Income inequality has been increasing steadily in the United States since the late 1970s. In 1978, American CEOs were paid 31 times as much as the typical worker. As of 2023, that number has skyrocketed to 290 times as much.
What is behind this still widening gap? One prevailing narrative is that Americans just don’t care much about inequality—that in the land of hard work and opportunity, we all rest easy knowing that everyone is getting their just deserts.
Leslie McCall has spent her career studying public opinion about inequality and its implications for policy and politics. McCall is a professor of sociology and political science at the City University of New York and associate director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. She investigates perceptions of inequality in the United States and around the world using data from long-running surveys like the General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme.
Through her research, McCall has found that the narrative of American indifference to inequality misses the mark. Her work reveals a paradox that she details in her book, The Undeserving Rich. “Americans can at times express little enthusiasm for welfare state policies,” she writes, “and still yearn for a more equitable society.” In other words, Americans tend to think that income inequality is a problem, but many aren’t sure they want the government to be the one to solve it.
Amid a backdrop of mass government layoffs and the increasingly visible influence of billionaires in American politics, I reached out to McCall to better understand how we ended up here. We discuss Americans’ perceptions of inequality and wealth, who they think should do something about it, and how all of this plays out in today’s political scene.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Heather Graci: You’ve found that Americans are more critical of the wealthy and less tolerant of income inequality than many believe. How would you characterize American perceptions of the wealthy?
Leslie McCall: The narrative is that people respect and envy the rich, and they want to be rich. So they don’t want to support any policies that would reduce the rewards of those who are rich, because they think they’re going to be rich. That’s clearly not the case. I couldn’t find any data that supported the notion that people think that they’re going to be rich someday.
One question that has been asked repeatedly over time is how much people think executives make, and then how much they think executives should make. You can see the difference between those two, and it’s really, really dramatic. The amount that people think that executives should make is about one-quarter to one-third less than what they think they make. Then you have to remember that what people think that executives make is a major underestimate of what they actually do make.
Even though Americans underestimate how much inequality there is, they still want dramatically less of it.
A lot of people will say, “Well, Americans just don’t understand how much inequality there is. They underestimate how extreme the income distribution is.” That’s absolutely true. But the problem with that argument is that even though they underestimate how much inequality there is, they still want dramatically less of it. I read a lot of research papers whose main point is, “Wow, look how much people underestimate how much inequality there is,” instead of emphasizing the fact that people want such a low level of inequality.
You’ve traced American perceptions of income inequality relative to its reality over many years, and you find that these two variables don’t always move together. Although income inequality has increased pretty consistently over time, our concern about it has fluctuated. Why don’t our perceptions of income inequality track with its actual level?
If people feel the economy is growing in general, that their wages are increasing, that their standard of living is increasing, and that they’re not struggling financially, then it’s not the inequality per se that matters.
This is different from just simply the business cycle. It’s not just going up and down with the unemployment rate. It’s actually the extent to which people feel that when we’re in a recession or recovering from a recession, everyone should be in that situation of struggling to get by. But if the rich are doing super well and the stock market is going bonkers, then that is seen as unfair. So you want to see, “Well, the economy’s growing, great. But are people’s incomes growing too?”
And when the economy’s growing but people’s incomes are not, that’s when we’re going to be upset about inequality?
Yes. The broader concept of opportunity that I use is this idea of plentiful jobs with good wages, and people’s perceptions of whether or not that exists. I do think the reason why people care about inequality is because they ultimately care about economic opportunity.
Who do people think should be responsible for reducing inequality?
Oftentimes, the reason people think that the U.S. doesn’t have more government redistribution is because, “Oh, Americans don’t like redistribution.” Mainly, that comes from responses to questions about welfare. It is true that over time, Americans are much less likely to say that they support something called “welfare.” If you say “assistance to the poor,” then support increases.
Welfare was really demonized and racialized. It comes from a very racist standpoint that welfare is only for people of color and Black Americans in particular, and this whole set of stereotypes that were created intentionally by Republicans and conservatives to try to delegitimize those kinds of policies and reduce the welfare state.
If you ask Americans in general about the government and its role in reducing inequality, relative to other countries, a much lower share of people in the U.S. will say that they think the government has primary responsibility or should have primary responsibility for reducing inequality. That’s clear.
But I contend that the question itself is problematic, because if you ask about specific policies, there’s very high support for those, even in cross-national terms, for what we call social insurance policies like social security, unemployment insurance, health insurance. There’s virtually as much support in the U.S. for those as there is in other countries, even though it’s the government providing those policies.
We developed another question to get at the inverse of the idea that Americans don’t like the government and don’t want the government to reduce inequality, which is that individuals are responsible for their own economic fate. So yes, Americans pick the government less than people in other countries do, but does that mean that all the people who don’t pick the government think individuals are responsible?
So we asked [which group should be most responsible for reducing inequality] among a list of people and institutions: there was government, but then also private companies, low-income individuals themselves, high-income individuals themselves, and unions. And then there was an option for people to say that they didn’t think inequality needed to be reduced.
For working-class and middle-class people in high-income countries, their status is declining, and a lot of that is the result of these global processes that have to do with global trade, automation, and the power of finance.
We found that the category the most people selected was the government. It wasn’t very high, but it was the modal category, like 38 percent. And then the next highest was private companies, 29 percent. If you add up private companies, unions, and high-income individuals themselves, then all of those together are higher than the government.
What that means is a very small minority believes that either income inequality doesn’t need to be reduced or that low-income individuals are responsible. That really challenges the whole idea that America is this individualistic country, that it’s all about individual responsibility. We don’t find that.
I’m interested and also kind of perplexed by this sentiment that private companies could be responsible for reducing income inequality because I don’t understand why they would be incentivized to do so. Do you know why so many Americans look to private companies rather than the government?
I think what it means is that people want a fairer economy. I think it means that people want companies to create better jobs with higher wages, with benefits, with less inequality between the CEO and the rest of the workers because that’s what we are used to in this country. In this country, we’re used to our economic health and our economic gains being very much tied to working for a growing and successful large corporation. That’s the way we think about economic success. So we want these corporations to do the right thing, basically. Now, whether people think that they’re going to do those things …
When we look at their policy preferences, people who select major companies and people who select government want virtually the same thing in terms of policy. They want worker representation on corporate boards. They want higher minimum wages. They want caps on executive pay. They want unions. They want higher taxes on the rich. They’re actually very similar when it comes to their policy preferences. It’s just that for whatever reason, when they see a question that has the government in it as a general actor abstracted from a specific policy like social security, then they back off.
If we make this a little bit more concrete, a lot of Trump’s rhetoric, especially in 2016, was kind of anti-corporate rhetoric, right? Because remember he said, “I’m going to make sure that those companies don’t send those jobs to Mexico. If you elect me, then your plant isn’t going to close.” They saw him as someone who could be very influential and very tough on businesses that were laying off workers. You see a little bit more of that now, not exactly the same way, but it’s more focused on other countries that seem to be taking industry and jobs away from the U.S. So that’s where the tariffs come into play.
I think essentially people are saying, “We want corporations to be better.” I don’t think they’re saying, “We think they are going to be better.”
Is the mismatch between all of these things—perceptions of income equality, the reality of income equality, and what to do about it—uniquely American? Or do we see this elsewhere in the world?
Almost everyone says there’s too much inequality. Virtually no one in any country says that inequality doesn’t need to be reduced.
Even if there isn’t as high a level of inequality as there is in the U.S., or if it hasn’t been increasing as much as it is in the U.S., most people feel like there’s too much inequality. They live in these capitalistic societies that have all been subjected to—particularly among the richer countries—the trends in globalization, international free trade, and automation. All those things are making work more precarious, less remunerated. So I think that a more general process is going on, what we sometimes call neoliberalism—a lot more power for corporations relative to workers. It’s true that even in countries like Germany and Sweden, the power of unions has declined over time.
Each country is a little bit different in terms of what their actual levels of inequality are, what is contributing to those levels of inequality, whether they’re changing. But I think what’s consistent is this sense that for working-class and middle-class people in high-income countries, their status is declining, and that a lot of that is the result of these global processes that have to do with global trade, automation, the power of finance, and just in general, that people at the top and highly educated people seem to be doing very well in the new economy. But because most people are not highly educated, they’re not doing well. These things are pretty common across countries like the U.S., and it’s also common that they haven’t been dealt with.
