-
It would be nice to be
-
objective in life, in many ways,
-
and the problem is that we have
-
these color-tainted glasses
as we look at all kinds of situations.
-
For example, think about
something as simple as beer.
-
If I gave you a few beers to taste
-
and I asked you to rate them
on intensity and bitterness,
-
different beers would occupy
-
different space.
-
But what if we tried
to be objective about it?
-
In the case of beer,
it would be very simple.
-
What if we did the blind taste?
-
Well, if we did the same thing,
you tasted the same beer,
-
but now in the blind tasting,
things would look slightly different.
-
Most of the beers will go into one place.
-
you will basically not
be able to distinguish them,
-
and the exception, of course,
will be Guinness.
-
(Laughter)
-
Similarly, we can think about physiology.
-
What happens when people expect
something from their physiology?
-
For example, we sold people
pain medications.
-
Some people, we told them
the medications were expensive.
-
Some people, we told them it was cheap.
-
And the expensive
pain medication worked better.
-
It relieved more pain from people,
-
because expectations
do change our physiology.
-
And of course, we all know that in sports,
-
if you are a fan of a particular team,
-
you can't but help see the game
-
develop from the perspective of your team.
-
So all of those are cases in which
-
our preconceived notions
and our expectations color our world.
-
But what happened in more,
let's say, important questions?
-
What happened with questions
that had to do with social justice?
-
So we wanted to think about
what is the blind tasting version
-
for thinking about inequality?
-
So we started looking at inequality,
-
and we did some large-scale surveys
-
around the U.S. and other countries.
-
So we asked two questions:
-
do people know what kind of
level of inequality we have,
-
and then what level of inequality
do we want to have?
-
So let's think about the first question.
-
Imagine I took all the people in the U.S.
-
and I sorted them from
the poorest on the right
-
to the richest on the left,
-
and then I divided them into five buckets:
-
the poorest 20 percent,
the next 20 percent,
-
the next, the next,
and the richest 20 percent.
-
And then I asked you to tell me
how much wealth do you think
-
is concentrated in each of those buckets.
-
So to make it simpler,
imagine I ask you to tell me,
-
how much wealth do you think
is concentrated in the bottom two buckets,
-
the bottom 40 percent?
-
Take a second. Think about it
and have a number.
-
Usually we don't think.
-
Think for a second,
have a real number in your mind.
-
You have it?
-
Okay, here's what lots
of Americans tell us.
-
They think that the bottom 20 percent
-
have about 2.9 percent of the wealth,
-
the next group have 6.4,
-
so together it's slightly more than 9.
-
The next group, they say, has 12 percent,
-
20 percent,
-
and the richest 20 percent, people think
have 58 percent of the wealth.
-
You can see how this relates
to what you thought.
-
Now, what's reality?
-
Reality is slightly different.
-
The bottom 20 percent
have 0.1 percent of the wealth.
-
The next 20 percent
have 0.2 percent of the wealth.
-
Together, it's 0.3.
-
The next group has 3.9,
-
11.3,
-
and the richest group
-
has 84, 85 percent of the wealth.
-
So what we actually have
and what we think we have
-
are very different.
-
What about what we want?
-
How do we even figure this out?
-
So to look at this,
-
to look at what we really want,
-
we thought about
the philosopher John Rawls.
-
If you remember John Rawls,
-
he had this notion
of what's a just society.
-
He said a just society
-
is the society that if
you knew everything about it,
-
you would be willing
to enter it in a random place.
-
And it's a beautiful definition, right?
-
Because if you're wealthy,
you might want the wealthy
-
to have more money, the poor to have less.
-
If you're poor, you might
want more equality,
-
but if you're going
to go into that society
-
in every possible situation,
and you don't know,
-
you have to consider all the aspects.
-
It's a little bit like blind tasting
in which you don't know
-
what the outcome will be
when you make a decision,
-
and Rawls called this
"the veil of ignorance."
-
So, we took another group,
a large group of Americans,
-
and we asked them the question
in the veil of ignorance.
-
What is the characteristics of a country
that would make you want to join it,
-
knowing that you could end
randomly at any place?
-
And here is what we got.
-
What did people want to give
to the first group,
-
the bottom 20 percent?
-
They wanted to give them
about 10 percent of the wealth.
-
The next group, 14 percent of the wealth,
-
21, 22, and 32.
-
Now, nobody in our sample
wanted full equality.
-
Nobody thought that socialism
is a fantastic idea in our sample.
-
But what does it mean?
It means that we have this knowledge gap
-
between what we have
and what we think we have,
-
but we have at least as big a gap
between what we think is right
-
to what we think we have.
-
Now, we can ask these questions,
by the way, not just about wealth.
-
We can ask it about other things as well.
-
So for example, we asked people
from different parts of the world
-
about this question,
-
people who are liberals and conservatives,
-
and they gave us basically the same answer.
-
We asked rich and poor,
they gave us the same answer,
-
men and women,
-
NPR listeners and Forbes readers.
-
We asked people in England,
Australia, the U.S.
-
Very similar answers.
-
We even asked different
departments of a university.
-
We went to Harvard and we checked
almost every department,
-
and in fact, from Harvard Business School,
-
where a few people wanted the wealthy
to have more and the rich to have less,
-
the similarity was astonishing.
-
I know some of you went
to Harvard Business School.
-
We also asked this question
about something else.
-
We asked, what about the ratio
of CEO pay to unskilled workers?
-
So you can see what
people think is the ratio,
-
and then we can ask the question,
what do they think should be the ratio?
-
And then we can ask, what is reality?
-
What is reality? And you could say,
well, it's not that bad, right?
-
The red and the yellow
are not that different.
-
But the fact is, it's because
I didn't draw them on the same scale.
-
It's hard to see,
there's yellow and blue in there.
-
So what about other outcomes of wealth?
-
Wealth is not just about wealth.
-
We asked, what about things like health?
-
What about availability
of prescription medication?
-
What about life expectancy?
-
What about life expectancy of infants?
-
How do we want this to be distributed?
-
What about education for young people?
-
And for older people?
-
And across all of those things,
what we learned was that people
-
don't like inequality of wealth,
-
but there's other things that inequality,
which is an outcome of wealth,
-
is even more aversive to them:
-
for example, inequality
in health or education.
-
We also learned that people
are particularly open
-
to changes in equality
when it comes to people
-
who have less agency:
-
basically, young kids and babies,
-
because we don't think of them
as responsible to their situation.
-
So what are some lessons from this?
-
We have two gaps: we have a knowledge gap,
and we have a desirability gap.
-
And the knowledge gap
is something that we think about,
-
how do we educate people?
-
How do we get people to think
differently about inequality
-
and the consequences of inequality
in terms of health, education,
-
jealousy, crime rate, and so on?
-
Then we have the desirability gap.
-
How do we get people to think differently
about what we really want?
-
You see, the Rawls definition,
the Rawls way of looking at the world,
-
the blind tasting approach,
-
takes our selfish motivation
out of the picture.
-
How do we implement that
to a higher degree
-
on a more extensive scale?
-
And finally, we also have an action gap.
-
How do we take these things
and actually do something about it?
-
I think part of the answer
is to think about people
-
like young kids and babies
that don't have much agency,
-
because people seem to be
more willing to do this.
-
To summarize, I would say,
next time you go to drink beer or wine,
-
first of all, think about, what is it
in your experience that is real,
-
and what is it in your experience
that is a placebo effect
-
coming from expectations?
-
And then think about what it also means
for other decisions in your life,
-
and hopefully also to policy questions
that affect all of us.
-
Thanks a lot.
-
(Applause)