{"id":4498,"date":"2011-03-23T18:45:06","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T23:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=4498"},"modified":"2011-03-23T18:45:06","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T23:45:06","slug":"the-lottery-mentality-room-for-debate-nytimes-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2011\/03\/23\/the-lottery-mentality-room-for-debate-nytimes-com\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lottery Mentality – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lottery Mentality
\nUpdated March 22, 2011, 05:24 PM
\nChrystia Freeland is the global editor-at-large at Thomson Reuters.
\nAmericans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz. This isn\u2019t the set-up for some sort of politically incorrect Catskills stand-up joke circa 1960. It is the takeaway from a remarkable study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely on how Americans think about income inequality.
\nAmericans are mistaken about income inequality because of national self-confidence and the lottery effect.
\nThe right likes to argue that income inequality as an issue doesn\u2019t win elections because Americans don\u2019t begrudge the rich so much as they want to join them. The Norton and Ariely study suggests otherwise. Given a choice, the authors find, Americans would prefer to live in a society more equal than even highly egalitarian Sweden.
\nAnother popular view is that income inequality isn\u2019t experienced as acutely by most Americans as the numbers suggest because of how much can be \u201cconsumed\u201d by the lower rungs of the nation\u2019s socioeconomic ladder. No less a figure than Alan Greenspan, the maestro himself, once made this case at the Federal Reserve\u2019s annual Jackson Hole conference, presenting data on the consumption of dishwashers, microwaves and clothes dryers showing that if measured by the possession of these goods \u2013 as opposed to the huge and growing income divide — inequality was decreasing.
\nThat interpretation is not without merit. But it turned out that allowing Americans to prosper by using their homes as A.T.M.’s and maxing out on their credit cards was maybe not such a great idea.
\nPersonally, I lean toward two other theories. Americans are mistaken about income inequality because of national self-confidence and the lottery effect.
\nBy national self-confidence, I mean the widespread conviction that the American way is probably right because all those other ways don\u2019t seem to work out so well. This is a wonderful national quality and one of the reasons America has such resilience. But confidence in the American way can make it hard for the country as a whole to recognize when things aren\u2019t working.
\nTake, for instance, the health care debate, when a politically effective criticism of what has come to be known as Obamacare was to argue that it would destroy the \u201cbest\u201d health care system in the world. Mary Meeker, a Silicon Valley guru of impeccably capitalist and American credentials debunked that idea in her recent USA, Inc. presentation, in which she pointed out that \u201cU.S.A. per capita health care spending is 3x OECD average, yet the average life expectancy and a variety of health indicators in the U.S. fall below average. But if you spend way more than everyone else, shouldn\u2019t your results (a.k.a. performance) be better than everyone else\u2019s, or at least near the top?\u201d
\nAside from faith in American national excellence, the other main reason Americans seem so unperturbed by the widening chasm between the rich and everyone else is what I like to call the lottery effect. Buying lottery tickets is clearly an irrational act — the odds are hugely stacked against us. But many millions of us do, because we see the powerful evidence that an ordinary person, someone just like us whose only qualifying act was to buy a ticket, wins our favorite lottery every week.
\nFor many Americans, the nation\u2019s rowdy form of capitalism is a lottery that has similarly bestowed fabulous rewards on the Everyman. The current leading exemplar of self-made billions is Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, and he may soon be outstripped by the even more instant cyber-star Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon.
\nBut the problem with lotteries is that there are only a few winners. That is the story the numbers tell us about American capitalism today — and unless that underlying reality changes, at some point all those folks who think they already live in Sweden will realize they live in a winner-take-all society, and that most of us aren\u2019t winning.
\nvia The Lottery Mentality – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lottery Mentality Updated March 22, 2011, 05:24 PM Chrystia Freeland is the global editor-at-large at Thomson Reuters. Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz. This isn\u2019t the set-up for some sort of politically incorrect Catskills stand-up joke circa 1960. It … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Lottery Mentality – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reposts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}