Economic inequality is high and rising, without much political response. Most stay that’s because our political institutions overrepresent the views of the rich. But Andrew Taylor finds that poor Americans don’t prioritize solving inequality or redistributive policy. They want their representatives to focus more on distributive politics and constituency service and that’s what they do. It’s a corrective to a lot of common social science assumptions.
Guests: Andrew Taylor, North Carolina State University
Study: A Tolerance for Inequality
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Political inequality isn’t responsible for economic inequality, this week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.
Economic inequality is high and rising and many have pointed the finger at our political institutions for over-representing the views of the rich. But perhaps Americans are just not really into redistribution, with inequality low on the list of concerns even of the poorest among us.
This week, I talked to Andrew Taylor of North Carolina State University about his new Chicago book, “A Tolerance for Inequality.” He finds that poor Americans don’t prioritize solving inequality or redistributive policy. They have ambivalent attitudes and don’t usually differ much from others. They want their representatives to focus more on distributive politics and constituency service and that’s what they do. Taylor paints a more optimistic picture than you usually hear, poking a lot of holes in the conventional narrative. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So, tell us about what you learned in your new book, “A Tolerance for Inequality.”
Andrew Taylor: Well, I learned a lot. I hope readers learn even more.
The principle takeaway, Matt, is that I think that the political science literature on the political causes of economic inequality in the United States in last part of the 20th into the 21st century is somewhat exaggerated in the extent that it indicts American democracy. I make the argument that American federal economic policy is more responsive to public policy inputs than I think the literature gives it credit for. And overall, we have an economy, which includes of course, fairly historical high levels of inequality. In a comparative sense, United States has a high level of economic inequality, including that we have the economy that we’ve really asked for, which is one of low taxes, little redistribution, significant levels of public goods, increasing tolerance for high debt, and sort of a minimal safety net that we kind of all enjoy regardless of socioeconomic status, particularly through the policies of Social Security and Medicare.
Matt Grossmann: So, you weren’t going after any one piece of this. You were going after this whole literature. So, what is the sort of current assumptions in the political science literature on inequality? And why was it in need of this broad reassessment?
Andrew Taylor: Well, political scientists, obviously, as I demonstrate in this book, like to push the boundaries of their field and go into others.
But strictly within the domain of political science, the model is basically that the political game is rigged, that people with high socioeconomic status, wealthy people, people with high income, people in white collar occupations, people with significant educational credentials, dominate politics. They vote more often, they participate in interest groups more, for example. They donate to campaigns disproportionately. They occupy office more than do their compatriots in the United States.
And as a function of this, they have been able, the story goes, to influence economic policy outputs and to advance their material self-interest. And that is to the detriment of other groups and has in turn led to, or at least heavily contributed to the current economic inequality that we experience. And I don’t really take on some of the sort of central features of that model, but I do try to arrest its tone and suggest it’s exaggerated and, as I said in response to the first question, feel that it is wrongly indicted in American democracy.
Matt Grossmann: So, just to clarify that a little bit, the first thing that you said, you don’t really have that much of a quarrel with, right? About higher levels of participation across the political spectrum? It’s just that as an explanation for policy differences that you really don’t find a lot of support for.
Andrew Taylor: That’s correct. So, as you say, the first part, this is established in the political science literature and part of basically American folklore, I guess. But it’s whether that has the kinds of effects on economic policy outcomes at the federal level that the literature suggests. That’s the part that I quibble with.
Matt Grossmann: So, you could imagine that Americans might directly accept inequality, that they might just fail to prioritize it, it’s one concern among many, or that they hold cross-pressured views. Maybe they’re okay with inequality if it’s associated with higher growth, for example. So, do any of those stories fit the model that you’re able to tell better than others?
Andrew Taylor: Well, I think they all do to a certain extent. I don’t think that they care particularly about inequality. There’s a lot of surveys that suggest everybody dislikes inequality, even the affluent when they’re asked directly. But it’s an abstraction, I think, that they don’t really, maybe not necessarily totally care about, but they feel it’s a condition and an abstraction that is difficult if not impossible almost to change by pulling particular policy levers. And as a result, there’s a level of acceptance of it that is higher than I think the existing literature believes.
