Changing the narrative on wealth inequality

Wealth inequality distorts democratic political cultures

Economic elites are able to exert political influence (so-called ‘elite capture’). The very wealthy can use their resources to influence politics in ways which ultimately protect their assets from redistribution (Bartels, 2016). Wealth generates power, which is used to protect wealth, creating an ‘inequality trap’.

Public concern about elite capture erodes trust in government. The overall increase in wealth stocks in the UK during the past forty years has led to worries that a small wealth elite is coming to have disproportionate power and influence. Hirneis (2023), for the APPG on Inclusive Growth, found that the public now feels ‘the very rich’ have more influence than the government (39% vs 24%). Low trust in government makes it less likely that people will demand redistribution of any sort.

Wealth is increasingly inherited, not earned. British people are not averse to some differences in levels of income and wealth, especially when these are endorsed by meritocratic beliefs. But these shared beliefs are undermined by the increasing effects of luck (via inheritance) and the transmission of wealth and other advantages within families and across generations. Inheritance – not hard work – is the principal route to wealth ownership, constituting 60% of all private wealth in the UK (Alvaredo, Garbinti and Piketty, 2017). The children of the wealthiest fifth of parents are 8 times more likely to be in the wealthiest fifth themselves than are the children of the poorest fifth (Davenport, Levell and Sturrock, 2021).

When economic inequalities are such that people lead different lives, social cohesion is threatened. While wealth inequality has only risen slightly since the 1980s, significant growth in the size of overall wealth means that absolute differences have grown between richer and poorer households, with correspondingly higher barriers to social mobility (Broome and Leslie, 2022).

This growth in absolute wealth has created gaps between groups which are no longer recuperable by earning a high income. This effect is further compounded by stagnating wages, which are decreasingly able to offer the promise of saving upwards across the wealth distribution. The effect is, people no longer feel they are playing the same game, or playing by the same rules.

Savage et al’s. forthcoming review of wealth inequality in the UK has a clear message: ‘If we want Britain to be an inclusive and open society, we need to tackle wealth inequality.’

This report starts from the premise that if we want to tackle wealth inequality, we need to better understand the factors that contribute to its low public and political salience. What can narrative change organisations do to increase the awareness of and engagement with this era-defining issue?

More public understanding of wealth inequality could change concern to action

The literature identifies distinct steps in preference formation around redistribution. These are: perceiving inequality to be high, recognising high inequality as unfair (or illegitimate), translating this concern about inequality into support for government intervention in general, and supporting specific proposals for government intervention. These steps don’t necessarily follow on mechanically from one another. For example, although 72% of people in the UK think economic inequality is too high (Hirneis, 2023), the complex set of beliefs summarised in the Why does wealth inequality matter? section above (and the system-justifying beliefs outlined in the next section, on existing beliefs) may mitigate against these high levels of concern translating straightforwardly into desire for action to remedy it.

Part of the difficulty in translating concern into action may be related to well-documented low levels of public economic and fiscal literacy referenced in 1 above. However, the evidence is ambiguous. Where Rowlingson (2023) advocates for better public education about the tax system and the levels of inequality it generates as a means of increasing concern about inequality and raising support for distribution, Trump (2018) provides empirical evidence for the ‘adjustment hypothesis’, the claim that as people become informed about higher levels of inequality, they shift towards justifying the new, higher levels (that is, they adjust their fairness evaluations to the new reality). This accounts for a key finding in the literature: that concern about inequality does not necessarily grow as inequality grows.

In this context, more information doesn’t always do the job we would like it to. The production of information about inequality which is taken to self-evidently build the case for action, has the potential in effect to do the reverse – it can seem to drain the urgency from the crisis or even help to acclimatise the public to higher levels of inequality in the way described by Trump (2018 and 2020). The effect of this information can be modified by the social and interactive ways in which opinion formation takes shape (Summers et al., 2022).

Second, a statistical appreciation of inequality (understanding how big the problem is) isn’t the same as a normative assessment of inequity (understanding why it matters and making a judgement about it). The polling data (Hebden and Palmer, 2020; Hebden et al., 2020; NEON, 2018; Fairness Foundation, 2023) and the deliberative focus group work (Summers et al., 2022) find these normative assessments of inequity to be more significant for the politics of wealth: preference formation (support for or opposition to redistribution) is found to be shaped more by the perceived behaviours of the rich than an understanding (accurate or not) of the amount of wealth they hold. This aligns with the research on income, which similarly shows that it is the amount of unfair inequality rather than inequality per se which shapes support for redistribution (Ahrens, 2022).

Finally, and importantly, a strong focus on literacy presents the issue as one of public cognitive deficit and underplays the responsibility of media and political discourse for what can be an elite, highly-financialised, partial and often partisan rendering of ‘the’ economy, which feels distanced from ‘the real economy’ as experienced by the general public (Davis, 2018). We’ll return to this in the section below, on the media.

Discussion points

• Raising levels of concern can cause people to become less motivated to seek change. This means that the use of diagnostic framing (shaping what the problem is perceived to be) needs to be undertaken with care. A frame that helps improve the accuracy of people’s perceptions of levels of wealth inequality may actually reduce support for redistribution in certain contexts and amongst certain demographics.
• Link prognostic framing (that is, solutions-oriented framing) to the public’s existing moral economic sensibility to ‘bad behaviours’ of the extremely rich (for instance, non-cooperation, unfairly acquired or unearned wealth).
• Different tools appeal to different kinds of cognitive processes. Data and information can help to raise concern but narratives appeal to moral decision-making (Prabhakar, 2009). Given that a majority of respondents now think economic inequality is too high, there may be more room for progressing the moral case about why this matters: this is the terrain that comes across as the most fertile in our literature review. In this case, narratives rather than (or in addition to) numbers might be more effective in shifting public opinion.

Existing beliefs can be a barrier to progressive change

Our literature review overwhelmingly found that system-justifying beliefs amongst the public, such as meritocracy and equality of opportunity, are a significant barrier to building political pressure for change.

Such beliefs make it less likely that the public will even perceive the current distribution to be unfair. Some research found that when individuals have access to the same factual information, those who are inclined to defend the status quo perceive less inequality (Trump 2020). System-justifying beliefs also make it less likely that once inequality is perceived to be high, people will judge this to be unfair.

System-justification is more prevalent amongst privileged groups, and amongst those on the political right. Hoyt et al., (2018) found that while liberals need distributional data on injustice alone in order to be motivated to act on wealth, conservatives needed that data plus confirmation that the system of allocation was unfair before being motivated to act. Messaging that for some groups might be met with system-justification (distributional data to conservatives in the example above), in others will stimulate action against inequality.

Alongside system-justifying beliefs like meritocracy and equality of opportunity, other factors modify both the perceptions of, and the perceived legitimacy of, economic inequality, including political party affiliation and membership (Hoyt et al., 2018), locality (Hecht et al., 2022a; Minkoff and Lyons, 2019), trust in government (Kuziemko et al., 2015), and the ways in which we talk about and develop opinions through social interaction (Summers et al., 2022). This means that the effects of framing are highly context specific, and in the presence of particular configurations of these affiliations and beliefs, are likely to produce divergent responses. Fatemi et al. (2008), for example, found that if people started off with negative views about estate tax, putting a positive frame around it made them feel more negative.

Discussion points

• Narrative change funders and organisations will need to consider the trade-offs between recognising and acknowledging strongly-held system-justifying beliefs and working within the constraints they set (Hecht et al., 2022a); and recognising and acknowledging these beliefs and making trying to change them the focus of activity (García-Sánchez et al., 2019).
• Perceptions of systemic unfairness might help to blunt the power of system justification (Hoyt et al., 2018). If people perceive the system to be unfair (rigged), they are less likely to have faith in meritocracy, and more likely to support redistribution. This is particularly important for conservatives (Table 1). However, viewing the system as rigged may simultaneously increase evaluations of inequality as unfair, while also decreasing political efficacy and support for specific forms of redistribution (‘they’re all crooks, so nothing’s going to change’). Further research is needed to unpick these complex interactions.

