Americans hate poor people.

[pampango]

52. That's a large part of the reason. Also people don't really understand how unequal our income

distribution really is.

Krugman: New study shows Americans think income is much more equal here than in Europe. The opposite is true.

Inequality Delusions

Via the FT, a new study compares perceptions of inequality across advanced nations. The big takeaway here is that Americans are more likely than Europeans to believe that they live in a middle-class society, even though income is really much less equally distributed here than in Europe. I’ve truncated the table to show the comparison between the U.S. and France: the French think they live in a hierarchical pyramid when they are in reality mostly middle-class, Americans are the opposite.



As the paper says, other evidence also says that Americans vastly underestimate inequality in their own society – and when asked to choose an ideal wealth distribution, say that they like Sweden.

Why the difference? American exceptionalism when it comes to income distribution – our unique suspicion of and hostility to social insurance and anti-poverty programs – is, I and many others would argue, very much tied to our racial history. This does not, however, explain in any direct way why we should misperceive real inequality: people could oppose aid to Those People while understanding how rich the rich are. There may, however, be an indirect effect, because the racial divide empowers right-wing groups of all kinds, which in turn issue a lot of propaganda dismissing and minimizing inequality.

Interesting stuff.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/inequality-delusions/

It is interesting that Americans say they want a degree of income equality similar to what Sweden actually has, but we are not willing to adopt the taxation, labor and economic policies that Sweden has used to accomplish this.