It may also be, and I think people like Larry Bartels have pointed this out, that they don’t really know how unequal the United States is. So, if they really knew that and they really knew their place in the pecking order, they might be a bit more upset. But I don’t think there’s a sort of broad understanding of where they sit relative to others. So, that’s part of it.
I also think in terms of economic policy or economic situation, I should say, I don’t think people really care as much about that than they do improving their own lot, that they look to get better, to be making more money themselves, to be feeling more economically secure themselves. And they don’t really worry too much about where they stand relative to others, at least others that are not geographically proximate to them. We might talk a little bit later on about how I see less affluent, low income Americans as being more interested in, I guess, what Lowe would call distributive policy rather than redistributive policy. And I think this all plays into it, that they’re interested in their immediate situation, in those of people who are close to them, and relative to where they were say last year, more than they are relative to people who live far away and they don’t often think about.
So, I think there are all of these things that come together to put inequality in the background more than I think we think it is.
Matt Grossmann: So, this literature really got going with findings about the correspondence between policy and public opinion and the relationships between high income opinion versus a lower income opinion. And you nicely summarize where this literature has gone, which is that it has found some differences but many of the differences are about lower income people being less attentive, having more ambivalence, having lower information, not answering the survey questions as much or as definitively.
So, what does all that tell us? Is this about real differences in opinion, but just having more ambivalence at the low level? Is it about informational differences? Is it about our error in trying to find what those differences are?
Andrew Taylor: Well, I think it’s certainly a combination of the first two.
I’m not here to impugn pollsters and survey researchers and I’m not really sure how better they could be getting at it. I mean, one of the approaches of the book is to really cast a wide net and try to distill a vast amount of survey research data on economic attitudes and policy over a long period of time.
But I certainly think it may be a function of the first two. They do seem to be ambivalent on a lot of issues. Maybe we might even say moderate on a lot of issues compared to their higher income compatriots who tend to take more polarized positions and positions that are perhaps driven more by party ID on economic policy. So, if you look at some of the just simple models of policy preferences on let’s say social welfare spending or taxes and you look at the interactions between party ID and income, you’ll see much wider gaps, party doing much more of the explaining at the higher income levels than they are at the lower ones, where both Democrats and Republicans seem to take positions that are between the Democrats and Republicans at higher income levels. So, I think there’s some of that.
There’s certainly, as you noted in the question and I show, a lot of “don’t knows” on responses. There’s a lot of what political scientists call inconsistent voting where lower income individuals will say, “I’m a liberal” or “I’m a conservative.” And then they vote in elections consistently for candidates of the other party, conservatives voting for Democrats and liberals voting for Republicans. And so, there’s a lot of this ambivalence, muffled signaling, inconsistent positions. If you look at lower income respondents to surveys on issues where there are four or five questions asked about the issue, maybe it’d be an immigration issue, and we look at the four or five questions, we code a liberal or conservative position to the four or five, lower income respondent will be much more inconsistent across the survey questions within the immigration issue than a higher income respondent.
So, all of these things I think together sort of suggest that lower income voters are giving mixed and inconsistent and attenuated signals to policymakers about what they want on economic policy. And the argument that I give is that, if you’re a policymaker and you’re trying to discern what these people want in economic policy, it’s hard to do so. You’re getting sometimes a much clearer signal from people of a higher socioeconomic status.
Matt Grossmann: So, I think there’s sort of a background toy model here that you’re arguing against, which is that if we’re dealing with a redistributive policy question where we’re taxing the rich to redistribute benefits, that we should get a voting distribution where everybody who would benefit from the redistribution votes yes and only the rich vote no. And so these should be overwhelmingly popular things. We don’t often see that and instead you say that economic policy is pretty responsive to public opinion overall. So, how would you characterize your model as opposed to that one? And walk us through the evidence of responsiveness to these-
Andrew Taylor: Well, I don’t really have a model. I mean, to the extent that I do, it’s just a simple one, public opinion input and then economic policy output.
