Economic Vulnerability and Belief in the American Dream: How Will Redistributive Preferences Evolve as Automation Displaces Labor?

If growth in automation increasingly challenges the American Dream, will preferences for redistributive policies increase? We inform survey experiment respondents that automation will increase inequality, and luck or decisions made by elites (rather than individual effort) will influence who loses out. We find that beliefs promoted by the American Dream are relatively immutable and preferences for redistributive policies increase only where...