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Income inequality in America has been growing rapidly, and is expected to increase [PDF]. While the widening wealth gap is a hot topic in the media and on the campaign trail, there's quite a disconnect between the perceptions of economists and those of the general public.
For instance, surveys show people tend to underestimate the income disparity between the top and bottom 20% of Americans, and overestimate the opportunity for poor individuals to climb the social ladder. Additionally, a majority of adults believe that corporations conduct business fairly despite evidence to the contrary and that the government should not act to reduce income inequality.
Even though inequality is increasing, Americans seem to believe that our social and economic systems work exactly as they should. This perspective has intrigued social scientists for decades. My colleague Andrei Cimpian and I have demonstrated in our recent research that these beliefs that our society is fair and just may take root in the first years of life, stemming from our fundamental desire to explain the world around us.
http://theconversation.com/lifes-not-fair-so-why-do-we-assume-it-is-45981
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:36PM
Actually, our predisposition to see society as basically fair might have biological origins.
Pretty much all the higher primates seem to have an inbuilt sense of fairness, refusing to engage in activities which will disproportionately benefit another, even i it would still benefit them. Especially if it is the other that chooses the benefit split (example: monkey A splits a banana, monkey B decides if both or neither of them gets to have their pieces. B will consistently refuse the deal if A claims more than about 2/3-3/4 of the banana)
In the wild, where individuals can't do much to leverage past gains into future advantages, this will maintain a certain level of "fairness" in the society, an important feature in a species for whom cooperation is one of their major evolutionary advantages. I would propose an evolutionary closed loop: instinctual belief that society is roughly fair -> reflexive refusal of grossly unfair proposals -> disadvantages those who behave very unfairly -> society as a whole remains moderately fair -> reinforces belief that society is fair.
As I see it, without a belief that life is/should be basically fair people would have much more incentive to accept bad deals so long as they come out at least a little ahead themselves. That encourages exploitation/freeloading, and makes cooperation a much less effective evolutionary strategy. And since all this was shaped long before we developed sophisticated symbolic reasoning, the fact that we're a cooperative species is in a sense built upon the instinctual understanding that fairness is a guiding principle in society.
And that of course leaves us predisposed to exploitation by a system that hides the unfairness of social interactions under systemic imbalances that aren't obvious within the context of individual decisions. Or under a system that allows the long-term accumulation of wealth such that a long history of only "acceptable" levels of exploitation can result in a grossly disproportionate accumulation of wealth. And of course our modern society facilitates both.