Graph of the day

The above is taken from a paper by Norton and Ariely. The authors conducted a survey in which they asked a representative sample of Americans a series of questions about income distribution in the United States. They asked people what they think that distribution actually looks like (this is the "Estimated" part of the graph) as well as what they think it should like (the "Ideal" part), and then pitted the results against the distribution as it actually is. The results are interesting. First, voters are deeply ignorant about the income distribution (they think it's much more egalitarian than it actually is). Second, they think that in a perfect world, the income distribution should be even more egalitarian than their erroneous perceptions of it. And third, there are no significant differences in those beliefs and desires between Democratic and Republican voters. This third finding is extremely surprising to me.