IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ireced/v30y2019ic18.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Student preconceptions and reality: A survey exercise to teach wealth inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Barnes, William
  • Easton, Todd
  • Hanig, Ross Leupp

Abstract

This paper presents a way to enhance student interest and learning when teaching economic inequality. The approach draws on a well-known survey conducted by Norton and Ariely (2011). The approach involves surveying students, asking them to estimate the current level of wealth inequality in the US, and asking them to state their ideal level of wealth inequality. As in Norton and Ariely’s survey of a representative sample of Americans, our students underestimated actual wealth inequality and preferred a distribution of wealth for the US that was more equal than any country’s distribution. We suggest ways the student survey results can be presented and discussed. We also provide Stata code and an Excel workbook to ease effective classroom presentation of the survey results. This approach to beginning the study of inequality piqued our students’ interest and helped them understand how inequality is measured.

Suggested Citation

  • Barnes, William & Easton, Todd & Hanig, Ross Leupp, 2019. "Student preconceptions and reality: A survey exercise to teach wealth inequality," International Review of Economics Education, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 1-1.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ireced:v:30:y:2019:i:c:18
    DOI: 10.1016/j.iree.2018.02.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147738801630041X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.iree.2018.02.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Humberto Barreto, 2023. "One-shot Economic Mobility via Microsoft Excel," Working Papers 2023-01, DePauw University, School of Business and Leadership and Department of Economics and Management.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic education; Pedagogy; Wealth distribution; Inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A22 - General Economics and Teaching - - Economic Education and Teaching of Economics - - - Undergraduate
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ireced:v:30:y:2019:i:c:18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-review-of-economics-education .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.