How Americans spread the wealth
By Robert Trigaux, Times Staff Writer
Amid raucous political debate over tax cuts for the rich and who owns most of America's wealth, university researchers have found at least one reason why we suffer such bruising public policy stalemates in this country.
When it comes to wealth inequity in the United States, we just don't know what we're talking about.
Two professors, psychologist Michael Norton from Harvard Business School and behavioral economist Daniel Ariely at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, surveyed more than 5,500 Americans who had been chosen at random to create a nationally representative sample. Those surveyed were asked to do two things.
First, they had to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States. And second, they were asked to "build a better America" by spreading the nation's wealth among five quintiles, poorest to richest, based on their own, ideal or optimal level of inequality.
Key findings appe
