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

Payne, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143128906 ISBN 13: 9780143128908

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"A persuasive and highly readable account." —President Barack Obama

“Brilliant. . . . an important, fascinating read arguing that inequality creates a public health crisis in America.” —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

“The Broken Ladder is an important, timely, and beautifully written account of how inequality affects us all.” —Adam Alter, New York Times bestselling author of Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink

A timely examination by a leading scientist of the physical, psychological, and moral effects of inequality. 

The levels of inequality in the world today are on a scale that have not been seen in our lifetimes, yet the disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically; it also has profound consequences for how we think, how we respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and even how we view moral concepts such as justice and fairness.

Research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has not only revealed important new insights into how inequality changes people in predictable ways but also provided a corrective to the flawed view of poverty as being the result of individual character failings. Among modern developed societies, inequality is not primarily a matter of the actual amount of money people have. It is, rather, people's sense of where they stand in relation to others. Feeling poor matters—not just being poor. Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social maladies we associate with poverty, including lower than average life expectancies, serious health problems, mental illness, and crime.
 
The Broken Ladder explores such issues as why women in poor societies often have more children, and why they have them at a younger age; why there is little trust among the working class in the prudence of investing for the future; why people's perception of their social status affects their political beliefs and leads to greater political divisions; how poverty raises stress levels as effectively as actual physical threats; how inequality in the workplace affects performance; and why unequal societies tend to become more religious. Understanding how inequality shapes our world can help us better understand what drives ideological divides, why high inequality makes the middle class feel left behind, and how to disconnect from the endless treadmill of social comparison.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Payne is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination. His research has been featured in The Atlantic and The New York Times, and on NPR, and he has written for Scientific American and Psychology Today.

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Chapter 1

Lunch Lady Economics

Why Feeling Poor Hurts Like Being Poor

I learned I was poor on the new lunch lady's first day at work. Before that, my school had had the same cashier for as long as my fourth-grade mind could remember. I knew that some kids paid when they got to the register and others, like me, didn't. But the old lunch lady passed us through the line, money or not, as smoothly as our plastic trays glided over the rail. Then one day she was gone, replaced by a younger woman who seemed to be trying hard. As I carried my food past her, she stopped me and asked for $1.25. I felt off balance, the way you do when an elevator stops too quickly. I started stammering, the only thing I could do, since I had not a cent. I would gladly have given her any amount of cash at that moment simply to escape. At that point, an older woman, tall and skinny in a pink polo shirt, like a flamingo with a hairnet, leaned over and whispered in her ear, and I was waved through. Eventually, the lunch line returned to its silent procession. But a hard week passed before the new cashier learned who paid what.

The moment when I realized what my free lunches meant is still with me, and I can feel the heat in my face as I recount it. Though my family had no less money than the day before, that moment changed everything for me. I began to notice differences between myself and my classmates. Despite the fact that we all wore the same school uniform, the kids who paid for their lunches seemed to dress better. Was it the shoes? They even had better hair. Did they go to a salon instead of having it cut with a bowl and a pair of scissors at home? We had all grown up within a dozen miles of one another, but the free-lunch kids had our parents' Southern drawls. The lunch-money kids had the generic voices of newscasters, from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Always a shy kid, I became almost completely silent at school. Who was I to speak? Suddenly a new social ladder stretched out before me, above me. Its rungs were marked with shoes and hair and accents, telegraphing a code I was just learning to decipher. It did not matter that nothing in my circumstances had changed but my perspective. Now I was, in fact, poor.

If you are used to thinking about wealth and poverty purely in financial terms, the way an accountant would, my response makes no sense. My insight did not change my parents' income. It did not change our monthly expenses. It changed nothing in the world, except for me. But by redirecting my attention and altering my perceptions, my thoughts, and my actions, it changed my future.

To understand how we think about status, take a look at the image of the ladder on the next page. Imagine that the people at the top of this ladder are the best off. They have the most money, the best education, and the highest-paying jobs. The people at the bottom are the worst off. They have the least money, the lowest levels of education, and the most menial jobs, if they have jobs at all. If you were to assess your own economic position with respect to that of other people, which of the ten rungs would you place yourself on?

This simple image is one of the most widely used measures of subjective social status. Let's call it the Status Ladder. We should be able to perfectly predict where a person would place himself on the ladder if we knew his income, level of education, and the prestige of his job.

Except we can't-and we can't even come close to doing so. It is true that, on average, people with higher incomes, more education, and more prestigious jobs do rate themselves higher on the ladder. But the effect is relatively small. In a sample of, say, a thousand people, some will rate themselves at the top, others will rate themselves at the bottom, and many will be in between. But only about 20 percent of their self-evaluation is based on income, education, and job status.

This surprisingly small relationship between traditional markers of status and how it is perceived subjectively means that there are a lot of people who are by objective standards affluent and yet rate themselves on the lower rungs. Similarly, many people who are objectively poor rate themselves high up the ladder.

A standard economic analysis would argue that people's own conceptions of themselves are effectively airy nothings, mere noises that flit around like the sound of static between radio stations. If subjective perceptions do not align with objectively measurable quantities like money, then so much the worse for those perceptions. Certainly, money is part of the story, but it's not the whole story, and not even the main character.

We have to take subjective perceptions of status seriously, because they reveal so much about people's fates. If you place yourself on a lower rung, then you are more likely in the coming years to suffer from depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. The lower the rung you select, the more probable it is that you will make bad decisions and underperform at work. The lower the rung you select, the more likely you are to believe in the supernatural and in conspiracy theories. The lower the rung you select, the more prone you are to weight issues, diabetes, and heart problems. The lower the rung you select, the fewer years you have left to live.

Let me be clear that I am not simply asserting that, if you are poor, then all of these things are more likely to happen to you. I am stating, rather, that these things are more likely to happen to you if you feel poor, regardless of your actual income. Of course, one reason people might feel poor is that they are actually poor. But as we have seen, that's just 20 percent of the story. For the rest of it, we have to look at ordinary middle-class people and ask why it is that, regardless of actual money, so many of them feel that they are barely getting by, that they are living paycheck to paycheck, that the neighbors know something they don't, and that if they could just earn a little more, then everything would be a little bit better. To understand the Status Ladder, we have to look beyond bank accounts and start looking at people.

All of us are aware of how much money we make, but very few of us know whether we make enough. That's because the only way we determine how much is actually "enough" is by comparing ourselves to other people. We make comparisons to other people so habitually that we rarely even notice that we are doing so. When a neighbor pulls up in a new car, we don't typically say to ourselves, "They have an Audi, so I need one, too." We are more sophisticated and mature than that. We might tell ourselves that our neighbor's good fortune is none of our business, or that she deserves the new car because of her hard work. If we do have an immediate impulse to keep pace with her, we might banish the thought as soon as it appears. And yet, the next time we get in our own car, we notice just a little more than yesterday how worn the seat is getting. Social comparison is inevitable.

It is hard to recognize such comparisons at work in our own lives, because they take place in the background, and we are experiencing the foreground. When the noise in a restaurant gets louder, for example, we begin to feel that our dinner partner is speaking quietly, because our attention is on our...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143128906
• ISBN 13: 9780143128908
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien