Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave, free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits. What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t?
A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.
“In Norway, people very much disapprove of inequalities that are due to bad luck,” Bertil Tungodden, a professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “People in the U.S. are more willing to accept inequality, even if it reflects pure good luck for some and pure bad luck for others.”
The researchers recruited a group of Americans and Norwegians online to complete a series of simple tasks including putting together sentences, and told them they’d be paid a basic fee plus a bonus. A second group of Americans and Norwegians recruited online—called spectators—was then asked to oversee the distribution of bonuses.
[For more of this story, written by Alana Semuels, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...erica-norway/512735/]
Comments (2)