View from the Top: What the 1% Know about Economic Inequality

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 20. Wealth

Abstract

The rich are getting richer. Economic inequality in the U.S. has been increasing for the past 30 years. The richest 1% have captured the majority of the country’s income growth (Atkinson et al. 2011), and there is a similar pattern of wealth inequality (Keister 2005; Wolff 2010). The wealth distribution is very skewed, and there also has been very little wealth mobility to mitigate the rise in inequality (Keister 2000). Given these trends, the wealthy are clearly an important group to study; yet little work has been done to examine this population. Using representative survey data on the wealthiest 1% of Chicago-area residents and original in-depth interviews with 60 wealthy Americans from across the country, this paper will report on preliminary findings of dissertation research that will help develop an understanding of what wealthy people know and believe about the stratification order and economic mobility; where those beliefs come from; and what their preferences are for interventions to reduce inequality. The wealthy are aware that inequality has grown in recent decades. They significantly overestimate the concentration of wealth held by the top 1%, and most believe that income differences are too high. Most wealthy interview subjects answered that large income differences were a “serious problem for the country,” but many did not favor any form of government intervention. This paper will focus on what the wealthy know about the income and wealth distributions and how they interpret inequality trends in relationship to individual and structural barriers to upward mobility.

Author

• Fiona Clare Chin, Northwestern University