"This viral video is right: We need to worry about wealth inequality"

This viral video is right: We need to worry about wealth inequality

Posted by Ezra Klein at the WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/06/this-viral-video-is-right-we-need-to-worry-about-wealth-inequality/

"SNIP......................................................

Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write Wednesday: Dan Ariely and Michael Norton’s 2011 study on wealth inequality went viral on YouTube this week.

Do you remember the Ariely and Norton study? It’s a beautiful piece of work. First, they asked Americans what their ideal distribution of wealth would be. The answer? Much more equal.

Then they asked Americans what they thought the actual distribution of wealth was. Less equal than their ideal, came the answer. But the truth, as Ariely and Norton noted, was that America was much less equal even than that. Reality was twice as far from the average American’s ideal as the average American thought. Here’s their graph:

.......................................................SNIP"