the â€Å"New World†. 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