Misunderstandings of how the rich get their wealth are underpinned by wider misconceptions about the causes of economic inequalities in general – not just between the 1% and the 99%, but within the latter. Many people think the rich deserve their wealth, because they believe that right across the board people generally get what they deserve. Even if we take out those whose income is mainly unearned, there are still significant inequalities within the rest. Don’t highly skilled people doing responsible jobs, like surgeons, get paid more than unskilled workers like cleaners because they deserve more? Doesn’t this explain the inequalities between them, and show them to be fair? It actually appears to be true. But, as we’ll see, this takes a lot for granted that needs to be questioned.

Surveys on attitudes to economic equality show that people are concerned not only with what people get in terms of income but also with what they contribute, in terms of work. And they expect there to be some relationship between the two. I agree that we should consider contributions as well as what people get – ‘distribution’; after all, the chapters so far are an attack on unwarranted free-riding on others’ work by the rich. To deal with these questions we need to

widen the scope of the argument to look at what produces economic inequalities within society as a whole. The answers take us deep into the basic structure of our societies.

The kind of wishful thinking involved in the belief in a just world may be partly the product of an understandable desire to avoid painful feelings of resentment at injustice and what might seem like mean-spiritedness. It’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that economic inequalities are basically fair, without investigating what does determine people’s incomes. When we do look at this in practice, we find that the issue of differences in what people seem to deserve shrinks considerably, because their jobs and income depend so much on other things; we realise that we don’t live in a just world.