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

“Comprehending the scale of economic inequality in America today is difficult because it butts up against the limits of our imagination. It’s like trying to envision the distance of a light-year, or to grasp the enormity of the brain’s hundred billion neurons, or how vastly greater still are the hundred trillion connections among them. Numbers like that are simply not on a human scale.”

Here we see an idea that recurs throughout the book. Payne carefully asserts that he is not against inequality in general; he is not advocating for an egalitarian socialist society. He concedes that some level of inequality and hierarchy is natural in any social environment but argues that modern inequality has gotten far out of control. Payne also argues that one of the primary factors hampering efforts to fight inequality is our inability to comprehend just how severe inequality is. He argues that if we did understand it, we would redouble our efforts to reduce inequality to a level that most consider tolerable.

“Once food could be accumulated in large quantities, it became possible for some people to amass a lot more of it than others.”

Although Payne is not interested in thoroughly examining the root causes of inequality, he lays out his brief theory of how inequality came to be. Essentially, the ability to store food, both in granaries and in livestock, meant that there would always be some people who controlled more wealth than others. This was not necessarily a bad thing while group sizes remained small, since the storage of food allowed our ancestors to devote their energy to constructing permanent settlements. However, our evolutionary adaptations happen much slower than changes in our environment. Our bodies still inhabit this world of primitive food storage, but our societies inhabit a far more unequal world than was possible in ancient times.

“For thousands of centuries the social ladders our minds and bodies have evolved to climb were only a few rungs high. If the contemporary world’s ladder were still on the kind of human scale to which we were once accustomed, then our urge for status might not be a problem, but instead we are facing the equivalent of scaling skyscrapers.” 

This quote ties together several of Payne’s major themes. First is the notion that our brains cannot comprehend the sheer scale of modern inequality. Because we cannot understand inequality, we cannot see that inequality is actually at the root of many of our modern social problems. If people could see just how bad inequality is, then they would work on reducing it. Second is how the mismatch between our evolutionary history and our modern environment. We evolved in the context of small groups with relatively muted inequality, but the modern world has massive skyscrapers right next door to slums.

“If our response to inequality is shaped by our need for status, then inequality is not simply a matter of how much money we have; it’s about where we stand compared with other people. Money, from that perspective, is simply one way we keep score. Feeling poor matters, not just being poor. That is why your subjective standing on the Status Ladder reveals so much about what you are likely to become.” 

“If our response to inequality is shaped by our need for status, then inequality is not simply a matter of how much money we have; it’s about where we stand compared with other people. Money, from that perspective, is simply one way we keep score. Feeling poor matters, not just being poor. That is why your subjective standing on the Status Ladder reveals so much about what you are likely to become.” 

“Because, as the historical perspective makes clear, poverty and wealth are always relative to what other people have in a particular time and place.” 

Another of Payne’s key arguments is the relative nature of wealth. Because our brains are constantly making unconscious and subjective status judgments relative to those around us, we always feel that we do not have enough, especially if we live in an environment of high inequality. To Payne, this is why inequality matters more than poverty.

“One of the most reliable findings in social psychology is that if you consciously think about a person who is clearly superior to you in some respect, it makes you feel worse about yourself than if you had never given that person any thought. Likewise, if you think about someone who is inferior to you in some way, it makes you feel better about yourself by comparison.”

This broad theoretical link between perception and emotion is a crucial element of the ensuing chapters. If simply thinking about someone superior to us makes us feel bad and stressed, and if inequality puts people far superior to us in our environment, then it follows that inequality itself angers us. Furthermore, this explains why inequality hurts everyone, not just the poor; even the middle class is aware of just how superior the ultra-wealthy are in terms of status.

“We’ve also seen that, when it comes to something as basic as food, the stomach and brain can’t accurately judge when we have had enough. More abstract judgments, like whether we have sufficient money, a big enough house, or a nice enough car, must be shaped even more by relative comparisons, as we have no sensors for this hunger, no taste buds for these tastes.”

Here we see another crucial theoretical argument that underlies Payne’s broad thesis. Contrary to what we (and economists) believe, our brains are not as rational and straightforward as we like to think. And if we cannot accurately judge simple things, it follows that we are even worse at judging more abstract elements like whether we have “enough” relative to those around us. Because inequality widens the gulf between the Status Ladder’s rungs, we are more likely to feel that we don’t have enough regardless of our actual wealth, which leads to the individual and social issues outlined in the book.

“Most people think that selling drugs is a way to get rich quick. Why else would they take risks like going to jail, losing everything, or even getting killed?”

