Socioeconomic Inequality: Public Attitudes

Resources to prepare participants for the Listening for Equality workshop

(1) NZ's 'Egalitarian Myth' ('a fair go for all'):

"The intuitively appealing notion of equality of opportunity has been popular in political discourse in recent decades. I would argue that its resonance is long-standing, and that the ideal of equality of opportunity is an accurate summation of New Zealand's historical 'egalitarian myth.' Andrew Sharp (1997: 195) puts the point bluntly: ‘Equality of opportunity and unequal rewards based on past performance: these, in the Pākehā ideology, constituted justice.’ A large component of the egalitarian strand in the national imagination has always been the insistence that New Zealand really is a class-less society, and that a beneficent centralised state really does work to the benefit of all, such that no one is truly disadvantaged in New Zealand... The egalitarian myth and a certain settler pride in the absence of an overt class structure (Willmott, 1989) have found ongoing expression in ‘complacent and reassuring’ national narratives that offered the ‘warm, comforting assurance of the benevolent state’ (McHugh, 1999: 103).

Critics, of course, have long seen the trope of equal opportunity as a rhetorical move that elides the significance of actual inequalities in wealth and power (see Stiglitz, 2012: 116 and Taylor-Gooby, 2011:466). John Schaar (1967: 233, 237) argues that equality of opportunity offers no more than the freedom to become unequal and that, in its profound individualisation, it ‘breaks up solidaristic opposition to existing conditions of inequality by holding out to the ablest and most ambitious members of the disadvantaged groups the prospect of individual success and advancement’ (Schaar, 1967: 237). Sharp (1997: 220), noting that people do not have ‘abstract “opportunity” or “freedom” but concrete things like houses and incomes and capital and cars and the ideal of equality of opportunity is an accurate summation of New Zealand’s historical 'egalitarian myth.' "

- Excerpt from Peter Skilling's "Egalitarian Myths in New Zealand: A Review of Public Opinion Data on Inequality and Redistribution," New Zealand Sociology 28.2 (2013): 16-43.

(2) Public Attitudes about Inequality in Aotearoa NZ: Summary of Findings to Date

• Opinion polls in New Zealand over the last twenty years have consistently shown that many people believe the gap between high and low incomes to be too large (Skilling, 2013; Humpage 2014).
• People in New Zealand tend to think both that those on low incomes are underpaid, and that those on higher incomes are very overpaid (Skilling & McLay, 2015).
• This apparent support for a more equal distribution of wealth and income does not necessarily translate into support for redistribution. Relative to the widespread agreement that “there is too much inequality in New Zealand”, there is lower support for the position that government should take steps to reduce inequality; and even lower support for any proposal to pay for redistribution through increased taxation (Skilling, 2013; Bamfield & Horton, 2009).
• That being said, there is very high support for increased spending on services available to everyone (such as education and healthcare); lower support for targetted services (unemployment benefits, fo instance) (Humpage, 2014).
• Interview and Focus Group work demonstrates that even people who thoroughly endorse traditionally leftist values of equality, compassion and fairness in the abstract do not necessarily vote for programmes and parties committed to reducing inequality.
• There is evidence that people mis-understand their own place in the economic distribution. People tend to self-identify in the middle of the distribution: very few people consider themselves very rich or very poor (Skilling, 2014).
• This is important, because there is a high level of support for the proposition that “those in the middle” are the group in NZ having the hardest time, since – people who identify with this group believe - they don’t have the resources of the rich, and yet they don’t receive the support available to the poor (Skilling, 2014; Bamfield & Horton, 2009).
• One argument here is that when people say “there is too much inequality” they are thinking that there is too big a gap between themselves and the very rich; when they say “but government shouldn’t engage in redistribution” they are thinking that they do not want to reduce the gap between themselves (the hard-working yet struggling middle) and the very poor (Bamfield & Horton, 2009).
• There is also evidence that people support a more equal society in the abstract but that they are unsure whether and how this can be achieved (Humpage, 2014).
• Many people who support a more equal distribution of society are easily persuaded that this desire is not achievable, because “the realities of the market” impose constraints on what we can do (Skilling, 2017).
• In terms of communicating about sustainability, work in the United States (admittedly a different context) has suggested that the very word “inequality” is unhelpful, since it triggers a range of ideas about what might be implied.

- Prepared for the Listening for Equality workshop by Dr. Peter Skilling, Auckland University of Technology