But if you look at, as I do in the first two substantive chapters, in Chapters 2 and 3, post-World War II overview of public opinion on the economy and economic policy outputs at the federal level, there’s a pretty strong match. So, I take data such as obviously polling, survey research data. I look at important laws and other indicators of economic policy output at the federal level. I look at bills passed in Congress.
And at the aggregate level, you see a pretty good match. I make the argument that if there is a mismatch, it tends to prior to the 1990s, be with a slightly liberal bias. And afterwards, when there are mismatches, it’s a function often of the leapfrogging effect of the polarization of the political parties so that we have relatively moderate economic policy opinion in the 21st century. And then when the Republican’s in charge, they go further to the right than that. And when Democrats are in charge, they leapfrog to the left.
I also show it at the sort of individual issue area. So, the Stimson public mood data, which I actually use in that first analysis that I just mentioned, is also disaggregated at the individual issue area. And I show that, I think quite interestingly, relative to other issues, Americans are more conservative consistently on economic issues that we would probably think of are more important in some-
… economic issues that we would probably think of are more important in some kind of normative way. So this is things such as social welfare policy or management of the macroeconomy or regulation and commerce, as opposed to let’s say education or energy or transportation. And I think that says something about public opinion on economic policy.
And then also with regards to Gallup most important issue measure. Congress tends to pass more bills on economic policy issues that are high up in the most important question by Gallup. And then in the third chapter, I basically look at a variety of different episodes and a variety of different individual economic issues and try to gauge where public policy was on them or is on them at a particular point in time and whether the policy response from Washington matched that, was commensurate with it, vaguely went in the direction that the public were wanting it to go. And the sort of culmination of those things is that the federal government’s done a pretty good job of producing policy that the public wants.
Matt Grossmann: One of the more distinctive arguments in the book is that lower income Americans are more likely to prioritize distributed benefits and that their representatives also do that in Congress. So walk us through that evidence and the extent to which you were able to distinguish between, is it these representatives come into office with these different goals or are they responding to the different goals of their constituents?
Andrew Taylor: Well, with regards to the last part of the question, Matt, I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s probably a bit of both, but certainly I discern patterns here whereby districts that tend to have fewer college graduates, lower median household income, et cetera, large proportions of low-income households and a few number of high-income households tend to have representatives who are a little bit different and behave differently from more affluent districts.
So for example, members from less affluent districts tend to be more likely to have been born in the district. They’re more likely to play certain kinds of roles or have certain kinds, to use Bill Bernhard’s and Tracy Sulkin’s work, certain kinds of legislative styles, being interested in allocations, being district advocates, interested in constituent service, rather than getting involved in the large, big national policy debates that swirl around Washington. They tend to be more likely to be on, this is with regards to the House, members of the House Appropriations Committee. They tend to assign more of their personal staff to the district rather than to the Washington office.
And there’s been a lot of research on this. They tend to be more and better able to capture a disproportionate share of federal largess for their districts in various forms, including in what are often called high-impact expenditures or things like grants and procurement. So I’m not sure whether that’s the district or the members working on those kinds of things independently of each other. I think it’s a bit of both, that these kinds of members might have been brought up politically thinking these kinds of things were important or that might be members who had never thought about these things, but they get in office and they realize this is what their constituents want, but nevertheless, the patterns are pretty clear.
Matt Grossmann: So we mentioned that you have no quarrel with the traditional findings of descriptive underrepresentation, that officeholders are dramatically more educated, richer, of higher incomes and higher occupational status than their constituents overall, but you don’t find much evidence that descriptive representation of when it comes to class actually changes things in terms of issue focus, effectiveness, economic policy differences. So how should we think about that, especially given that most of the literature on this is about racial representation and does find pretty consistent effects of Black representative focus that don’t necessarily match what you’re finding here for class.
Andrew Taylor: Yeah. In the book, I look at two sides of this, whether lower income, lower socioeconomic status, less educated, blue collar Americans actually desire greater descriptive representation. And I find through a couple of different analyses, including one where I’ve got data from the House of Representatives over the past decade, candidates for the House have also been subject to the same financial disclosure rules that members have. And so you can work out relative net worth of candidates. And so I show that lower income Americans don’t really care too much about voting for the candidate who is observably less affluent than the other candidate. There’s just nothing there. And I also do an analysis of districts here. So that’s the first part. I show that they don’t really care too much.
