Wealth equity? We all want it

Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:

New York Times’ reporter Jeff Zeleney recently wrote that Mitt Romney and his allies were lacerating President Barack Obama as determined to expand government until the United States resembles Sweden. Think Paul Ryan or Tommy Thompson would disagree?

But Romney, Ryan and Thompson might be surprised to find out that both Republicans and Democrats favor a distribution of wealth much more like Scandinavian countries than our own. Research by Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton and Duke University’s Dan Ariely also document how mistaken Americans are about wealth distribution and social mobility.

Their study, titled “Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” which appeared last year in the academic journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, can be found here. The two professors conducted a random survey of 5,500 Americans to create a countrywide representative sample.

When it comes to wealth inequity, it turns out that it’s worse than we thought.

Those surveyed were first asked to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the U.S.

Read the whole story: Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel