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

Payne asserts that “[t]he live fast, die young approach that is motivated by an uncertain future leads to shortsighted decisions […] that provide short-term rewards but sabotage the future” (197). Similarly, our stress systems’ emergency response to daily crises helps us in the short term but sabotages our future health. Finally, the insecurity fueled by poverty combined with the polarized social divisions stoked by inequality “provoke us to embrace simplistic beliefs, extreme ideologies, and prejudices that […] sabotage the healthy functioning of civil society” (197). In turn, each of these factors worsens the initial inequality and insecurity, leading to a vicious cycle.

Those “who can afford to move away from troubled areas tend to do so, leaving behind them those with the worst problems and least prospects” (197), making it harder for the disadvantaged to escape poverty. Those who do escape need to achieve an “escape velocity,” and once they do, they think and act differently from those who could not escape. And as the educated and wealthy pull further away from everyone else, these disparities become enshrined in impenetrable cultural barriers because “living in such different lives in such dissimilar places means that we share few assumptions about how the world works” (198). Understanding how inequality accelerates these cycles of disadvantage helps us defuse the conflicts that arise when we discuss inequality.

When people debate whether individual choices or systemic factors cause inequality, they are missing the point. It is not “an either-or debate;” rather, “inequality affects our behavior, and differences in behavior can magnify inequality” (200). This “self-reinforcing cycle between poverty and self-defeating behavior” (200) is often ignored when it comes to “proposing solutions” to poverty. Payne writes, “Conservatives focus on individual agency and argue that we have to develop incentives to motivate the poor” (200) to improve themselves. However, the poor are driven by immediate problems involving “daily crises, which they attempt to cope with using the best short-term crisis management responses they have available” (200). Those on the left “recognize the importance of systemic factors like inequality and inherited disadvantage,” but they “minimize the important role that individuals’ decisions play in their fate” (200). Finally, many who see the poor’s persistent harmful behavior conclude that nothing that can be done. However, this ignores that people’s behaviors are a response to their environments, and that these environments can be changed because the same forces that cause “vicious cycles” in the poor cause “virtuous cycles” in the rich.

The role inequality plays in health, decision-making, and socio-political divisions means that economic growth alone cannot solve these problems: “Just as people often confuse inequality with poverty, they often confuse the goal of reducing inequality with the goal of fostering economic growth” (203). This is because above a certain point (around $75,000 per year), making more money stops making us any happier because we quickly adapt to our new economic status. This is known as the Easterlin paradox, a finding in which “average happiness is entirely unrelated to economic growth over time” (203). By standard growth metrics, the last 50 years have been great for America, with even the financial crisis of 2008 only representing a small dip. If economic growth was all that mattered, Americans would be extremely happy, but they have never been more dissatisfied. The key to understanding this paradox is the fact that economic “growth has not been widely shared” because “almost all of it has gone to the richest few percent” (205).

Payne acknowledges that economic growth is better than economic stagnation, but when that growth solely benefits the rich, this will magnify inequality and make everyone less happy. To tackle this, we must pursue two solutions simultaneously: building a flatter ladder while also getting better at living amid its rungs. Shortening and flattening the ladder (i.e., reducing inequality) is the most immediate and powerful way to address the health and social problems caused by inequality because it tackles them simultaneously at the root rather than in the piecemeal way policymakers normally approach them. The only way to achieve this is by “moving away from seeing inequality through a moralizing lens” and instead naming it a “public health problem” (206). In practice, this “means both raising the bottom rungs of the social ladder and lowering the top ones” (206) using solutions that involve both markets and governments. This is not a call for socialism “any more than efforts to reduce binge drinking are a demand for prohibition or a call to reduce the speed limit is an effort to slow traffic to a crawl” (208). Eliminating all inequality is not the objective; rather, Payne recommends adjusting “the level of inequality to a more human scale” (208). Some level of inequality is natural and healthy, but extreme inequality is not.

Shortening and flattening the ladder is a long-term project, but other strategies can improve the quality of individual lives in the near term (206). The first is recognizing when we are making unconscious comparisons and instead choosing our social comparisons wisely and consciously. The second strategy is redirecting these comparisons with others to our own past to more accurately gauge our status. The final strategy is changing the contexts within which we compare by moving from high-poverty areas to low-poverty areas or, if that is not feasible, moving from high-inequality areas to low-inequality ones.

The above strategies are mostly aimed at the poor and middle class, but the rich should also strive to reduce inequality because high inequality leads to increased crime, illness, and political polarization, which degrade quality of life across social classes. But even more directly for the rich, “higher levels of inequality tend to accelerate the social comparison treadmill, in which you have to run faster to stay in place” (183). High inequality has also been observed to lead the rich to act more entitled and less virtuously. The rich must be conscious that their success is a mix of ability, effort, and chance, and realize that they are in a privileged position to make a difference.

The final strategy applies to everyone and concerns assessing what is most important and meaningful to you as an individual. When people perform this exercise, they almost never write down status. Furthermore, simply focusing on this question makes people less likely to care about others’ perceptions, less impulsive, and more likely to close the achievement gap. This exercise only requires shifting our perspective from the standard economic model, where people respond rationally to incentives, to a more realistic psychological one, where people habitually compare their positions to their social contexts to gauge their worth. Payne concludes, “Making the conscious effort to consider what genuinely matters interrupts the unconscious default pattern of looking to others to gauge how much we value ourselves” (219).