Inequality in America and Norway - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave, free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits
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What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t?
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A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.
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“People in the U.S. are more willing to accept inequality, even if it reflects pure good luck for some and pure bad luck for others.”
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The purpose of setting up the experiment this way, Tungodden told me, was to find out spectators’ views about different sources of inequality. In the first setting, inequality was a result of luck: The workers both did the task well, but one just got lucky and received a bonus. In the second, inequality was a result of merit: One worker did the task better. And the third was to assess whether people were willing to eradicate inequality created by luck if doing so had costs: The bonus was lower if the spectators chose to redistribute it more fairly.
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In the experiment, Americans were more willing to accept inequality if it’s a result of luck than Norwegians were. When both workers did the task well, but only one got the bonus (the first setting), half of Americans said they wanted to redistribute the bonus equally. By contrast, 78 percent of Norwegians did. “It’s an enormous difference in exactly the same situation in a willingness to accept brute luck,” Tungodden said. “Americans hold this view of, whatever comes to you, good for you.”
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When inequality was a result of merit, on the other hand, people in both countries were willing to accept it. Just 15 percent of people in the U.S. and 36 percent of people in Norway redistributed the bonus in the second situation.
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Together, this helps explain why Norway has a more robust welfare state than the U.S. does, Tungodden said. Norwegians believe that when someone is, by bad luck, born into a poor family, or is, by bad luck, thrust into poverty, that person should have help from others. U.S. residents are more split on this idea
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This could be because Americans admire wealth and would be hesitant to implement policies that would hurt people who, by luck, are wealthy.
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There were some differences in which demographics in each country were willing to redistribute the bonuses.
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white Americans tend to be more withholding when it comes to welfare if they believe the money is going to black Americans. It would be illuminating for another, similar study to be performed that looks at whether white people perceive luck as more or less fair if the beneficiary (or loser, as the case may be) is black.
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Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, both Americans and Norwegians seemed willing to weather some costs of wealth redistribution. In the third setting, when spectators were told that the inequality was the result of luck, but that redistributing the bonus would have a significant cost, about equal numbers of Americans and Norwegians decided to redistribute
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it shows that people in both countries are more concerned about whether inequalities are fair than about whether there are costs to redistribution.
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Debates about the costs of a welfare state and redistribution in America, then, may be besides the point. Costs don’t seem to be Americans’ big hang-up with redistribution. Rather, their opposition seems to go to an underlying acceptance of fate and the fortunes it brings.