As a followup to my recent post on inequality, I wanted to highlight some recent research by Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom on fairness and inequality. Based on a survey of lab experiments and evidence from the real world, the paper argues that people don’t actually care about unequal outcomes as long as they are perceived as fair.
They highlight several studies that show that in laboratory settings people (even children) are likely to distribute resources equally. However, in many of these settings, equality and fairness are indistinguishable. Since none of the participants did anything to deserve a larger portion, participants could simply be attempting to create a fair distribution rather than an equal one. And experiments that explicitly distinguish between fairness and equality do find that people care more about the former. For example, people were not unhappy with allocations that were determined randomly even if the outcome ended up being unequal as long as everybody began with an equal opportunity. Children who were asked to allocate erasers as a reward for cleaning their rooms were more likely to give the erasers to those who did a good job.
In reality people also seem to prefer an unequal distribution of income as long as it is perceived to be fair. In surveys, while people’s perception of the true income distribution is often highly skewed, their ideal distribution is not one of perfect equality. Of course, looking at these surveys does not necessarily tell us much about what the “best” income distribution would be, but rather the one people (think they) prefer. As I argued in my last post, I think too much weight has been placed on income or wealth inequality when really all that matters are differences in people’s happiness or utility. The evidence presented here does not go that far, but it does suggest that people realize that different behavior should lead to different rewards in some cases.
One reason that I think the debate has focused mostly on income or wealth inequality rather than on fairness or another measure of inequity is due to issues with measurement. Everybody has different ideas about what is fair so it’s easier to frame the question in terms of something that can be easily reported numerically. We may want to reconsider our acceptance of those statistics as a meaningful representation of a social problem. The whole paper is well worth reading and it opens up some interesting questions about human behavior. I will have at least one more post related to inequality coming in the next week or so.