تاثیر نابرابری درآمد بر ارزش ها و نگرش

Scholars in several social science disciplines scholars have argued from their respective disciplinary perspectives that income inequality has a considerable impact on economic and social performance of a nation. This essay investigates the possible impact of income inequality on 290 values and attitudes in forty industrial nations from an economic perspective. The results show that inequality has a significant impact on values and attitudes especially concerning religion and the family.

The questions on which this study is based were not formulated with the intention of revealing differences in behavior, so the linkages between values or attitudes and behavior are difficult to discern. Nevertheless, I try to show that many values and attitudes are influenced by income inequalities, particularly those regarding political actions, religion, and family. The mechanisms linking inequality and behavior still remain in large part terra incognita, but for an important set of such behaviors we can see the linkage through values and attitudes influenced by income inequalities. If we turn back to the differences of opinion over the impact of income inequality cited in the beginning of this essay, it should be clear that those arguing that income inequality is “really unimportant” in understanding our behavior are mistaken, at least for those countries without a previous communist government. The work of Wilkinson and Pickett demonstrates that inequality affects some important behaviors and this study shows that income inequality also has an important effect on our values and attitudes. The causal mechanisms linking values, attitudes and behavior, however, still deserve further analysis. The most unusual result of this study is that inequality has had relatively little impact on the values and attitudes in countries with previous communist or Marxist governments. I suspect, however, that because values and attitudes require a certain confirmation if they are to be strongly held, and since in the ten years preceding the World Value Survey these nations experienced rapid systemic social and economic change, many of their population have not received confirmation of their old values or have time to develop new values and attitudes. This conjecture can be confirmed either by looking at the values and attitudes of the younger population in these countries or by looking at the values and attitudes a quarter century after the fall of communism.