If Americans weren’t such ignoramuses, what would they think about income redistribution? I’m putting it a bit more rudely, but that’s basically the question addressed in a new study (“How Elastic Are Preferences For Redistribution? Evidence From Randomized Survey Experiments”) by Ilyana Kuziemko of Columbia's graduate school of business; Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School; Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who (with Thomas Piketty) is our preeminent academic expert on income inequality; and Stefanie Stantcheva, an MIT economist. A nicer way to state the question is: To what extent does the American polity’s resistance to government programs that redistribute income reflect conviction, as opposed to mere lack of information?

Our starting point, of course, is that income distribution has become steadily more unequal in the U.S. during the past three decades (to learn why, read my book The Great Divergence) without creating the sort of political unrest you’d expect. About 100 years ago, when income share for the top one percent was also quite high—though lower than it is today—you had Wobblies, anarchist bombings, etc. “Why aren’t the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?” I wrote in September 2010. A year later, they were marching in the streets as the Occupy movement took hold. But now they’ve stopped. We still hear a lot about income inequality, including from the president, but we don’t see much political mobilization to do anything about it. Indeed, “there has been a slight decrease in stated support for redistribution in the U.S. since the 1970s, even among those who self-identify as having below-average income [italics mine]." Liberals call this false consciousness and conservatives call it the deeper wisdom of the common man. Neither characterization tells you much about whether this belief is rooted in ignorance or basic values.

To find that out, the authors used an online tool called Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) to quiz a randomized group of about 5,000 respondents, some of whom were, and others weren’t, provided “information on U.S. income inequality, historical data on the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax.” mTurk is a crowdsourcing site used to connect computer programmers with homo sapiens who can perform tasks that computers can’t do (not this week, anyway). Apparently it’s been found also to be a pretty good tool to perform social science research on the cheap while furnishing a sample that (according to a separate 2012 study published in Political Analysis) is “no worse than convenience samples used by other researchers in political science.” (Convenience samples are sample pools drawing on populations close to hand—for example, students at the college where the researcher is located.)

In general, what the researchers found was that it was not too difficult to change people’s opinions about inequality—that is, to persuade them that inequality is a much bigger problem than they realized. Respondents were asked what their income was and then shown where they fell in the income distribution. Then they were shown what their incomes would be today if economic growth since 1980 had been distributed evenly across all income groups. (Short answer: A lot higher for most.) They were shown that economic growth in the U.S. has tended to be higher in times when top marginal tax rates were high, and lower in times when top marginal rates were low. Simply catching respondents up on such facts closed 40 percent of the gap between conservatives and liberals on the question of whether income inequality was “a very serious problem.”

But it was very hard to change people’s policy preferences regarding what should or shouldn’t be done to create more equality—with one important exception that I’ll describe at the end of this column.