Who are you most likely to think deserves to be rich? An elite athlete? An entrepreneur? A pop star? Maybe even a lucky lottery winner?
This question was put to 1,084 people by researchers at Ipsos MORI for a brand-new study commissioned for my book The Rich in Public Opinion.
Among the study’s key findings are numbers suggesting that people are most likely to think entrepreneurs deserve their wealth (53%), followed by the self-employed (44%) and creatives such as actors or musicians (35%). At the bottom of the pile rest senior bankers, who only 14% think deserve to be rich.
Here are the full findings:
- Entrepreneurs: 53%
- Self-employed: 44%
- Creatives and artists: 35%
- Property investors: 27%
- Lottery winners: 27%
- Property investors: 27%
- Financial investors: 25%
- Top athletes: 22%
- Senior-level managers: 21%
- Heirs: 18%
- Senior bankers: 14%
- None of these: 12%
- Don’t know: 19%
The study developed a social envy scale to categorize respondents according to the extent to which they envy the rich. Based on survey responses to a range of questions, three groups emerged: social enviers, non-enviers, and a third group, the ambivalent. It is noticeable that social enviers are more likely to think that lottery winners deserve their wealth than people who experience little or no social envy. Among social enviers in the United States, 34% believe that lottery winners deserve to be rich compared to just 21% of non-enviers.
The same question was also asked in three other countries: Germany, France, and Great Britain. In each country, social enviers were most likely to believe that lottery winners deserve to be rich. In fact, the difference between enviers and non-enviers in these European countries was even more striking than in the U.S. Take Germany, for example: 61% of social enviers in Germany agree that lottery winners deserve their wealth, significantly more than those who deem the self-employed (49%), creative people (48%), or entrepreneurs (33%) deserving of their wealth. The figures for non-enviers in Germany are quite different, with 71% agreeing that the self-employed deserve to be rich, 68% saying the same of entrepreneurs, and 53% feeling positively disposed toward rich creative people. Lottery winners rank only fourth among non-enviers, at 49%.
The fact that social enviers are most likely to say that lottery winners deserve to be rich may seem surprising at first glance and certainly needs some explanation. After all, other rich groups are vehemently criticized for the alleged discrepancies between how long and hard they work and their wealth. This is an opinion held, for example, in relation to senior-level managers: 61% of social enviers (but only 24% of non-enviers) in the U.S. agree with the statement “I think it is inappropriate for managers to earn so much more as they do not work so much longer and harder than their employees.”
It certainly seems paradoxical: Why do social enviers doubt that managers deserve their wealth while at the same time believing that lottery winners, of all people, whose only real “achievement” was randomly filling out a lottery ticket correctly? As the sociologist Helmut Schoeck has tellingly observed, envious people are most likely to think that advantages are deserved when the advantages are the result of luck and chance rather than of achievement and merit. After all, if someone has gained an advantage through luck or chance, unlike when the advantage is based on achievement, it does not lead to the nagging question of why someone else does not have the same advantages.
Schoeck even cited lottery winners as an example. The random selection process of a lottery ensures that the winner is not envied: “A wife will not nag her husband for not having bought the right lottery ticket. ... No one could seriously suffer from an inferiority complex as a result of repeated failure.” In terms of self-esteem, it is therefore easier to accept the good fortune of a lottery winner without envy than it is to come to terms with the success of an entrepreneur or a senior-level manager. Moreover, people who play the lottery think there is even a remote chance that they could join the ranks of the lucky winners themselves at some point.
Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is also the author of The Power of Capitalism and The Rich in Public Opinion: What We Think When We Think about Wealth.
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July 30, 2020 at 05:30PM
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