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This paper provides the first comprehensive global evidence on fairness and efficiency preferences, beliefs about inequality, and policy attitudes, based on data from over 65,000 individuals across 60 countries. It presents three sets of main findings. First, it offers novel insights on the fairness and efficiency preferences across the world, including causal evidence on how the source of inequality and the cost of redistribution affect inequality acceptance. Globally, we find that the source of inequality is far more important for inequality acceptance than the cost of redistribution. At the same time, significant heterogeneity in fairness views exists both within and between countries, with meritocracy being the dominant fairness view only in the Western world. Second, it provides a deeper understanding of the global patterns in people’s beliefs about the source of inequality and the cost of redistribution. In most countries, people believe that luck plays a more important role in shaping inequality than merit, while there is more disagreement about whether there is a cost of redistribution. Third, it establishes unique evidence on the importance of both preferences and beliefs for understanding policy attitudes on redistribution. People who are more accepting of inequality and those who believe in the importance of merit relative to luck as the source of inequality are less likely to view inequality in their own country as unfair. Finally, the paper provides compelling evidence that fairness considerations are crucial for explaining support for redistribution and cross-country variation in redistribution through taxes and transfers, while efficiency considerations play a less important role.