This is an interesting article I came across, haven't had any chance to look at the underlying study but it's about how people have difficulty estimating and comprehending the difference in the levels of wealth between those at the very top and everybody else. It's hard to know where to extend the inferences from this but I imagine it influences people's feelings about wealth inequality and the extent to which it's a problem or solvable.
It's also related to a couple other things that seem relevant in this zone, and which influence our politics in a very negative way imo...
The fact that many people do not vote their economic interest, for the most part - I've had this argument with so many people and even when I tell them exactly how a Trump tax cut benefited me and is not going to benefit them in any way whatsoever, or how a capital gains tax benefits me but will not benefit them at all, still they will reach an absolutely false conclusion. It would be one thing if they understood it but then decided that something else like saving the fetuses was more important. But they really just don't understand what you're saying. The lack of math literacy is pretty profound and this is one of the cases that show it. Like explaining how people pay higher taxes when a bigger proportion of their tax comes from XY and Z as opposed to capital gains, or being able to deduct business expenses and depreciation... All of this is just lost.
The other interesting part of this is something I get to talk to people about regularly: that thought experiment about whether you would choose to flip a coin, If by flipping you would have an equal chance of having a low minimum income every year or having millions a year, And by not flipping you would be locked into a middle income every year. People have lots of interesting motivations for the choices that they make, but my results (which are not just anecdotal at this point) confirm everybody else's: People who have wealth and people who totally lack wealth are 100% down to flip that coin, and people who have had low to middle zone comfort and are very attached to that comfort, and don't have a good sense of the intervals that separate middle from low and high, don't ever want to flip the coin. The gap between middle and low is almost nothing, and the gap between both of those and the high end is unimaginably vast - literally people can't imagine it or conceptualize it. But that's the wealth inequality we are dealing with in our country and it's wrecking so many things.
Estimating Income Inequality
Re: Estimating Income Inequality
Link to the article please? It sounds fascinating.
Re: Estimating Income Inequality
Haha my level of dumbassery knows no bound... I had to search back through so much history to get to this link!
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-people-un ... ncome.html
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-people-un ... ncome.html