From: The Wall Street Journal
Inequality Isn’t the Real Issue
The Wall Street Journal:
What do Americans and Europeans see as the greatest threat now facing the world? A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that the most common answer is inequality—ranking above religious and ethnic hatred, pollution, disease and nuclear weapons. Pope Francis has called economic inequality “the root of social evil,” and inequality was a major theme in the last presidential election, with different solutions offered up by candidates of the left and right.
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A 2011 study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, asked a sample of more than 5,500 Americans to estimate the actual distribution of wealth in the U.S., and then to suggest what they saw as an ideal distribution. One of their main findings was that Americans were unaware of just how unequal their society is: They thought that the bottom 40% had 9% of the wealth and the top 20% had 59%, while the actual proportions were 0.3% and 84%.
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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