WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Gary L. Wamsley
If anyone does not understand the metaphor, they probably have never seen
sparrows in a barnyard picking tiny pieces of oats from horse manure. The
Reagan administration was, to say the least, not pleased with Stockman’s
characterization, notwithstanding its accuracy.
Seventh, I would return to the assignment where students marked the
vertical and horizontal lines indicating their parents’ wealth and their own
political leanings. After reviewing their answers, I would replicate the recent
study by Norton and Ariely (2011), whose results give reason for both
despair and hope. In particular, these researchers assembled a nationally
representative panel of Americans and showed them pie charts depicting the
percentage distribution of wealth (everything one owns minus all debts) in
three unidentified political systems (United States, Sweden, and a fictional
state). The pie charts were divided into five groups, each representing 20% of
the country’s population along with the proportion of wealth owned by the
respective quintiles. The distribution in the fictional state was evenly divided so
that each group held 20% of that nation’s wealth. The Swedish chart showed
that that country’s top quintile holds 36% of the wealth, 3 and the other quintiles
possess these amounts in descending order: 21%, 18%, 15%, and 11%. The
unidentified U.S. chart showed the top fifth of the population owning 84% of
the wealth, while the second quintile held 11%, the third 4%, the fourth 0.2%,
and the bottom quintile 0.1%.
Respondents were given a “Rawls (1971) constraint” for determining a just
society: “In considering this question, imagine that if you joined this nation, you
would be randomly assigned to a place in the distribution, so you could end up
anywhere in this distribution, from the very richest to the very poorest” (Norton
& Ariely, 2011, p. 10, quoting Rawls). The U.S. distribution was considered
far less desirable than Sweden’s or the fictional state with its equal divisions.
Ninety-two percent of those questioned preferred Sweden’s distribution to America’s.
These results held for respondents when controlling for gender, political party,
and income. There was a slight preference for the Swedish distribution over the
unnamed state’s equal distribution, suggesting Americans favor some inequality
versus absolute equality, but certainly not as much variation as currently exists in
the United States.
If the outcome of the in-class replication of Ariely and Norton’s study
is anything like what they found, the results will give students a better
understanding of the extremes of America’s maldistribution of wealth. I
would also point out to students that existing inheritance laws, college legacy
preferences, and so forth will likely intensify these current disparities. Hopefully,
after completing this exercise, these same students will entertain, at least in the
abstract, a discussion about policies directed toward a downward redistribution
of wealth. Indeed, the people participating in Ariely and Norton’s study
supported the idea of sharing wealth more equally. However, the basic problem,
102 Journal of Public Affairs Education