• If people make sense of the world using local references (Kuziemko et al., 2015), can local references be used more often and more effectively to help draw attention to wealth inequality (at the city level, for example)? Some of the research suggested that people may be more likely to make political decisions to tackle inequality if they ‘build connections between their immediate situation and the broader, social, political and economic factors’ (García-Sánchez et al., 2018) and if their attention can be focused on the ‘consequences of economic inequality in their daily lives’ (García-Castro et al., 2020).

Subsuming wealth inequality into a tax justice agenda might hamper the wider cause

The literature demonstrated that a potentially rich debate on the moral economy of wealth which could well act to counter the potency of system-justifying beliefs is too readily subsumed into conversations about the viability or legitimacy of wealth tax or inheritance tax.

Frames establish not only that something is a problem but also help to establish ‘what kind of problem it is’ (García-Sánchez et al., 2020), who is to blame, and who is responsible for addressing it. Frames are a way of linking specific problem definitions to specific solutions, yet our observation is that UK organisations have at times avoided clear problem definition in a potentially limiting ‘catch-all’ strategy to muster support for a desired (fiscal) solution. This premature narrowing down means that a range of moral economic questions around accumulation, wealth-making processes and pre-distributive questions of equity are circumvented. Put more bluntly, are wealth taxes a solution to inequality or budget deficits?

Because of the complex relationship that the UK public has towards wealth, it is ‘reductionist to consider wealth and its taxation as representing only an economic matter for most people’ (Hecht et al., 2022b). Taxation as a tool for equalising or concentrating wealth could be better integrated into wider conversations about our moral economy.

Discussion points

• Tax justice work is crucial and has added much to the understandings of public views and sensibilities towards wealth and the wealthy (Hebden and Palmer, 2020 and Hebden et al., 2020). However, tax-focused work needs to be complemented by a fuller diagnostic of what the problem is. Such a diagnostic could enrich the tax justice agenda to ensure it is not a thin descriptive set of technical reforms. A fuller diagnostic of the problem could also stimulate a richer range of solutions. For example, if the problem of wealth inequality includes, as Robeyns’ work on limitarianism suggests that it does (2019; 2024), a bleed between financial and political power, this is unlikely to be stopped by a wealth tax alone.
• Robeyns et al. (2021) hypothesised that ‘citizens may be unwilling to support policies that limit a person’s wealth if it is unclear what society would gain’. They found that 69% of respondents agreed that if the government had to choose between cutting services on the most vulnerable people in society and increasing taxes on the income of the rich and super-rich, they should choose a tax increase. Taxes might usefully be presented as a choice (for example, failing to tax extreme wealth as a choice to leave poverty unaddressed), drawing on earlier insights from fiscal sociology which position taxes as defining the ‘inequalities we accept and those that we collectively seek to redress’ (Martin et al., 2009).

The media tends to legitimise wealth inequality and offer reformist, not radical, solutions

The way that wealth inequality is framed in the media shapes public understanding and preference formation. The media tends to have an unquestioning attitude towards orthodox economics (Schifferes and Knowles, 2022) and tends towards reformism over radicalism (Vaughan et al., forthcoming).

The failure of the media to communicate the economy and taxation fulsomely and critically is the other side of the coin of low levels of public economic literacy and relatedly, of low levels of public support for redistribution.

There are several concerns identified in our literature review relating to the media’s role in the framing of the economy and taxation:

• Concentration of media ownership leads to a small number of narratives circulating, and these narratives tend to privilege a narrow range of orthodox economic perspectives (Limbert and Bullock, 2009; Epp and Jennings, 2021; Schifferes and Knowles, 2022). Personal failure frames predominate over social failure frames. The public response to personal failure frames tends to be low levels of support for redistribution.
• There is a tendency across all media (right and left) to leave the terms of the debate unchallenged – business and financial news coverage tends to be framed around pro-market explanations with little questioning of the ‘overarching economic philosophy of free-market capitalism’ (Robertson, 2020; Grisold and Thiene, 2017).
• Special interest groups with media influence can shape frames to deliver specific beneficial outcomes (Emmenegger and Marx, 2019; Harrington, 2016).
• The media tends to legitimise wealth and the rich and fails to focus on their role in determining the rules that protect their wealth. This points to an endemic failure to connect economic and political spheres in public narratives about wealth and inequality (Grabner et al., 2020).

