Executive Summary: “Do They Know and Do They Care? Americans’ Awareness of Rising Inequality” by Leslia McCall

Although inequality in the United States is high by both historical and international standards, it seems to have received little attention by politicians and the media. Since presumably public policies are shaped in part by the public’s awareness and tolerance of social problems, does the lack of attention reflect a lack of knowledge or a lack of concern among the general public? Most commentators assume the latter, but there is little analysis to back it up.

This paper investigates four specific sets of questions about inequality. First, do Americans care about inequality? If so, who cares about inequality? Is there increasing polarization in opposition to rising inequality that mirrors the growth in income polarization? Second, what do Americans know about rising inequality? Third, is it really true that rising inequality has received little popular attention? And, fourth, what do trends in the 1980s and 1990s tell us about American views of inequality more generally?

Since there is surprisingly little data from which to investigate these questions, this paper draws on a number of sources, with a focus on survey data from the General Social Survey’s Social Inequality Modules, fielded in 1987, 1992, 1996, and 2000. Newsweekly coverage of issues related to inequality is also investigated for each year from 1980 to 2000 (in Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report).

Despite the prevailing image that Americans are tolerant of inequality, two-thirds of Americans either strongly agree or agree that income differences are too large. As significant, this share fluctuated from a low of 58 percent in 1987 to a high of 77 percent in 1992. The shifts among those who strongly agree are more pronounced, ranging from a low of 15 percent in 1987 to a high of 33 percent in 1996. Strong agreement in opposition to inequality also peaked in 1996 for two other questions: whether income differences benefit the rich and are unnecessary for prosperity. When adding those that agree to these questions, opposition exceeds one-half of Americans in 1996.

These general patterns hold after extensive controls for compositional and behavioral changes over time. Compositional trends were actually moving against the tide of rising opposition, toward greater conservativism. Changes in the intensity of opposition by particular groups (signaled by a change in coefficients) indicate that ideological moderates increased their opposition to inequality substantially in 1996; in contrast, opposition was less consistently polarized by income and education. This suggests that the mainstream of American society had become opposed to inequality in the early to mid-1990s.

Were Americans responding to knowledge of high and rising levels of inequality? The analysis of newsweekly articles suggests that critical, structurally-oriented coverage of accessible inequality-related issues affecting the middle class may have been influential: the executive pay scandals of the early 1990s and the jobless/downsizing recovery of the mid-1990s. The business cycle per se cannot fully explain these trends, since strong opposition peaked during the mid-1990s expansion. However, the lack of coverage of still-high levels of inequality during the booming late-1990s most likely helped reduce opposition in 2000. A fuller discussion of the complicated question of whether Americans “know” about rising inequality and its dynamics is provided in the paper.