That’s what gives rise to populism. It’s a culmination of economic concerns and anxiety and insecurity, and forms of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment too. But I feel like you can’t really disentangle those two things.
I asked before about who people believe should be responsible for reducing inequality in the U.S. Do you see similar trends across countries on that question as well? Or is this American belief in private companies an outlier?
What’s really interesting is that there are a few countries like the U.S. Switzerland has very similar trends. Strangely, France too has a very high share of people saying that private companies [are responsible]. New Zealand too. The four big ones are the U.S., Switzerland, France, and New Zealand.
We think it probably has something to do with [the fact that] there’s a lot of attention to excessively high-earning executives and wealthy people in all of these countries. Switzerland is pretty unusual in that they have a lot of nationwide ballot measures. A number of them have been about limiting executive pay. So it’s been a very politicized issue in Switzerland. There have also been politicians who have really politicized the issue of high executive pay in France.
People aren’t so much thinking, “These great CEOs at these companies are going to reduce inequality.” No, they’re more saying, “We don’t want these corporations to be so unequal. We think it’s unfair that the structure of inequality is so great within these companies.” That’s our understanding of it when we look at the people who respond that way, and we look at their responses to other questions. It seems to me like it’s really about the unfairness of corporations and, in particular, the low pay of most workers relative to that of the senior management.
Do you see a path forward today toward reducing income inequality in the U.S.?
There are both Republicans and Democrats who say they want to change the current structure of the economy, which has been termed “neoliberalism.” There’s been a lot of discussion about needing to return power to the working class family, the middle-class family. Not just power, but economic security.
For the Republicans, for people like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, there are a number who want to shore up the traditional family. We kind of go back to the ’50s—that’s the “Make America Great Again” idea. Let’s go back to a time in which there were breadwinners. The men were the breadwinners, but they made enough money to support their families, and then their wives could have children, and then they could take care of their children.
Two-thirds of people want a major institution—the government or private companies—to reduce inequality.
Even in the modern perspective on this, in which [the breadwinner] could be a man or a woman, or it could be a same-gender household, an extended household, however you want to define today’s households, they are having a hard time making ends meet. Childcare is really expensive. Housing is really expensive. There’s a lot of writing now on the affordability crisis. All of this was exacerbated by the high inflation that was precipitated by the pandemic.
We are definitely at a point where both parties are acknowledging that things need to change. The economic system, whether it’s capitalism, whether it’s neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it—globalization, technology, and automation. Something needs to change because all of these things are conspiring to limit the economic livelihoods and security of working and middle-class people. It’s just that they haven’t converged on the same solution.
Conversations about inequality can tend to get very partisan very quickly. What have you learned about how people on different sides of the political spectrum tend to think about inequality?
One of the ways we’ve tried to analyze this is to see whether there are partisan differences in responses to the questions about the government being the most responsible. We have one question that asks people about their support for the government reducing inequality, and then we have a completely separate question that asks people about their support for private companies reducing inequality. [Editor’s note: This is different than the multiple choice question about the group most responsible for reducing inequality discussed earlier in the conversation.]
When we look at responses to those two questions, we see a lot more similarity across all groups in the response to the private companies question. You have much more of a partisan difference in people’s responses to the government responsibility question, but you have fewer partisan differences in response to the private companies being responsible for reducing inequality.
Can you say more about the response to the private companies question?
Overall, there are more people, over a majority, who think that private companies should be responsible for reducing the pay [gap] between executives in major companies and unskilled workers in major companies.
It’s usually like 57, 58, 59 percent who support that. The share who support the government’s responsibility in reducing inequality is just under 50 percent. So it’s like a 10 percentage point difference between the two.
When you just look at relative differences between the share of Republicans that support it versus the share of Democrats, that difference is much smaller when you’re looking at the private companies. In other words, there’s more agreement among partisan groups about the importance of private companies being responsible for reducing inequality.
The last thing I’ll say is that if you combine the share of people who say the government is responsible or that private companies are responsible, it’s about two-thirds of Americans. Two-thirds of people want a major institution—the government or private companies—to reduce inequality. That’s a really different conclusion than if you only look at the government responsibility question, which is what everyone does. Then, what you get is that less than half of Americans want the government to reduce inequality. So that’s where you get this conclusion that Americans are not very concerned about inequality.
