The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

Psychologists have found that the political left and the right differ from each other in two fundamental ways. First, conservatives want to preserve tradition and the status quo while liberals favor changes in society. Conservatives believe that a society in chaos is the worst possible outcome, and that civil order is difficult to achieve, and so we should preserve order and tradition even if that means missing out on opportunities to improve society. In contrast, liberals believe that some aspects of society work well and others poorly, and so we should change the dysfunctional things because we can use the power of reason to find rational solutions to problems.

The second fundamental difference is the willingness to accept inequality. Conservatives view it as the natural outcome of a world where some individuals are better than others, while liberals see individual merit as just one factor among many determining success or failure. Both agree that both individual talent and context matter, but conservatives emphasize the former and liberals the latter. However, both are oversimplifications because inequality affects our behavior in ways that cause even greater inequality.

We think that our political beliefs are a stable set of principles based on logic and facts, but in reality, “they are more like an assortment of tools that we choose among depending on the demands of a particular moment” (89). This is partly because our ideological principles depend on what we have thought about or seen recently, which is what psychologists call accessibility. It is also because we do not track the logical consistency of our thoughts the way we think we do; the reasons we articulate to explain our decisions are not always the real reasons we made those decisions. In sum:

“Sometimes we think through an issue based on our principles and end up at an ideological conclusion. At other times we take our cues from a particular situation and find an ideology that fits the moment. When we reflect on our own beliefs, it can be nearly impossible to tell the difference between the two” (94).

Of all the cues that nudge us left or right, the role of wealth, poverty, and inequality is one of the most vexing. Many argue that the poor seem to vote against their own self-interest, such as by supporting leaders who cut taxes on the wealthy while eliminating social programs because conservative leaders rile up the poor with cultural issues. But not only is this account wrong, it’s completely backward: the higher a person’s income, the more likely they are the vote Republican, and vice versa. And the further we move away from political issues, the more our images of liberals and conservatives turn into misleading stereotypes.

People tend to vote for policies that they feel are in their interest, whether they actually are or not. And what feels to be in their self-interest depends on how they compare themselves to others. As inequality worsens, these comparisons have more of an effect; “[t]aken together, these observations suggest that the rise in inequality that has occurred over the past few decades might be contributing to increasingly intense partisanship and political conflict” (104). This is because we tend to think that those who agree with us are brilliant, while those with whom we disagree are idiots, because we believe that we see the world accurately. And so, if the ultrawealthy minority grows further and further above the poor and middle class, their political opinions will change, they will mistake their rational self-interest for universal principles, and they will think that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid and not worth compromising with. Furthermore, “feeling superior in status” (110) makes us more likely to believe we see reality as it is and that our opponents are mistaken. And so as inequality increases, politics becomes more divisive. Payne cautions against these trends, “because when opponents become enemies, people can justify almost anything in responding to them. After all, how can you expect to reason with maniacs?” (112).

There are several reasons why poverty is bad for health, such as poor access to proper food, medical care, safe living conditions, and sanitation. Similarly, data shows that the more money you have, the better your health and the longer your life expectancy. But when you compare countries to one another, increases in average income stop affecting health incomes once a country reaches a certain level of economic development. However, within rich countries themselves, the relationship between health and wealth remains linear—more money means better health. Other studies have shown that “where people place themselves on the Status Ladder is a better predictor of health than their actual income or education” (117). Taken together, this means that societies with greater inequality have poorer health outcomes, even when we control for income.

How something as abstract as inequality or social comparison causes physical health problems lies through specific maladies, particularly heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Unhealthy behavior and poor decision-making, discussed in Chapter 4, explains about a third of the relationship between inequality and health. The rest is explained by how our bodies respond to crisis, particularly our stress response system, which is designed to save us in the near term during a crisis, even if it shortens our lives by releasing a large amount of energy in response to a perceived threat or opportunity. However, the stress response system does not create new energy, it only diverts it from somewhere else by shutting down other body functions and putting great strain on our bodies. This stress response kicks when there is an actual threat and when we feel there is a threat. Unlike animals, our stress response can last for years at a time. When this stress response system doesn’t shut off properly, it raises the risk of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, heart disease, and depression. For our ancient ancestors, the downsides of the stress response system were massively outweighed by its benefits, but in our modern environment, the effects of stress are much more harmful than the threats it evolved to protect us from.

Because stress is the body’s way of focusing on an immediate crisis at the expense of long-term health, it is not surprising that economic hardship and low social status can trigger the stress response. Studies have shown that people with lower incomes tend to have higher levels of stress hormones and that those with lower social status have much stronger stress responses to external stressors. The pathway that leads from our subjective rating of status to stress hormones is controlled by the brain’s frontal cortex, which is activated when people think about the thoughts and perspectives of others. In other words, people responded to a low rank in the social hierarchy as if it were a physical threat. When we feel we have nothing, “even the cells in our body start demanding to take what they need now and worry about the future later. Inequality accelerates this process by making everyone less secure” (133).