Who Wants What?

"This is a book about the demand for redistribution of income through taxes and transfers. It is also a book about how our main intuition about what affects individual preferences for redistribution (whether a person is rich or poor) needs to be complemented with the consideration of other factors. Income will take us some ways into understanding whether a person supports redistribution and whether that support affects her political behavior (we will show below that the poor do support redistribution more than the rich and that their votes follow their preferences). But a fuller explanation of the demand for redistribution will require developing three complementary arguments: one considering the effects of expected future income; a second one about the negative externalities associated to inequality; and a final one emphasizing the consequences of population heterogeneity in a society. We dedicate the rest of the book to work through these propositions, but we begin by offering three illustrations of how we think these factors influence the political outcomes we are interested in exploring"--