Extract from Keith Payne’s The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
“...when the level
of inequality becomes too large to ignore, everyone starts acting
strange.
But they do not act
strange in just any old way. Inequality affects our actions and our
feelings in the same systematic, predictable fashion again and
again.
It makes us short-sighted and prone to risky behaviour, willing to sacrifice a secure future for immediate gratification. It makes us more inclined to make self-defeating decisions. It makes us believe weird things, superstitiously clinging to the world we want it to be rather than the world as it is.
It makes us short-sighted and prone to risky behaviour, willing to sacrifice a secure future for immediate gratification. It makes us more inclined to make self-defeating decisions. It makes us believe weird things, superstitiously clinging to the world we want it to be rather than the world as it is.
Inequality divides
us, cleaving us into camps not only of income but also of ideology
and race, eroding our trust in one another. It generates stress and
makes us all less healthy and less happy.
Picture a neighbourhood full of people like the ones I’ve described above: short-sighted, irresponsible people making bad choices; mistrustful people segregated by race and by ideology; superstitious people who won’t listen to reason; people who turn to self-destructive habits as they cope with the stress and anxieties of their daily lives.
These are the classic tropes of poverty and could serve as a stereotypical description of the population of any poor inner-city neighbourhood or depressed rural trailer park. But as we will see in the chapters ahead, inequality can produce these tendencies even among the middle-class and wealthy individuals.
What is also notable about the air rage study is that it illustrates that inequality is not the same as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it...Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not.
Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds that the United States of America, the richest and most unequal of countries, has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a superpower.
[We should keep this in mind since] income and wealth inequality are higher now than they have been in generations.”
~Keith Payne, ‘The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die’
Picture a neighbourhood full of people like the ones I’ve described above: short-sighted, irresponsible people making bad choices; mistrustful people segregated by race and by ideology; superstitious people who won’t listen to reason; people who turn to self-destructive habits as they cope with the stress and anxieties of their daily lives.
These are the classic tropes of poverty and could serve as a stereotypical description of the population of any poor inner-city neighbourhood or depressed rural trailer park. But as we will see in the chapters ahead, inequality can produce these tendencies even among the middle-class and wealthy individuals.
What is also notable about the air rage study is that it illustrates that inequality is not the same as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it...Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not.
Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds that the United States of America, the richest and most unequal of countries, has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a superpower.
[We should keep this in mind since] income and wealth inequality are higher now than they have been in generations.”
~Keith Payne, ‘The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die’
And
before you all say “well yes, that may be so...but this
is not America!” I’d ask you
to keep this in mind:
You
can find the audio from which this quote is taken here:
No comments:
Post a Comment