Most Americans Don't Realize How UNEQUAL Our Country Really Is, They Think We Have The Income Distribution of Sweden

The Economist

9:35 AM  -  Public

Trending: A quarter of a century ago, The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born. Then, America came top. Now the Economist Intelligence Unit has more earnestly calculated where would be best to be born in 2013 http://econ.st/VJ0qGi

DAN ARIELY: We had 7,000 people distributed around the U.S., different levels of income, education, wealth, political opinions -- 92 percent of the Americans picked Sweden over the U.S. When we broke it by Democrats and Republicans, Democrat, it was 93 percent, Republican, it was 90.5 percent.
So there's a difference, but the difference is tiny. And one of the possibilities is that, when we dig deep down and we ask people to examine their core beliefs about a just society, Americans are really quite consistent in terms of thinking this is way too much inequality, and we want something that is much more equal to Sweden.

Financial gains over the last decade in the United States have been mostly made at the "tippy-top" of the economic food chain as more people fall out of the middle class. The top 20 percent of Americans now holds 84 percent of U.S. wealth, as Paul Solman found out as part of a Making Sen$e series on economic inequality.





Test your knowledge of wealth distribution by exploring pie charts of different societies.

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