Als Gesellschaft können wir möglicherweise die Unterstützung für Umverteilung erhöhen, indem wir die Ultrareichen bloßstellen. Wenn Menschen große Vermögensunterschiede nicht direkt beobachten, neigen sie dazu, die Ungleichheit zu unterschätzen, sind mit ihrer Situation zufriedener und zeigen weniger Interesse an politischen Änderungen.

I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/11/pgaf339/8340223

From the linked article:

Our research suggests that, **as a society, we may be able to increase support for redistribution by exposing the ultra-rich**, but paradoxically, the resulting lower inequality may be accompanied by increased dissatisfaction and disagreement.

**People are more likely to support wealth-redistribution policies when they can clearly see how rich others are**. However this greater visibility of wealth also increases dissatisfaction and political polarisation, according to new research published in PNAS Nexus.

Dr Milena Tsvetkova, Associate Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology was part of a team of three co-authors whose study showed that the structure of people’s social networks strongly influences how they perceive inequality and how they vote on redistribution. **In everyday life most individuals interact with people whose income and circumstances resemble their own, creating blind spots. When people do not directly observe large differences in wealth, they tend to underestimate inequality, feel more content with their situation, and show less interest in policy change**.

The research team combined a computational model with an online experiment involving 1,440 US participants who were randomly assigned as rich or poor and asked to vote repeatedly on tax rates. This design reproduced the selective visibility created by real social networks where friendships, professional contacts and online activity shape how accurately they judge the wider distribution of wealth.

Networks that were highly segregated by wealth produced the lowest support for redistribution and the lowest levels of polarisation. **Poor participants remained the poorest group but often reported feeling relatively satisfied because they did not see the far higher scores of the wealthy**. In contrast, networks that allowed poor participants to see many rich individuals generated higher voting support for taxation and reduced inequality, but also produced more dissatisfaction and more division between groups.

We need a revival of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

we need a 32 hr work week and free healthcare

I got radicalized after moving to NYC and meeting actual rich people for the first time. Without a PR team working overtime to fix their image, being in the same room as a billionaire would turn anyone into a revolutionary. They are dumb, disgusting monsters.

It’s more that the poor think themselves temporarily embarrassed trillionaires and not human beings. We know these things. We don’t do anything about them because that would be hard and we’re le tired and even if we did something about it.. then we wouldn’t be able to be trillionaires with hard work.

Daily reminder that the French Revolution was not caused by inequality but by widespread dissemination of print media exposing that inequality.

There is a reason why the ultra-rich are seeking to control media and it ain’t just an inflated sense of self-importance, it is vital to their survival.