Discussion points

• Legacy media organisations continue to matter, especially for political elites, but it is possible that the most effective narrative shift will initially work around not through mainstream news organisations, which are increasingly characterised by fragmenting agendas and audiences.
• Make space for heterodox economic thinking in the media. There is more than one legitimate way of understanding the economy.
• Media framing is a key part of the mix of influences on public attitudes but needs to be used in a targeted way because prior beliefs can modify the effects of frame (Fatemi et al., 2008) and political party membership can modify the effects and intensity of effects. This means that content of the frame and the political sponsor matter differently for different constituencies. The increasing influence of party ‘sponsors’ means that getting political buy-in will be key to shifting public opinion.

Different frames shape understanding of, and response to, economic inequality

Advantage and disadvantage frames

Although the findings in the literature on the effects of advantage and disadvantage frames (respectively, versions of ‘the rich have more than the poor’ or ‘the poor have less than the rich’) are highly context-dependent, there are key consistencies (see Appendix 1): namely, that disadvantage frames tend to drive support for solutions that help the disadvantaged group; and that advantage frames tend to drive support for solutions that harm the privileged group. What the results have in common is the finding that framing is fundamental to perceptions of the legitimacy of economic inequality (Bruckmüller et al., 2017).

Discussion points

• Explore the idea of advantaging and disadvantaging processes (Jun et al., 2022). Recognise and describe these as active (legislative, political, economic) interventions made in support of inequality.
• There is a challenge: people might be less responsive to advantage-reducing frames than disadvantage reducing frames (Dietze and Craig, 2021); but when advantage frames are used, people propose remedies that harm the privileged group (advantage reducing) (Dover, 2022).  More work might need to be done to test the limits of what people will tolerate in terms of advantage frames before they respond defensively. This is likely to differ for more or less privileged groups.

Social failure frames or personal failure frames

Acceptance of inequality is related to how people explain positive and negative economic outcomes. Explanations that focus on individual agency lead to higher tolerance for inequality - if you can improve your economic fortunes through hard work, then if you haven’t done so it must be your fault. In more unequal societies, people tend to think that their (high or low) economic position is their doing, and this lowers demand for redistribution (Mijs, 2021). 

Explanations that focus on structural and social factors, conversely, make it more likely that people will express concern about poverty and demonstrate willingness to address it – the ‘system’ is unfair and making it impossible for people to advance. Belief in meritocracy or other forms of system justification (the focus of the point on existing beliefs, above) reduces the likelihood that people will attribute economic outcomes to structural factors. 

The literature observes a trend in attitudes of richer and poorer people in the 1990s-2000s away from a social failure frame to a personal failure one (Epp and Jennings, 2020), making people at the bottom less supportive of welfare in line with people at the top. There is a risk, then, that as inequality continues to rise, concern about it might not only fail to keep pace, it might even recede. 

The corollary of personal failure frames used to explain poverty are personal success frames used to legitimate wealth, in which very wealthy individuals are presented as ‘self-made’, their success an effect of their hard work or ingenuity with ‘the structural processes that reproduce advantage…obscured’ through a process of ‘discursive misdirection’ (Serafini and Maguire, 2019; Waitkus and Wallaschek, 2022). The effect of this can be to ‘individualise and naturalise inequality’.

