Global Rich and Poor

Abstract: Do the rich converge into a culturally uniform “global elite,” and is there consensus on how people view them? We first split 259,388 people from 92 countries by relative income and compare the endorsement of 110 moral, economic, and political values between the relative “haves” and “have-nots” in each country. Higher income is associated with lower religiosity, greater trust in strangers and institutions, and greater acceptance of abortion and homosexuality. These correlations are robust across the Global North but are weaker, often absent, or even reversed in the Global South. As a result, higher-income groups display greater cultural differentiation across countries. Using a different dataset (N = 72,390), we observe the same pattern in the United States: the rich vary more across nine US regions than do the poor. In a separate study, we survey 29,450 people in 140 countries about their stereotypes of and attitudes toward the rich and the poor. Both within and across countries, people are more polarized in their views of the rich than of the poor. In the Global South, people see the rich as more tolerant and secular than the data show; in the Global North, people overestimate the extent to which the rich are prejudiced and undemocratic. Attitudes toward the rich are markedly more negative in the Global North, though this North–South difference narrows on more implicit measures. Negativity toward the rich is not explained by standard measures of inequality. Instead, attitudes toward the rich are most negative where the top 1% and 10% derive a larger share of income from capital rather than labor.