This question frames the argument that Payne pursues in Chapter 3. Because drug-dealing as a profession poses clear downsides, such as death or imprisonment, we conclude that it must make people wealthy, otherwise no rational person would ever become a drug dealer. Payne says this rational economic element is faulty because it does not capture how our brains make decisions. In reality, most drug dealers make less than minimum wage, and even middle-class dealers make far less than they would in a legal job. Payne says this seeming paradox is explained by how our brains make decisions: Inequality causes us to make higher-risk decisions because we feel it is the only way to meet our needs.

“Like any nature versus nurture discussion, it misses the larger point: Nature and nurture always work together, because what we have inherited genetically as humans is not a rigid set of behaviors, like those that send fruit flies fluttering toward a light. They are, rather, tendencies to react to changes in the environment in particular ways.”

Payne frames several of his arguments in terms of the classic nature versus nurture debate. This debate questions whether someone’s behavior stems from their inherent character and biology (nature) or their upbringing and environment (nurture). For example, is a criminal born bad or were they made that way by the institutions that raised them? Payne argues that we need to move beyond this dichotomy because while we do have inbuilt tendencies, our environment shapes how those tendencies manifest.

“If rising inequality makes people feel that they need more, and higher levels of need lead to risky choices, it implies a fundamentally new relationship between inequality and risk: Regardless of whether you are poor or middle class, inequality itself might cause you to engage in riskier behavior.”

Payne returns to the idea that inequality affects everyone, not just the poor. This is because our perceptions of our social status determine our behavior. If we feel poor, we act poor, and so even a middle-class or wealthy person will make poor decisions and act in self-defeating ways if they live beside people with far greater wealth.

“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 different between the two approaches.”

Payne challenges common thought about how we form political and moral judgments. We like to believe that our principles and beliefs are fundamentally stable and that we derive our political positions from those stable principles. However, Payne draws on psychological research to argue that this is not the case. Our principles are not stable; they depend on what we have thought about or seen recently. Furthermore, we do not actually keep track of the logical consistency of our thoughts the way we think we do.

“When asked factual questions about the cuts and their consequences, most people either didn’t know the answers or got them wrong.”

Payne challenges the common argument that people, particularly the poor, vote against their own interests because they have been riled by cultural issues like religion, gun control, and homosexuality. Payne says this is not true; people usually vote for their economic interest. However, people tend to be quite uninformed about whether government policies are actually in their interest in the first place. Payne explains this seeming paradox by returning to one of his major arguments about the significance of people’s subjective feelings and perceptions: People vote for policies they feel are in their self-interest, whether they are or not, and what they feel is in their best interest depends on how they compare themselves to others.

“As the minority at the top pull further and further away from the mass of working-class people at the bottom, we can expect their political opinions to change. They will mistake their self-interests for genuine principles, and they will look with disdain on people who disagree with them. If they view their political opponents as incompetent, irrational, or immoral, then they won’t be motivated to compromise.”

One of the book’s more striking claims is that inequality has contributed to the rise of political partisanship and extremism. If people compare themselves to others to determine their self-interest, and if inequality makes these comparisons more influential, then inequality contributes to increased partisanship. As the ultrawealthy minority rises further and further above the rest, they will mistake their self-interest for universal principles and feel that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid.

“If health and longevity in developed countries are more closely linked to relative comparisons than to income, then you would expect that societies with greater inequality would have poorer health. And, in fact, they do.”

This quote captures the thesis of Chapter 5. Payne argues again that what matters is inequality (relative poverty) rather than poverty itself. The link between national income and health is generally accepted, but Payne goes a step further by arguing that, at a certain level of national income, this relationship levels off, and so inequality is what determines overall health outcomes in developed (wealthy) countries.

“When you feel that you have nothing, even the cells in your body start demanding to take what they need now and worry about the future later. Inequality accelerates this process by making everyone feel less secure.” 

The stress response system is the crucial physiological process that translates our abstract status comparisons into concrete health outcomes. Simply perceiving differences in status triggers the stress response, as our brains respond to a low position in the social hierarchy like a physical threat. This causes our bodies to take what they can get in the short term, even if it compromises long-term health. Furthermore, by exacerbating the effects of these status comparisons, inequality makes us all less healthy, not just the poor.

“The tendency to find meaningful patterns in randomness is universal, as Hume argued, but it happens more in some circumstances than others. We are especially likely to manufacture meaningful patterns when we feel powerless.”

This is the crucial claim underlying Payne’s arguments in Chapter 6. He argues that our brain’s natural and normal response (in this case locating patterns in randomness) is magnified and exacerbated by inequality. Because inequality makes us feel powerless and inferior, our brains work overtime to find a pattern or reason as to why this is the case. This often manifests in religious belief and conspiratorial thinking. Increasing inequality helps explain the rise in such thinking in the United States.

“The more puzzling exception is the highly religious United States. Despite having by far the highest income per capita in the survey, its measure of religious belief is on par with that of Mexico, Lebanon, and South Africa.”

Within social science, there is a commonly accepted theory that the importance of religion will decline as a country becomes wealthier. The reason for this lies in the preceding quote: Poverty and inequality lead us to religious thinking to make sense of our environment. As poverty decreases, we do not need religion to make sense of our situation. But Payne presents a paradox, as the United States defies this trend. The reason, he argues, is inequality. When inequality rises, people feel less secure and more inferior, and religion becomes more appealing.

“White respondents, in contrast, believed that antiwhite bias had steadily risen in the period in question. Whites seemed to view discrimination as a zero-sum game: The less discrimination they perceived against blacks, the more they saw it turned against whites. The trend was so stark in the eyes of white respondents that by the 2000s they judged discrimination against whites to be a bigger problem than discrimination against blacks.” 

Payne frames this chapter with another paradox: The percentage of Americans supporting overt racial discrimination has fallen to single digits, but people and institutions still consistently behave in racially prejudiced ways, particularly in stressful situations. Furthermore, white Americans actually believe that “discrimination against whites has now become a bigger problem than discrimination against blacks” (157). In reality, the income gap between white and black Americans has stayed about the same, while the wealth gap has increased. Payne argues that this seeming disconnect between the beliefs of white Americans and reality is another result of inequality. Feeling disadvantaged magnifies perceptions of racial discrimination, and occupying superior positions in a hierarchy increases implicit bias. Hierarchy and inequality create conditions for racial bias and conflict.

“Although it may be difficult to change people’s hearts and minds, economics policies can certainly reduce income inequality.”

Although bias against black Americans seems like an intractable problem, Payne closes Chapter 7 on a note of hope. If inequality causes racial bias and conflict (as Payne has argued), then we only need to change inequality. While solving racial conflict may seem impossible, we can succeed by addressing its root: inequality.

“On both surveys of anxiety and biological measures of the stress hormone cortisol, the people taking direction showed substantially higher levels of stress than those giving the directions.”

Payne presents another situation that runs contrary to our expectations to demonstrate that our brains are not as neat and tidy as we think. Most people believe that leaders and executives have the most stressful jobs because they must make big, important decisions. In reality, the situation is the complete opposite; those at the bottom of workplace hierarchies are much more stressed than those at the top. This is partly because steeper hierarchies cause stress for those near the bottom. Furthermore, the lower you are on the hierarchy, the less control you have over your work, and this lack of control causes stress.

“Thus the idea of ‘relative deprivation’ was born. Stouffer’s research was the first in a long tradition of studies finding that relative standing in a hierarchy matters as much as or more than tangible rewards associated with a particular rank.”

Payne centers Chapter 8, which deals with workplace inequality, on yet another paradox. He cities a sociological study of World War II troops that found combat experience actually decreased hatred of the enemy, and that soldiers were most satisfied in units where they had the least opportunity for promotion. This again has to do with the relative status comparisons that we make in our given environment. Soldiers compared themselves to others in positions like their own, so they were most satisfied in units with flat hierarchies and least satisfied (and even resentful) when there were steep hierarchies. Contrary to what we usually believe, our relative standing in a hierarchy matters as much as, if not more than, the material rewards associated with rank.

“The extreme inequality seen today in CEO pay is likely to undermine job satisfaction, team performance, and product quality. It may inspire workers to slack off, steal, and sabotage. These tendencies have probably been kept in check, so far, by the general lack of awareness of how unequal the pay scales really are.”

This quote captures the thesis of Chapter 8. Payne intervenes in the debate as to whether inequality is a crucial motivating factor, for instance by incentivizing those lower in the hierarchy to perform better in hopes of moving up. Payne concludes that the only situation this motivational effect outweighs the drawback of inequality is in highly competitive and individualized fields like professional golf. In all other cases, inequality breeds resentment, lowers job satisfaction, and leads workers to sabotage their employer if they subjectively determine that their rewards do not match their contributions.

“Once a projectile leaving Earth reaches that speed, it will keep going forever. When people escape an impoverished background, they, too, are gone forever in a sense. Even if they return, they think differently, speak differently, and even eat differently.” 

Payne closes the book by reflecting on his own escape from poverty. It was very difficult for him to escape, and it made him fundamentally different from his family and friends who stayed in their environment. This is because, as he argues throughout the book, inequality and our perceived status fundamentally shape how we think and perceive the world. He delineates the broader implications of this: As the educated and wealthy pull further away from everyone else, these disparities become increasingly entrenched.