Discussion points

• Frames which foreground personal agency in economic outcomes deflect attention from the disadvantaging and advantaging interventions of the state (such as, for example, enabling a low-wage culture at one end, and failing to cap large bonuses at the other). Personal agency frames are a barrier to tackling wealth inequality because they contribute to justifying the status quo. How can more compelling ‘social failure’ narratives be created with regards to wealth inequality? Given what we know about the public dislike for frames that vilify individuals, is it possible that frames that vilify systems might have more success?
• We know that support for redistribution increases when rich people are felt to be acting in a non-cooperative or anti-social way, that is, when their individual behaviours are creating problematic social effects. We also know that personal failure frames when used in the context of poverty tend to increase the condemnation of the poor and make them appear responsible for their condition (Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017).  What might the effect be on support for redistribution of personal failure frames applied to the non-cooperative extremely rich population? Is it possible to circumvent the hostility towards ‘vilifying’ frames if bad behaviours are in play?
• Findings on the effects of ‘episodic’ framing (which highlight individuals and their behaviours) over ‘thematic’ framing (which highlight social trends) (Max and Baumgartner, 2013) are highly context-dependent. It is not always the case that episodic frames lower support for redistribution. So, for example, while some research finds that presenting a few rich individuals as extraordinary can tend to obscure the ‘very many other less publicly visible highly-affluent people’ (Serafini and Maguire, 2019), other work suggests that presenting a few rich individuals as non-cooperative can draw attention towards the social effects of non-cooperation by the very wealthy as a group. 
• In some contexts, episodic frames help to draw attention to system-level problems, and an individual comes to stand in for system-level problems. For example, Robeyns et al. (2021) compared the effect of a statement presented in the abstract about extreme wealth with a concrete example (in their context, Jeff Bezos). They found the latter increased support for limiting extreme riches.

Visual frames

The repertoire of images used to support text-based media and civil society engagement around wealth inequality is restricted and lacks criticality (Vaughan and Kerr, forthcoming).

Images typically used to communicate about wealth inequality or to illustrate articles and advocacy content on wealth inequality can tend to rely on stock photographs which function as ‘single-item lists of what it takes to be super-rich’. This is problematic because it can seem to erase ‘both the super-rich themselves and the causes and effects of the extreme wealth gap’ (Jaworski and Thurlow 2017, and Image 9).

This kind of luxury-goods image selection is also problematic because these are the exact same images used to illustrate luxury lifestyle brochures. In the presence of these images, can accompanying text ‘successfully anchor associations away from their consumerist origins’, which have been shown to reduce support for redistributive politics (Vaughan and Kerr, forthcoming)?

There is a lack of imagery emphasising the interdependencies of lives lived in poverty and lives lived in extreme wealth (Vaughan and Kerr, forthcoming): media and campaigning images tend to represent either poverty or wealth, or they are contrastive, seeking to shock viewers by juxtaposing extremes (Image 1).

Ideas

The findings in Vaughan and Kerr (forthcoming) suggest that media and campaigning images are implicated in the failure to connect economic and political spheres identified in the wider framing work by Grabner et al., (2020). How can images avoid defaulting to narrowing the focus to specific parts of the picture (wealth OR poverty rather than the relationship between the two)? How can news media use imagery to more directly visualise the interdependencies between great wealth and deep poverty?

The current ways that wealth is visually represented constitutes ‘discursive misdirection’. Images tend to actively keep the eye on the surface (of buildings, cars, people, consumer goods), which several of our authors suggested frees the rich and their wealth from responsibility for social harm. Images need to engage with process, through thematic framing or social failure frames, to shine light on the advantaging processes (for example, media influence to maintain the predominance of personal failure framing) that are only available to the extremely rich, and which only benefit them (Beckert, 2023).

There is a general lack of iconic symbolic resources which act as shortcuts for the problems of wealth inequality (for example, it is notable that few campaigners, academics or journalists use ‘the same’ symbols). Is it possible to start cohering around key symbols, which avoid the trap of depicting luxury commodities, to reinforce shared narratives?

What else might it be useful to know? A future research agenda

The literature review overall drew attention to gaps in the evidence base that would benefit from new research.

A new research agenda should include the following:

• Exploring the relative effect of advantage and disadvantage frames on support for wealth redistribution in the UK, along with work isolating the effect of some of the wide range of variables referenced earlier (prior beliefs, ideology, party affiliation, locality, social interaction).
• Testing the effect of advantage frames on increasing opposition to high levels of wealth inequality by targeting the specific forms of wealth/wealth ownership that the public feels are illegitimate. These might include unearned wealth, wealth acquired through luck and inheritance, for example.
• Work on the role of images in the framing of wealth inequality. What images work to generate concern? What images work to translate concern into preference formation? What images work with existing system-justifying beliefs? What images challenge these beliefs? Is it possible to use image series to enable a more expansive engagement with inequality-producing processes? Do we need to more consistently anchor images to meanings using text descriptions?