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Javier E

Elderly and Black Americans Are Decreasing Support for Economic Redistrubtion - The Atl... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...404806

culture inequality African-American senior redistribution fairness wealth income constructivism

shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • a new working paper from NBER suggests that by and large, America’s desire to see wealth spread around more evenly hasn’t really increased that much at all in the past 30 years. And in fact members of some of the most vulnerable economic groups are actually less supportive of efforts that would boost the economic standing of the less well-off than they once were.
  • For those over the age of 65, support for redistribution has actually waned as inequality has risen. And for black Americans, a group that is overall more supportive of redistribution than their white counterparts, desire for such efforts also decreased.
  • It’s not because the two groups have improved their economic standing, or because they had become more conservative in their views about economic policy or political affiliation, researchers found. Instead, it was about how they saw their position in society, and how they thought that redistribution would affect it.
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  • “Blacks view the economic system as becoming increasingly fair and are decreasingly supportive of government targeted aid based on race,” the authors write. And they say that this shift in views accounts for about 45 percent of the decreased support for wealth redistribution among the group.
  • They are left somewhat baffled by the responses of black respondents. And rightly so. While it’s true that black Americans have made some educational and societal gains, the wealth gap between blacks and whites is at its highest level since 1989, according to Pew Research. And other important indicators of economic health including unemployment, wages, and homeownership also remain much more dismal for black residents than for their white counterparts.
  • But the study’s findings are telling, showing that there can be significant differences in how people perceive their place in the world compared to what data shows about their place in the world. And that gap, too, can be difficult to overcome.
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