Subject: Americans Want to Live in Sweden - Baseline Scenario
From: "Michael Andrews" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:57:49 -0400

Americans Want to Live in Sweden
with 11 comments

By James Kwak

The chart below is from a short paper by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely  
(author of Predictably Irrational) (hat tip Huffington Post). The top  
line is the actual U.S.wealth distribution. The second is what  
Americans think the wealth distribution is. The bottom line is what  
Americans think the wealth distribution should be.

Yes, in the real world, the wealth held by the bottom two quintiles  
together simply vanishes on a chart like this.

It’s based on a survey done in 2005–before the financial crisis, and  
just about at the peak of housing boom-induced euphoria. The results  
are consistent across income groups, gender, and political  
affiliation. There are small differences, but they are swamped by the  
basic results.

There are two other great charts (including the U.S.-Sweden  
comparison), but in the interests of respecting fair use I’ll send you  
over there.

This is one of the themes brought up in Winner-Take-All Politics by  
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Americans really think that society  
should be considerably more equal than it is, and that attitude has  
not shifted appreciably during the past thirty years. Yet our  
political system produces policies that make America more and more  
unequal, predominantly by cutting taxes for the very rich. Hacker and  
Pierson’s point is that there has not been an ideological shift toward  
conservative positions in the country at large (at least not on this  
issue). Instead, it’s the game of politics that has changed, so policy  
has become more disassociated from the preferences of the people.