HOMMERICH CAROLA

Abstract This chapter explores the impact of inequality-normalizing narratives on attitudes toward income inequality. Focusing on economically developed East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), it examines how inequality-normalizing narratives and social status relate to individuals’ acceptance of income inequality. Drawing on the latest subset of the World Values Survey (7th wave, 2017–20), it finds stronger alignment with narratives that legitimize inequality (e.g., individual responsibility, belief in the merits of competition, meritocracy, hard work, and the importance of freedom over equality) to be an important predictor of acceptance of income inequality. For all three countries, we find that belief in inequality-legitimizing narratives provides a more robust explanation for the acceptance of unequal income distributions compared to subjective social status. The chapter highlights how narratives that normalize income inequality are deeply entrenched in developed market economies, regardless of their developmental pathways.

Abstract People who are socioeconomically better off tend to report higher levels of well-being, with inconsistent roles ascribed to objective socioeconomic status (SES), subjective SES (SSES), and personal relative deprivation (PRD)—depending on the predictors, facets of well-being, and countries under study. We tested a comprehensive model of social status indicators as determinants of subjective well-being by a) including PRD, SSES, income, and education as predictors, b) assessing subjective well-being as well as interdependent happiness (happiness in relation to significant others), c) testing the model in Japan, Germany, and the US—countries with comparable societal structure (e.g., educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) but diverging cultural dimensions, and d) testing an explanatory variable: feeling excluded from society. Cross-culturally (N = 2,155), PRD and SSES independently and strongly predicted well-being, while income and education exhibited negligible direct effects. SSES emerged as the predominant predictor in Japan compared to the US and Germany, whereas PRD was the predominant predictor in the US compared to Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan. This was largely accounted for by culture-specific links of social status with perceived social exclusion—the extent to which people feel unable to keep up with society as a whole. Perceived social exclusion was more strongly linked to SSES in Japan compared to Germany and the US, and more strongly linked to PRD in the US than in Germany. The role of perceived social exclusion as an explanatory variable in the relationship between social status and subjective well-being merits further investigation within and between countries.

Since the economic boom of the 1970s, Japan was generally discussed as a mass middle-class society. This image was based less on objective status indicators and more on the fact that over 90% of Japanese self-identify as middle class. Even with an increase in income inequality and the onset of the discourse on Japan as a gap society since the mid-2000s, the distribution of self-identification has hardly changed. However, this does not mean that the objective shifts in Japan’s social structure have gone unnoticed by the population. The way objective changes have impacted evaluations of individual social status is simply more subtle: what has changed is not the distribution of how people self-identify, but rather the way their objective social status (measured via education, occupation and income) impacts their self-evaluation. Added up, the share of the population that places itself in the middle has not remarkably changed. But, whereas there was no clear concept of what it meant to be upper or lower middle in the mid-1980s, resulting in rather arbitrary self-placement, there now seems to be more awareness of distinctions also within the middle. As a result, self-placement has bec

<p>Within the booming field of research on subjective well-being, happiness and unhappiness have so far been treated as two ends of a continuum with causes and mechanisms being the same for both. Still, this is not self-evident. We here use the SSP2015 survey data to investigate whether happiness and unhappiness have the same determinants. To do so, we classify the respondents into three well-being groups: the "happier than average," the "average," and the "less happy than average." We conduct a multinomial logistic regression analysis to disentangle the effects of education depending on the level of happiness. Our results imply that (1) more education promotes happiness of unhappy people. At the same time, however, we find that (2) an increase in education reduces the happiness of happy people. This means that the impact of education on happiness is by no means straightforward, but that it can have opposing effects depending on the happiness level. This supports our hypothesis that some determinants have different effects on different happiness levels. It also implies that an enhancement of subjective well-being cannot be achieved in the same way for happy and unhappy people. Therefore, happiness and unhappiness turn out not to be two sides of the same coin.</p>