In that context, Dias wrote in his email, it would be inaccurate to say that
policies designed to benefit minority constituencies have run their course. There’s plenty of evidence that members of these constituencies lack economic opportunities or cannot meet their needs. However, I think many Americans need to be convinced of that.
In a further elaboration of the affirmative action debate, three sociologists, Leslie McCall, Derek Burk and Marie Laperrière, and Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale, discuss public perceptions of inequality in their 2017 paper “Exposure to Rising Inequality Shapes Americans’ Opportunity Beliefs and Policy Support”:
Research across the social sciences repeatedly concludes that Americans are largely unconcerned about it. Considerable research has documented, for instance, the important role of psychological processes, such as system justification and American dream ideology, in engendering Americans’ relative insensitivity to economic inequality.
Challenging that research, the four scholars contend that when “American adults were exposed to information about rising economic inequality in the United States,” they demonstrated increased “skepticism regarding the opportunity structure in society. Exposure to rising economic inequality reliably increased beliefs about the importance of structural factors in getting ahead.” Receiving information on inequality “also increased support for government redistribution, as well as for business actors (i.e., major companies) to enhance economic opportunities in the labor market.”
The intricacies don’t end there.
In their April 2017 paper, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” three professors of psychology, Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom, write that
There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies.
How can these two seemingly contradictory findings be resolved?
The authors’ answer:
These two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.
Human beings, Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom write, “naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”
My interest in the subdued political response to the court’s affirmative action decision was prompted by a 2021 book, “The Dynamics of Public Opinion,” by four political scientists, Mary Layton Atkinson, James A. Stimson and Frank R. Baumgartner, all of the University of North Carolina, and K. Elizabeth Coggins of Colorado College.
The four scholars argue that there are three types of issues. The first two types are partisan issues (safety net spending, taxation, gun rights etc.) and nonpartisan issues, like the space program. Public opinion does not change much over time on these two types of issues, they write: “Aggregate opinion moves up and down (or, left and right) but fifty years later remains roughly where it started.”
