Economic Evaluation and Top Income Earners' Perceptions of Economic Inequality

Economic research has demonstrated that the richest 1 percent in terms of income and wealth are increasing their relative advantage (Atkinson et al., 2011; Piketty, 2014). However, there is little empirical research on the role of cultural processes including evaluation in (re)producing economic inequality at the top of the income distribution (Lamont et al., 2014; McCall, 2013). My study highlights the importance of the evaluative processes which are narrated as constituting top incomes for top income earners’ perceptions of economic inequality. To understand how top income earners understand economic inequality, I interviewed and surveyed 30 UK-based participants. My main finding is that participants’ perceptions of top income shares closely relate to their views on the production of top incomes for which evaluative processes based on economic ideas of the market are key. A majority of participants termed ‘economic evaluators’, explain that top incomes are the result of rational, economic evaluation processes based on the idea that ‘the market’ is the best instrument to determine the economic value of individuals’ contribution. Economic reward is viewed as reflecting social contribution, as in the neoclassical marginal productivity theory of income distribution (McGoey, 2017). Hence economic, quantifiable ‘value’ is seen as enmeshed with moral, cultural ‘values’ (Skeggs, 2003). The most notable evaluative practice which participants refer to is the assessment of performance pay, which includes formulas for traders’ bonuses and hedge fund returns. It is precisely these practices of performance-based remuneration which have been shown to be associated with increased wage inequality in the US and the UK (Atkinson, 2015; Angeles et al., 2016). I argue that inequality is made sense of as well as ‘rationalized’ through the economically ‘rational’ evaluative practice of performance pay (Bourdieu, 1986).