Your question emphasizes the second part, which is does it matter that we don’t have more blue collar, less educated, lower income members of Congress. And if we did, then policy would move in a, I guess we would say in an economic way, in a leftward direction. And I don’t think there’s really any evidence particularly for that either. The only difference between the performance, whether we’re talking about it ideologically or in terms of effectiveness between members who represent lower scale districts and those that represent higher end districts socioeconomically, is that the members who represent lower income districts do tend to be a little bit less effective in terms of the scores that Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman use, which are pretty broadly used in congressional studies these days. So many listeners might be familiar with them, but that is entirely attributable to the fact that members who represent higher income districts introduce many more bills.
In fact, if you look at their, what you might call batting average, if you want to use a baseball metaphor, members who represent lower income districts actually have a higher batting average because they introduce fewer bills, but they are able proportionately to get more of those through the various stages of the legislative process, including enacted into law. But the bottom line is, yes, it’s not much material difference between the performance, or ideologically those members who are affluent, have been educated at Ivy League institutions, have postgraduate degrees, have white collar occupations, and those who are not and who have lower net worths, maybe just have a college degree because there are very few members who don’t have a college degree. They’re increasingly a… Some of them, particularly on the Republican side, interestingly enough, but not many, and who have come from blue collar or maybe middle class rather than high end, white collar occupations.
Matt Grossmann: So the parties have been changing their class coalitions pretty readily in recent years. And you do look at some changes among the Democrats and finding that the most educated and professional Democrats don’t necessarily prioritize redistribution. Maybe it’s regulatory issues that they are focused on or more liberal on. So talk about those findings and put it in context of, I guess, one alternative formulation, which is that both parties are now unrepresentative of their constituents. It’s the rich Republicans are more economically conservative than their constituents, but the rich Democrats are more culturally liberal than their constituents. And so we’re really getting this kind of underrepresentation of the poor in both parties, but on different issues.
Andrew Taylor: Yeah, that’s interesting, and that’s been a case that people have made. First of all, the context of this argument is that if the basic model is true, maybe there’s a silver lining in that if the Democrats are becoming more upscale, then presumably those voters are going to have disproportionate influence and certainly more influence than Democratic voters that they’ve been replacing. And therefore in turn that should move economic policy outcomes to the left because even though they’re more affluent, their party makes them more progressive or liberal, and therefore this could be a counterbalance or a counterweight to the shift in economic policy to the right that critics say we’ve had over probably now the last 45 years, and coincides with a little bit of an acceleration in the Gini coefficient and other measures of inequality in the early 1980s.
But I show that when you look at economic policy attitudes of Americans and you take into account occupation, party and measures of education and income, you can see that the group of Democrats that are affluent professionals, they’re in professional occupations, which often means law, education, medicine, engineering, and compare them to not just, well, Republicans of their similar social economic stature and other Democrats, that they tend to be ambivalent with regards to redistribution.
They’re not more progressive in any particular way than any of those other classes of voter, but they do tend to be more to the left on regulatory policy. And so I show, for example, that when you ask them where government spending should be concentrated, it is on things like education, science, rather than transportation, rather than matters like redistribution, like welfare policy. When you ask them what groups of Americans they particularly feel warmly to, will be groups like, and this is compared to the other groups of voters, it will be gays and lesbians, environmentalists, but groups like labor unions and even minority groups, they will be no warmer towards than comparison groups.
Compared to Black Americans, for example, they’re much more likely to want to support environmental protection, policies protecting the environment, even if there is a trade-off against jobs, whereas Black Americans are completely 180 the other way around. And so through this analysis, I sort of create this portrait of the economic policy preferences of these affluent professionals, Democrat, who are overwhelmingly Democratic and suggest that they’re not going to provide the kind of counterbalance that they might.
Now, the last part of what you said is, does this make both parties now unrepresentative? It may do particularly in a descriptive sense, I don’t know, maybe a little bit in a substantive manner. I don’t know whether yet we’ve really seen it in a real divorce between economic policy outcomes and aggregate American public opinion.
Matt Grossmann: And what about changes on the Republican side? One story that you hear is that the move from the Paul Ryan Republican Party to the Donald Trump Republican Party was a response to Republicans not being representative of American’s economic policy attitudes. And so what Trump managed to do was moderate the party image on social security and Medicare, emphasize issues of immigration and trade as economic policy issues, and that it’s that that has sort of allowed the Republican Party to be competitive on economic policy but even when its policy agenda in Congress remains largely about tax cuts. How does that story kind of comport?
Andrew Taylor: Yeah, I-
Matt Grossmann: … tax cuts. How does that story kind of-
Andrew Taylor: Yeah, I do think obviously Trump has tapped something. I do think it is a sort of basic sense of security and Medicare and social security have always been very popular and those have been issues in which the Democrats have had an advantage or to use a term that political scientists use, they’ve owned over a long period of time. And I think Trump sort of realized that this is probably somewhere that you don’t want to go as a Republican. And I think you’re right in the question, Matt, he sort of said, “They’re off limits,” but he’d made that claim a long time ago and it hasn’t brought it up again. It’s just that the Republicans are just not going there.
With regards to immigration and trade, I do think that he was able to tap into a sense of basic insecurity. I don’t think it’s a desire to redistribute radically. I think it’s a sense that Americans feel a little bit insecure and to the extent, in fact, that they’re comparing themselves to others, I think they’re comparing themselves perhaps to themselves in the past or themselves versus competitors in other countries around the world and feeling that we need to create a broad security blanket. Again, I don’t want to think of it in terms of mass redistribution or any real kind of redistribution, but Trump is responding to this sort of sense of insecurity.
And of course with immigration, there are a whole host of other kind of issues wrapped up in that. I just mentioned it in response to the last question. We haven’t really mentioned race in the conversation and race plays a little bit of a role in the book, but not a significant one. And of course particularly on issues like immigration plays a significant role.
So again, I am cognizant, sensitive, to these shifting plates underneath American politics and the way the parties’ coalitions are changing, but I’m not convinced at all that this is really affecting… Or one, it’s really a cry for significant redistribution within American society. And two, if that’s the case then clearly it’s not affecting economic policy outcomes and I suspect it won’t do at least in the short to medium run.
Matt Grossmann: So class is a mix of these different variables that are all included in your book in some way, income, education, self-image, occupation. So walk us through which ones of those distinctions really matter politically. Is it just the case that we’re finding different relationships to the parties but there’s not any strong differences in opinion across any of those or that one matters more than the other?
Andrew Taylor: Well, I think as you noted in the question, and you should be asking yourself this question, Matt, as much as me, because you’re an expert on it as well, of course. But whereas in the relatively recent past, all of those things seem to move in the same direction and have the same relationship with important outcome variables like party ID, ideology, policy preferences, they’re not now. And they’re working at… I don’t know if cross purposes is the right word, but they’re certainly contradicting each other. And obviously the two biggest examples of that are income and education. And I think education and occupation in many ways are more closely… To get entwined in many ways than income. And even income and occupation, funny enough, which obviously those seem to be more closely related than perhaps any other couple, but they seem to be a little bit different as the economy has changed.
So certainly if you look at the economic policy attitudes, both income and education, occupation are having a role. Income seems to be having a role in that people towards the middle are increasingly holding classically conservative positions on the economy. Those at the high end are curating and I just mentioned how affluent Democrats are increasingly embracing regulatory policy. At the high end on the Republican Party, they tend to be a little bit more sort of classically conservative.
With regards to education, it’s pretty clear that people with higher educational credentials are progressive and increasingly so in many ways in redistributive ways. I know Stuart Soroka and Chris Wlezien have sort of made an argument that some of the movement to the left on social welfare policy is attributable to high-end educated people being more progressive on these issues. But I do think they hold them less important or a lower kind of rank than they do regulatory policy, than they do protection of the environment, protection of women’s rights, civil rights issues in the workplace, even issues like antitrust issues. Those kinds of issues are much more important to them than meaningful redistribution that would come through a much more aggressively progressive tax system and greater benefits for people who are low income or who are out of work, who are disabled, et cetera.
Matt Grossmann: So you know that you’re entering a big literature with somewhat of a minority point of view within political science. So help us kind of situate what you find with some of what other listeners might have encountered. So you mentioned Larry Bartels. We’ve talked about Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s work. We have popular work by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and we have work by Nathan Kelly who’s been on the podcast about the reinforcement of inequality. Those are all more pessimistic accounts. They’re all a little bit more consistent with the traditional view. So where are you in that mix? What is still kind of true of the existing literature and where is your intervention?
Andrew Taylor: Yeah. So you mentioned Nathan Kelly, just to start with his work and other work like that, there’s a kind of institutional focus that there is this sort of idea that American governmental institutions are reinforcing this, particularly kind of counter majoritarian aspects of the way policy is made and that’s reinforcing the inequality through stasis and that those who want to change policy to create more egalitarian outcomes are unable to because the status quo bias and counter majoritarian forces at work are protecting.
I don’t really look at that. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time studying institutions, my approach is really to sort of look carefully at public policy inputs to see whether they’re being reflected in policy outcomes rather than looking at institutions. And so I would say it’s a really interesting idea. I don’t really take issue with it, but it’s just not my focus in this particular work. But the rest of the scholars that you mentioned are more of the… The public’s not getting what the public wants and regardless of whether institutions are at fault or not, that’s a problem.
Again, I just say I don’t think they quite get it that in terms of kind of aggregate public opinion, I don’t think Americans have changed that much at the 30,000 foot level in embracing the kind of economy that they’ve embraced in the post-World War II period. This isn’t a support for unbridled capitalism, but I do think they’re to the right on economic policy to where many of these scholars believe they are. They do like low taxes. The survey data consistently says that of all groups… And they prioritize lower taxes. And relative to people in other countries. They, however, do like public goods. They do believe greatly in matters like strong defense, education should be funded adequately and greatly. And the data suggests that the United States provides those public goods.
They do want a kind of minimal safety net, but one that is for everybody in which they manifest through support for policies like social security and Medicare rather than programs like TANF for SNAP and other kinds of social welfare programs, but they are not particularly interested in redistribution in a way that I think sometimes political scientists really want them to be, but they’re not.
And I just thought that this huge body of literature, and there’s an infrastructure in political science now that’s supporting this. There’s a lot of grant money, particularly from people like Russell Sage Foundation. There are centers and institutes with various different places around the country that clearly see this as a problem and I think you can argue that it is a problem, but I think that they are exaggerating the extent perhaps to which the public wants some kind of solution to the problem.
Matt Grossmann: You’re also more optimistic about American democracy than much of recent scholarship and that there’s been concerns about democratic backsliding and all kinds of ways that the institutions might be changing to inhibit the relationship between public opinion and policy. So should we read you as being less concerned about those changes or what would it take to undermine this match between what the public wants and what it gets?
Andrew Taylor: Well, I do think that what we have seen in the past few decades is when we do have periods of unified government and we do have a president who does believe that he has a real mandate for change, whether it’s in his head or not, and given the polarization of the parties, you can have significant zigzagging on policy outcomes that at any one point in time do seem to be to the right and the left of what the public wants.
In that way, our institutions aren’t impeding. I wouldn’t say they’re facilitating, obviously, in a way that they might be in a parliamentary system, but they are certainly not impeding in a way that the institutional quagmire argument would suggest they are. I really think that the real tragedy of economic inequality is not really a political one, it’s an economic one and that for some reason that the economist [inaudible 00:43:47] will tell us that the economic inequality that we’ve had particularly in the 21st century… And much of this may be explained by the globalization story and perhaps therefore indirectly explaining some of Trump’s appeal that the economic inequality we’ve had in the 21st century isn’t delivering the kind of growth that it could and should.
And I think to a certain extent, some of the exasperation with it is a function of that. It’s certainly delivering growth around the rest of the world and certainly more in the United States than it is in… Well, when I say the rest of the world, in developing countries, certainly in the United States more than it is in Europe. But it’s not, for some reason, making us grow in a way that we were accustomed to in the last half of the 20th century, particularly in decades like the 1950s, ’60s and ’90s and to a certain extent, the ’80s. And that’s causing some of the political problems. So if-
… Causing some of the political problems. So if inequality is letting us down, it’s letting us down in much… it’s not providing the broader economic performance that it should, then it’s letting us down and giving us a condition that we really, really don’t want.
Matt Grossmann: So what about an alternative story of success? That is, if you look at taxes and transfer policy in the US since the middle of the 20th century, it is actually quite progressive, and it does reduce inequality dramatically relative to the market outcomes. So is there a role for that story, that actually, what’s happened is not a kind of a lack of concern, but to some degree, an effectiveness of the existing policy regime, that we do have pretty progressive taxation already, we do have a safety net that operates more through the tax code, but that has alleviated poverty more dramatically than we might think, and that really, it’s a story of success rather than lack of concern that explains this?
Andrew Taylor: Yeah, possibly. Although the economic model hasn’t really changed as I noted earlier on in the conversation, at least the model that the American people kind of want, and yet we do have periods. And it’s not exclusively now, many of us who remember the 1970s will remember I think a similar period of economic angst, if we want to call it that, at little bit lower levels of inequality, but nevertheless, a sense that things were going awry, that individual American households were going to… their economic situation is going to deteriorate, that future generations might not be as well off as current generation is.
And so there is that kind of economic angst that periodically shows its face. But the general model that the American people have in mind I think has been pretty similar across the period, and it has been successful. Again, relative… over the long period, let’s say the 80 years of the post World War II period, and relative to most countries in the world, that it’s amazing given how concerned we’ve been recently about the performance of the American economy and the future, that you look at even growth post COVID, and the US growth has been far outpacing that of European countries to the extent whereby most major European countries have GDP per capitas that are amongst some of the poorer of the 50 American states. That seems to me to be a success story, at least a success story relative to European countries of this basic model, which, again, as I said, is not unbridled capitalism, the American people don’t want that.
This isn’t a book that we’re all closet libertarians by any stretch of the imagination. But certainly, we sort of bought into this model that you described in the question. And it’s done pretty well, and as a result, the kind of frustration perhaps that many political scientists believe that we should be seeing amongst the general public isn’t there.
Matt Grossmann: So what’s the most pessimistic story about American inequality and American politics that you think is still plausible after your effort to take down some of this literature? If you had to build back up the kind of conventional case, what is still there?
Andrew Taylor: Well, the institution’s argument is pretty interesting, but I would say, and this is even the final sentence of the book, to that institutional argument, you need to be careful for what you want, because if you do believe that the institutions are blocking majority sentiment through, I don’t know, the electoral college, separation of powers, the Senate filibuster, the presidential veto, and you want to go full on majority rule, given what my book argues, you might not get the kind of left of center economic policies that you want. So you should be careful of that. But I guess on the institutional side, we don’t want complete dysfunction, and perhaps, the incapacity of the system to deal particularly with economic crises. And we saw it work, I guess, pretty well in COVID, even some of that was under a divided government, and getting a lot of COVID relief, we’ll have to argue maybe, we still can’t argue, still too early to see whether that was successful from an economic point of view. But it worked, it got stuff done. But it may well be that it could become so dysfunctional that it couldn’t deal with rising crises.
And my personal sense is that we’re going to have some fiscal reckoning here sometime in the maybe near future, although I’ve been saying that for a while, and it will be interesting to see whether institutionally… even if the public is willing to make some real sacrifices, whether institutionally, we will be able to do that, particularly since neither of the political party seems to be interested in talking about fiscal constraint, and the public’s tolerance for debt has been growing as well. So that could be a pessimistic outcome. And presumably, at some stage, the economists would say, at some stage, you have inequality that just doesn’t work for anybody. And I did mention that earlier on in the conversation, that my one concern was that the inequality wasn’t producing the kind of growth that it had been in the past, and maybe that could be an issue.
There are other things that are creating problems with growth, and there are other opportunities that growth might increase, particularly if we get productivity gains through some technological innovations that we’re experiencing. But at the moment, it isn’t, and that could be a real problem. And I think if we get no… little growth, that’s the kind of stuff that gets the public upset and may lead to a change in what they want.
Matt Grossmann: So let’s say that you were talking to two different audiences here who are kind of off the path of public opinion, as you describe it, well, first is the left that really wants more higher taxes on the rich to support a bigger social welfare state, and then second, if you’re talking to the libertarian audience that really does want to reduce the size and scope of our existing redistributive programs, what are kind of the actionable lessons from what you’ve found for each of those audiences?
Andrew Taylor: Well, I guess for the left, it would be you’ve got to work on public opinion, and you’ve got to work on… well, you’ve got to work on your team a little bit more, and particularly since the leadership now is increasingly… the engine room of the Democratic Party is increasingly white collar, well-educated, affluent, you’ve got to make them walk the walk as well as talk the talk, I guess, and be more invested in redistributive policy. I think it’s telling, it was really telling during the Biden years, and Biden… Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and others are starting to talk about, we need a tax the rich. And they’re very clear… Biden was very clear, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the time. That meant no one under… 400 grand a year, married couples that make less than $400,000 a year, they’re off, don’t worry about your taxes being raised, we’re not going to do that to you.
And that was conscious, because that’s probably the sweet spot for the valuable Democrat, the one that votes a lot, the one that is active, the one that gives money. It’s a coastal married millennial couple, one’s a lawyer, one’s a doctor. And so maybe they need to pay more taxes, and you need to convince them that they need to pay more taxes if you’re on the left. You can go after the billionaires, but you can only squeeze so much orange from that juice, and if you’re really interested in wide scale redistribution, you might have to go after some of your own. For the libertarians, I do think there is a sort of myth that Americans are all Adam Smiths, or something like that. And they do believe in basically the supremacy of the market over government as a means of redistributing resources, but they are interested in a certain amount of, as I said, what I call a safety net.
They are tolerant of debt, they are very interested in the provision of public goods and resources being directed towards them. And that’s something that people… the libertarian right I think found out a little bit in the middle part of the 2000s. You mentioned Paul Ryan, the end of the Paul Ryan part of the party. I think President George W. Bush realized that when he started to try to play with social security, that they… we do think of the United States as the paragon of capitalism, and the American people, relative to those in other countries, clearly are more embracing of basic capitalism, but to take them the whole way, they’re just not going to go there, and you need to realize that and act accordingly. So I guess that would be my advice for the two sides there on how to interpret the findings of the book.
Matt Grossmann: Anything you want to tout about what’s next, or anything we didn’t get to that you want to include?
Andrew Taylor: Well, I’m interested in a lot of things, Matt, like you are, I do think, and I do want to explore at some stage the role that occupation has played in all of this. You’ve done a lot of work on education, but I have a sense that… and not just this, I mean, I guess when I say this, I’m not talking about economic inequality now, I’m really talking about partisan polarization and our polarized politics, I do think that there is something about what happened in the last part of the 20th century with regards to the relationship between occupation, and wealth, and political perspectives. I think part of this is we’ve seen a real polarization, for example… and this is at the elite level, this is an elite level story, we’ve seen real polarization of elites along occupational lines between professionals and those in business and commerce.
Even within business, we see it between those who work in large organizations and those who have small businesses. We’ve seen a rise in the number of professionals who run big corporations, C-suite is now full of lawyers in a way that it wasn’t in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I think globalization plays a large role in that. And I’m interested in sort of teasing some of these things out with regards to occupation in a way I’ve kind of done with income, and the way that you and Dave Hopkins have done with education, and seeing how that sort of contributes to the story of American politics in the 21st century, which is not only one of course of economic inequality, relative economic inequality, but also one of great polarization along party lines.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website, Labor Union Influence on Inequality and Legacy Costs, How Marriage and Inequality Reinforce Partisan Polarization, How to Change American’s Views of Inequality, Teaching and TV, Does Anyone Speak For The Poor In Congress? And Why Rising Inequality Doesn’t Stimulate Political Action? Thanks to Andrew Taylor for joining me. Please check out A Tolerance for Inequality and then listen in next time.
