Grand Hilarious Delusion of the Citizenry
The splendid Dan Ariely has done another study, along with Michael Norton at Hahvahd, of the amazing BULLSHIT USians believe about wealth distribution in this land (which is your land).
Ariely, author of The Upside of Irrationality and other interesting tomes, is half economist, half ironist in the manner of the Yes Men.
There's a graphic on Ariely's blog showing the actual distribution at the top, the estimates given in the survey by USians broken down by income, vote, and sex, and the "ideals" described by the deluded populace. (Hint: The "ideals" are basically Sweden.)
NPR interview with Norton.
Here's a simplified version from the survey summary made by me. The bar on the left is the wealth held by the top quintile (84%), on the right, the goods of the second highest quintile (11%).
Ariely, author of The Upside of Irrationality and other interesting tomes, is half economist, half ironist in the manner of the Yes Men.
There's a graphic on Ariely's blog showing the actual distribution at the top, the estimates given in the survey by USians broken down by income, vote, and sex, and the "ideals" described by the deluded populace. (Hint: The "ideals" are basically Sweden.)
NPR interview with Norton.
Here's a simplified version from the survey summary made by me. The bar on the left is the wealth held by the top quintile (84%), on the right, the goods of the second highest quintile (11%).
The amassed wealth of the third quintile is 4%, the fourth is .2%, the fifth is .1% (or "nothing" as Norton notes). See the study's "USA" pie below:
The survey, done in 2005, tapped over a million USian respondents.
Labels: ariely, bush economics, irrationality, norton, survey
posted by Tom Matrullo at Thursday, October 07, 2010
2 Comments:
"Amazing BULLSHIT" is a very mild way of characterizing some of the inputs to a clearly-very-effective propagandization that we must assume has been going on for some while in order to completely destroy the relevant areas of the cerebral cortexs (cortices ?) of a decent proportion of the USian population.
When media has incorporated the propaganda, there is no propaganda.
USians have merely underestimated the size of the capital formation phallus:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130395070
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