According to The Spirit Level, inequality is bad for everyone—including people with higher incomes. That conclusion is evident also in research exploring the impact of inequality on status anxiety. But existing research on this topic is cross-sectional (and gives too much weight to statistical significance). I construct a longitudinal analysis to explore whether status anxiety increases with inequality, especially among higher earners. I use country-level averages of status anxiety for this purpose and ignore individual-level control variables, on the grounds that they are not antecedents of the focal independent variable, inequality. In contrast to previous research, I find that increases in inequality lead to lower levels of status anxiety for higher earners. People at the top appear to benefit from inequality in this sense—a finding that runs against the idea that inequality is bad for everyone.

中文翻译：

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不平等会加剧高收入者的地位焦虑吗？纵向评估

根据The Spirit Level 的说法，不平等对每个人都有害——包括收入较高的人。这一结论在探索不平等对地位焦虑影响的研究中也很明显。但是关于这个主题的现有研究是横断面的（并且过于重视统计意义）。我构建了一个纵向分析来探索地位焦虑是否会随着不平等而增加，尤其是在高收入者中。为此，我使用了国家层面的地位焦虑平均值，并忽略了个人层面的控制变量，因为它们不是焦点自变量不平等的前因。与之前的研究相比，我发现不平等程度的增加会导致高收入者的地位焦虑水平。从这个意义上说，处于高层的人似乎从不平等中受益——这一发现与不平等对每个人都有害的观点背道而驰。