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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsExperimental psychologist Dan Ariely on the “Irrationality” of American inequality
This is just a fantastic interview with experimental psychologist Dan Ariely. You really should listen to it. Bolding mine.
Main roots of Judts and our own unease seem to pop right out of Dan Arielys experimental surveys typically clever in their simplicity. First, when he asks his thousands of respondents to estimate the real division of wealth in the US, and then to propose an ideal distribution, we Americans confirm our sentimental attachment to a polite tilt of privilege. We cherish our mythic legacy of quasi-egalitarian social democracy, with no extreme concentrations of wealth or poverty. But what our answers really confirm is our delusion about the economy we live in now. The top 20 percent of the people in fact own 84 percent of the goods, and the bottom 40 percent of us, barely floating on a sea of debt, own less than half of one percent of the wealth of the nation. We live across roughly double the rich-poor gap measured in Germany, Japan and Denmark. By the standard Gini coefficient of wealth inequality, the US ranks with Turkestan and Tunisia, just a tad more equal than Chad and Sri Lanka.
The second key question in Arielys survey is even simpler; the answer is a slam dunk. Respondents were shown two pie charts one with the actual American shares of wealth, in which 60 percent of the population nearly disappears with less than 5 percent ownership altogether; in the alternative, modeled on Sweden, the top 20 percent owns 36 percent of the wealth (almost double its claim by sheer numbers) and the bottom 20 percent owns 11 percent (about half its numerical share). In Dan Arielys study (with Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School), 92 percent of us Americans want to live Swedish-style {economy} instead. Women (93 percent in favor of the Swedish model) are a ever so slightly more egalitarian than men (90 percent for Sweden). But the results come out very nearly the same Republicans and Democrats, richer and poorer, NPR listeners and readers of Forbes Magazine.
What we hear eternally in political chatter is Joe the Plumbers dread of spread the wealth government, and Newt Gingrichs alarm about European Socialism. And now the screech from Mitt Romneys ex-Bain partner Edward Conard in the Times Magazine that we need bigger payoffs and twice as many people in the high-end investor class in short, that we need a lot more inequality. But Dan Arielys evidence is that in the most steeply skewed social order in the industrialized world, were miserable about being skewered on the contradictions in a proud democracy thats eroding fast at the foundations.
Listen online at: http://www.radioopensource.org/dan-ariely-on-the-irrationality-of-american-inequality
Or download the MP3: http://archive.org/download/RadioOpenSourceWithChristopherLydon-DanAriely30May2012BostonMa/ariely.mp3
xchrom
(108,903 posts)OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)Auntie Bush
(17,528 posts)Guess we should start calling ourselves the 1/2% or 1/4%
laundry_queen
(8,646 posts)limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)realizing what is going on? Most of the people around me are middle class and they understand there is a war on the middle class but I do not think they connect the two ideas.
TrogL
(32,818 posts)randome
(34,845 posts)Internet media is alive and well and very diverse. The people still make the decisions in this country. Or we choose not to make them.
I could see the argument for saying that we're all too comfortable and lazy. But not for being controlled.
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)I'm sending this to my 'SAMIZDAT' email list.
ck4829
(35,039 posts)PotatoChip
(3,186 posts)It's approximately 50 minutes long (give or take 5 or 10) but well worth at least one listen.
PA Democrat
(13,225 posts)I loved Arielly's discussion of libertarians who feel that individuals can be trusted to do the right thing when we have so much evidence to show the foolhardiness of such a belief. Texting while driving was one of his examples. While there are some things that government should stay out of, there are other things that we just cannot trust people to do the "right thing."
SoCalDem
(103,856 posts)Prior to WWII, we were still pretty much "the way we had always been".
Think back to the '30s movies.
People flocked to the movies to watch screwball comedies, most of which made fun of the rich, or love/crime/western themes. It was mostly pure escapism, and even the smallest of towns usually had more than one theater. They went, were entertained & then went back to their daily lives that were the same as everyone they knew.
It wasn't until post-war (40s-50s) that we started getting heavy doses of "morality" & and the in-your-face materialism we all live with now..
It all tied in nicely (for the manufacturers/politicians/ad men) to create a "we deserve that" mentality, and TV only reinforced it.
Until EZ-credit arrived for the "lower classes", people may have aspired to "having more", but they also lived within their means.
Advertisers created demand, and bankers/politicians obliged by lessening rules so that the masses could lock into perpetual debt.
There was a PBS special years ago that laid it all out very well.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/cinemasexiles/
They maintained that the wave of filmmakers from Europe who fled the Nazis were SO grateful to be in America, that they used their own myth-knowledge of the US to create their films & worshiped the ideas of rugged individualism, and an almost religiosity when it came to idealizing the goodness of Americans.
This not necessarily a bad thing, but our movies & tv shows of those years helped mold the psyches of many who used those movies as a model of what "life should be like".
salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)You might remember Curtis' The Power of Nightmares, but I think this is his best documentary series of all time. You can watch it for free online or download it from archive.org.
http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheCenturyOfTheSelf