Youths? understandings and judgments of national wealth distribution in the midst of extreme inequality: the Argentine case.

BARREIRO, ALICIA; CECILIA WAINRYB; ARSENIO, WILLIAM

Austin, Texas

Congreso; 2017 SRCD Biennial Meeting; 2017

Society for Research in Child Development

Even as economic inequality has increased in industrialized countries, those disparities pale in comparison to the depth of inequality common in developing countries. Argentina, where this study was conducted, features profound wealth disparities. According to the 20:20 ratio (an index of how much richer the top 20% of a population are to the bottom 20%, which correlates with established indicators of human development and social stability), the richest 20% in Argentina earned 18 times more than the poorest 20%. By comparison, in Sweden the richest 20% earned only 4 times more, and in the US the ratio was 8 times. Although the importance of youths? conceptions of inequality is broadly recognized, relevant research has been limited to samples from industrialized countries with moderate wealth disparities. This is a first study to explore how youth growing up in the midst of more extreme economic disparities understand and evaluate the distribution of wealth in their country.Participants were 767 high-school students (57% female) in 3 age groups (12-14, 15-16, 17-19) drawn from low-, middle-, and high-SES schools. Participants were given five diagrams depicting distinct patterns of wealth distributions (Niehues, 2014) and asked to pick the ones that best describe the actual and ideal wealth distributions in Argentina, and evaluate the fairness of the actual distribution. To assess youth?s tendency to justify the prevailing social order (Kay & Jost, 2003), two measures of attitudes about less explicitly economic aspects of societal fairness were included: trust in the social system (Anes, 2012), and overall societal fairness (Flanagan, 2007). Most participants (62%) depicted the actual wealth distribution as a pyramid with a small wealthy class, a larger middle class, and a majority of either poor or very poor, and most thought the ideal wealth distribution was one where most people are middle class (43%) or wealthy (37%); most (64%) also rated the actual wealth distribution in Argentina as very or somewhat unfair, though those who thought the actual distribution was egalitarian also rated it as more fair (p