Endowments
Socially Stratified Epigenetic Profiles Are Associated With Cognitive Functioning in Children and Adolescents
Laurel Raffington et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Children’s cognitive functioning and educational performance are socially stratified. Social inequality, including classism and racism, may operate partly via epigenetic mechanisms that modulate neurocognitive development. Following preregistered analyses of data from 1,183 participants, ages 8 to 19 years, from the Texas Twin Project, we found that children growing up in more socioeconomically disadvantaged families and neighborhoods and children from marginalized racial/ethnic groups exhibit DNA methylation profiles that, in previous studies of adults, were indicative of higher chronic inflammation, lower cognitive functioning, and a faster pace of biological aging. Furthermore, children’s salivary DNA methylation profiles were associated with their performance on in-laboratory tests of cognitive and academic skills, including processing speed, general executive function, perceptual reasoning, verbal comprehension, reading, and math. Given that the DNA methylation measures that we examined were originally developed in adults, our results suggest that children show molecular signatures that reflect the early life social determinants of lifelong disparities in health and cognition.
Wealth Without Limits: In Defense of Billionaires
Jessica Flanigan & Christopher Freiman
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, November 2022, Pages 755–775
Abstract:
In this essay we argue against preventing people from amassing extreme wealth via increased taxation. The first argument in favor of such a proposal, recently advanced by Ingrid Robeyns (2018), states that billionaires’ resources would be better spent addressing morally important goals such as meeting disadvantaged people’s needs and solving collective action problems. In response to this claim, we argue that billionaires are typically in a better position to benefit the poor and to solve collective action problems than public officials. The second argument in favor of preventing extreme wealth accumulation, advanced by Robeyns and Robert Reich (2018), states that billionaires have an inappropriate amount of influence in public life, which undermines political equality. We argue that corporate leaders tend to be more accountable to their fellow citizens than public officials. We then consider and criticize the objection that billionaires’ success is typically a result of public investment, which entitles public officials to enforce taxes that demand a return on the public investment.
Intergenerational income mobility and economic freedom
Justin Callais & Vincent Geloso
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerous studies have found that income inequality reduces the chances of upward relative mobility (i.e., climbing up the income ladder). However, most of this work ignores the role played by institutional quality (namely, economic freedom) in determining mobility and increasing the individual's set of choices. We fill this gap by empirically testing the direct and indirect (through economic growth) impacts of economic freedom on intergenerational income mobility. We find that economic freedom has both direct and indirect effects on intergenerational income mobility, while income inequality is a strong predictor of downward income mobility. When we incorporate findings about the purely mechanical relationship between inequality and intergeneration income mobility, we find that the legal system and property rights component of economic freedom matters more than inequality. These results suggest that good institutions can increase intergenerational income mobility.
Support for bigger government: The principle-implementation gap and COVID-19
Sandra Goff et al.
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on government and market attitudes using within-subject comparisons of survey responses elicited before and after the onset of the pandemic. We find that participants develop significantly less favorable opinions toward government and markets; and that participants increase support for bigger government significantly and for redistribution, in general, marginally significantly. There is no evidence this leads to an increase in support for specific redistributive policies, nor for government to play a larger role in specific functions. Our results echo the stubbornness of American preferences for redistribution and suggest the presence of a principle-implementation gap.
The Importance of Parental Ability for Cognitive Ability and Student Achievement: Implications for Social Stratification Theory and Practice
Gary Marks & Michael O’Connell
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
Socioeconomic status (SES) is considered a powerful influence on children’s cognitive development and student achievement. This model has generated an enormous literature on the nature of, explanations for, and policy implications arising from SES inequalities in early childhood cognitive outcomes and student achievement. An alternative model focuses on the associations between SES and parental ability, the parent-child transmission of ability, and the association between children’s ability and their test scores. This study analyses two ability and three achievement measures, with composite and multiple SES measures and a commonly used indicator of the home environment (HOME) in children aged from 3 to 15. The associations between SES and children’s test scores are only partially accounted for by the home environment, which itself has only small to moderate associations with test scores, independent of SES. Adding mother’s cognitive ability substantially reduces the coefficients for the composite SES measure by between 50 and 60%, and for mother’s education by between 56 and 87%. The contemporaneous effects of SES and the home environment are small or very small. Sizable percentages of the variance in the five outcome measures are attributable to genetics ranging from 38% for the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) to 77% for reading recognition. The contributions of the shared environment ranged from 14% for reading recognition to 41% for the PPVT. Therefore, genetics is important, and the non-trivial contributions of the common environment are more likely to reflect school and neighborhood factors rather than SES and the home environment.
The Widening Achievement Gap Between Rich and Poor in a Nordic Country
Astrid Marie Jorde Sandsør et al.
Educational Researcher, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study a decade of achievement gaps for fifth-, eighth-, and 10th-grade students in Norway using administrative population data. Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.
The impact of real world information shocks on political attitudes: Evidence from the Panama Papers disclosures
Agnar Freyr Helgason & Vittorio Mérola
Research & Politics, December 2022
Abstract:
The Panama Papers disclosures in April 2016 revealed information about tax avoidance and fraud among political elites and the wealthy on a global scale. But did the disclosures affect relevant political attitudes and behavior, including perceptions of corruption, redistributive preferences, and voting intentions? We leverage nationally representative surveys that were in the field at the time in two heavily impacted countries, France and Spain, and treat the disclosures as a natural experiment, comparing respondents questioned just before and just after the disclosures. Our design highlights the difficulty, at times, of interpreting natural experiments, given the potentially compounded treatments that arise as events unfold over time, and the common inability to properly determine views prior to the treatment. That said, the analysis indicates that the disclosures had limited effects on the domains most likely affected by such a scandal, consistent with them being interpreted based on existing beliefs and identities. Our results thus contradict prior findings which suggest that the Panama Papers had substantial effects on redistributive attitudes, and shed further light on voters’ learning and updating around uncertain, yet emotionally laden, political facts.
Economic Inequality, the Working Poor, and Belief in the American Dream
Benjamin Newman
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does exposure to economic inequality undermine belief in the American dream? Scholarship has long argued that the availability of meritocratic ideologies like the American dream inoculates people against exposure to inequality by leading them to rationalize unequal outcomes by viewing wealth as due to hard work and poverty as due to indolence. The existence of inequality where the “have-nots” are working poor, however, could serve to undermine such a process because their employment status casts them as “deserving poor” and limits the applicability of agency-based explanations for poverty. Across two experiments embedded in national surveys, exposure to inequality alone did not cause significant reductions in belief in the American dream; however, exposure to inequality where the have-nots were working poor significantly reduced belief in the American dream. Moderation and mediation analyses indicate these effects were most pronounced among lower-income Americans and indirectly heightened support for government reduction of inequality.
Trust and attitudes toward income inequality: Does individualism matter?
Nabamita Dutta & Russell Sobel
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the last decade authors have increasingly examined the role of two cultural traits – trust and individualism – on a variety of economic outcomes ranging from gendered attitudes to entrepreneurship, human capital accumulation, and economic development. While both have positive effects, recent literature suggests that the effects of trust are often conditional on other variables, and this aspect has been neglected in the literature. Indeed, a recent paper found that with respect to gendered attitudes, there are important interactions between the traits of trust and individualism. Building on this foundation we explore how views of trust and individualism interact to affect attitudes about income inequality. Our results show that while views regarding social trust generally positively affect the desire for income equality, this effect is strengthened in the presence of high individualism. Alternatively stated, distrust in highly individualistic environments leads to a greater desire for income differences (inequality). Our result highlights the important role played by market-based price and profit incentives in fostering economic activity and exchange in larger, impersonal extended orders where interpersonal trust and reputational effects are generally absent (in contrast to personal, small group exchange). Our results are robust to a variety of techniques to establish identification and account for sample selection and omitted variable bias.
Self-other differences in perceptions of wealth
Rafael Batista, Abigail Sussman & Jennifer Trueblood
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2023
Abstract:
People evaluate their own wealth differently from how they evaluate the wealth of others. Across six experiments, we find evidence that people focus disproportionately on debt when thinking about their own (vs. another person's) wealth. In Experiments 1–3, participants predicted how wealthy they or someone else would be in one year, assuming they had the same amount in assets and debt today. While participants were generally optimistic about the future, they believed debt would shrink faster for themselves than for others. Participants focused more on paying down debt than growing assets when thinking about their own wealth. Further, when asked to consider what they would do with a windfall, they allocated more towards repaying debt than they believed others would. In Experiments 4 and 5, participants assessed their own wealth or that of another person after purchasing a car or a house and borrowing to do so. In every case, participants considered others (vs. oneself) as better off financially when holding the price and amount borrowed constant. As debt increased, the gap between self and others widened. In Experiment 6, a separate group of participants also reported their beliefs about how others might see them. When actively considering another person's perspective, people saw themselves as wealthier. We conclude by discussing the role that different evaluations of wealth might play in patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Opposing effects of income inequality on health: The role of perceived competitiveness and avoidance/approach motivation
Nicolas Sommet & Andrew Elliot
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Income inequality is commonly posited to elevate concerns about social status that undermine psychological health, but the empirical evidence is inconsistent. Here we propose that these inconsistencies conceal opposing processes: Income inequality prompts perceived competitiveness, which can both negatively predict psychological health via avoidance motivation and positively predict psychological health via approach motivation. First, we conducted a two-year longitudinal study (1,700+ participants from 500+ county identifiers) and provided support for our opposing processes model. Second, we conducted three pre-preregistered studies using an experimental-causal-chain design. We sequentially showed that induced income inequality increased perceived competitiveness (Study 2a; 444 participants), induced perceived competitiveness increased avoidance and approach motivation (Study 2b; 1,018 participants), and induced avoidance/approach motivation decreased/increased psychological health (Study 2c; 562 participants). These findings suggest that scholars should shift from studying the main effects of income inequality on psychological health to studying the psychological processes involved in the inequality-health relation.
Warfare and Economic Inequality: Evidence from Preindustrial Germany (c. 1400-1800)
Felix Schaff
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
What was the impact of military conflict on economic inequality? I argue that ordinary military conflicts increased local economic inequality. Warfare raised the financial needs of communities in preindustrial times, leading to more resource extraction from the population. This resource extraction happened via inequality-promoting channels, such as regressive taxation. Only in truly major wars might inequality-reducing destruction outweigh inequality-promoting extraction and reduce inequality. To test this argument I construct a novel panel dataset combining information about economic inequality in 75 localities, and more than 700 conflicts over four centuries. I find that the many ordinary conflicts — paradigmatic of life in the preindustrial world — were continuous reinforcers of economic inequality. I confirm that the Thirty Years’ War was indeed a great equaliser, but this was an exception and not the rule. Rising inequality is an underappreciated negative externality in times of conflict.