Beliefs About Inequality
This discussion still leaves one final puzzle: why do Americans and European have
such different beliefs about the nature of inequality in their countries? One thing
is clear. Differences across countries in beliefs about the nature of inequality don’t
reflect reality. As mentioned above, the available evidence suggests that the American
poor work harder than their European equivalents and have a lower probability of
exiting frompoverty. Yet 60 per cent of Americans believe that their poor are lazy and
have tremendous opportunities, while 60 per cent of Europeans believe that the poor
are trapped.
A far better explanation is that beliefs about inequality reflect political power of
the left and right working through indoctrination and the formation of beliefsLeftwing
leaders find it in their interest to convince people that the poorer beneficiaries from left-wing policies are good people sadly beset by forces outside of their control.
Right-wing leaders find it equally in their interest to convince people that the poor are
cheats and wastrels and that money spent on welfare is useless spending on morally
deficient individuals.
While there is little direct evidence on the impact of indoctrination, two sets of
facts are clear. First, a vast abundance of evidence frompsychology (starting with Asch
1955) has shown that beliefs are extraordinarily malleable, at least in contexts where
error isn’t privately costly. Second, across countries Alesina and Glaeser (2004) show
that political variables, like proportional representation, that seem to increase the
power of the left (as discussed above) also predict beliefs about inequality. Somewhat
remarkably, geographic variables that seem to increase the political power of the left
(like little land area) also predict beliefs about income inequality, even though they
have no correlation with the relevant economic reality.
Indoctrination works through both politicial speeches and education. Right-wing
American inaugural speeches are filled with comments like “no one can deny the
equality of opportunity that made us what we are” (Harding 1921) and “there are
no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free” (Reagan
1985). By contrast, left-wing European leaders say things like “the society in which
we live is founded on privilege” (Blum 1946), and “In countries where the capital
system of production prevails the masses of people are forced down to the condition
of proletarians” (Kautsky 1910).
Almost surely, teaching in schoolrooms shapes economic viewsmore strongly than
political speeches, and again here, there is a clear difference between the USA and
Europe.
In the nineteenth-century USA, schoolbooks like McVickar (1846) taught
that “even the poorest boy in our country . . . has as good a chance of becoming
independent and respectable, and perhaps rich, as any man in the country.” Still today,
high school textbooks emphasize that the USA remains the land of opportunity.
Significantly, when Europe was actually more aristocratic and less open, its textbooks
were more likely to teach that children were growing up in a land of opportunity.
For example, the textbooks of the French Third Republic taught that “hard work and
rectitude were bound to bring improvement, internal and external,” and featured a
shoemaker named Grégoire whose hard work was leading towards success. The Kaiser
was just as adamant that his schools taught people that working hard will lead to
success.
The difference between American and European indoctrination appeared with the
triumph of the European left. Already in the 1890s, German teachers’ unions fought
with the Kaiser to teach a different ideological message.
In the aftermath of the First
World War, schools in Europe came steadily to spread Marxist messages of class
immobility and consciousness (details in Alesina and Glaeser 2004). The steady use
of education to build “class consciousness” appears to have formed economic beliefs
in Europe and can provide at least one explanation of why beliefs in the USA and
Europe are so different. As such, beliefs about income mobility and inequality reflect
indoctrination and the political success of the right in the USA and the left in Europe,
more than they do anything about reality..
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