The poor endorse the meritocratic creed almost as much as the rich

Mean endorsement (0–10, higher = more agreement with the meritocratic / pro-market answer) by household-income tercile, pooled across the World Values Survey. The hard-work and competition items barely move with income; only the income-inequality item tracks material interest.

Poorest third Middle third Richest third line spans poor→rich

Takeaway: on “hard work brings success” the poorest third sit at 6.65 and the richest at 6.76 — a gap of one-tenth of a point on a ten-point scale. Competition is just as flat. Only the income-inequality item opens a real gap, with the rich (6.42) favouring larger income differences far more than the poor (5.51) — the one item where belief follows the wallet.

Pooled population-style means weighted by the WVS design weight; income terciles are the survey’s own ten-point household-income ladder collapsed into thirds. Hard work and competition are reverse-coded so that high = endorses the meritocratic answer; income is used as fielded (high = favours larger income differences). World Values Survey, EVS+WVS pooled, fieldwork 1989–2023; effective n per cell up to 184,643. Source: WVS, weighted.

Where inequality is widest, the poor believe in hard work the most

Each dot is a country: its national income inequality (Gini index, higher = more unequal) against the average meritocracy endorsement of its poorest-third respondents. The dashed line is the fitted trend; dots are coloured by World Bank region.

Takeaway: the cloud tilts gently upward — in more unequal countries, the poor endorse “hard work brings success” more, not less (correlation +0.218 across 76 countries). The very unequal South Africa and Zambia sit high; a few unequal cases like Brazil sit low. The dissonance-reduction tilt is real but modest, as single noisy items over imperfect global measures predict.

Country endorsement is the weighted mean among each country’s poorest-third respondents (income terciles); only countries with at least 100 poor respondents are shown, 76 in all. National Gini from the World Bank context join. The Pearson correlation between Gini and poor-endorsement is +0.218; between Gini and the poor-minus-rich endorsement gap, +0.26. Each country counts once, equally. Source: WVS (weighted) joined to World Bank Gini.

The disadvantaged endorse the bootstraps account too

Share agreeing that Black Americans should “work their way up without special favours” (General Social Survey), by household-income tercile and by race. The income gradient is flat; the racial gap is large — yet nearly half of Black respondents still agree.

White respondents Black respondents Other dashed = each group’s overall share

Takeaway: by income, agreement is nearly flat — the poorest Americans agree (65.5%) about as often as the richest (62.5%). The real divide is racial: White respondents agree 68.1% of the time, Black respondents 47.4% — far lower, but still a near-majority endorsing the account against their own group’s interest.

Weighted by the GSS person weight; income terciles computed within survey year on inflation-adjusted family income to neutralise price changes. “Agree” pools “agree strongly” and “agree somewhat.” By-race lines trace agreement across income within each racial group; subgroup cells below 50 respondents are dropped. General Social Survey, 1994–2024; n = 636–6,753 per cell. Source: GSS, weighted.