Ray Fisman and Daniel Markovits write,
We measured attitudes toward equality by asking hundreds of Americans to distribute a pot of money between themselves and an anonymous other person. Our subjects weren’t making hypothetical choices in responding to the survey—their decisions affected how much real money they would get when the experiment ended.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I added the emphasis on “themselves.” That is very different from what redistribution means in political terms. There, it means redistributing other people’s money.
The authors seem to suggest that we should be surprised that rich progressives are reluctant to redistribute their own money. I do not think we needed an experiment to show this. I think we already know from their behavior that rich liberals are averse to redistributing their own money. I believe that surveys have shown that instead conservatives and people lower down the income ladder give larger shares of their income to charity.
Political support for redistribution is costless, especially compared with actually giving away some of your wealth.
I guess I’ll offer a charitable view. I think liberals and progressives for various reasons, to include their preferred size of the redistribution, consider it a coordination/first mover problem.
Perhaps the more interesting and predictably not media-emphasized angle is the preference for efficiency. My interpretation is that liberals highly concerned and motivated by inequality are more willing to waste more resources in even futile (and maybe even counterproductive) attempts to address it. Perhaps it is because they don’t see inequitable growth as a positive whereas the elite tend to be more favorable and tolerant of this ‘negative externality’ of inequality that accompanies efficiency. They may be selfish, or they may be correct.
This is another of those liberal social “science” studies in which the liberal narrative is baked into the study. This is clearly shown in their characterization of those they favor being “fair minded” and those they disfavor being “selfish.” Moreover, as AK points out, rich people self-evidently do not value equality over being personally rich. If equality were high on their hierarchy of values, they would give away their wealth so as not to be rich. On the other hand, that someone of means might reasonably decide that their own participation in the economy is the most “efficient” way to help others would not enter the realm of possibility in the mind of the researchers. They’re just selfish.