The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne
Title: The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
Author: Keith Payne
Published: 2018
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 219
The live fast, die young approach that is motivated by an uncertain future leads to shortsighted decisions, from payday loans to selling drugs to dropping out of school, that provide short-term rewards but sabotage the future. It also encourages young people to have children sooner and discourages marriage, the biggest long-term commitment that most people ever make. This lack of a stable family life also sabotages their children’s future. The emergency response of our stress and immune systems to daily crises gives us the energy to get us out of those scrapes, but at the expense of sabotaging our future well-being. The feelings of insecurity cued by poverty, together with easy us-versus-them divisions of inequality, provoke us to embrace simplistic beliefs, extreme ideologies, and prejudices that provide easy answers, but do so by sabotaging the healthy functioning of civil society.
In Brief:
A really awesome book delving into the impact of inequality through a psychological lens! Super readable, with a combination of research studies and anecdotes, strongly recommend!
Rating: 4.3
Synopsis:
It’s a fact that inequality in the world, and especially America, has been rising dramatically over the course of the last fifty years. Just ask Robert Reich. You can hardly watch the news without it being referenced or (bizarrely) argued over. Plenty of books have been written on the subject – again, Robert Reich (did you know I went to Berkeley) – but this one is unique. Instead of looking at the obvious factors of inequality like education, income, and employment, psychologist Keith Payne seeks to understand the impact inequality has on the way we live our lives – “we” being both the poor, wealth, and middle-income.
Overall, Payne argues that there’s a difference between being poor and feeling poor, and feeling poor in such an unequal society (even while earning a respectable income) can contribute to a wide range of damaging behaviors. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of this, combining scientific studies with personal anecdotes from Payne as well as others. To name a few, Payne discusses how feeling poor helps account for our political choices, unhealthy behaviors, racial prejudices, and belief systems.
It’s not a policy book so Payne doesn’t have a silver bullet solution (unfortunately), but he does give a different perspective to this all-too-prevalent problem American society faces today. He doesn’t make the case for eliminating inequality altogether, but argues for a goal to make it “more human,” allowing people to compete and move up in their lives, without making economic competition a “winner-take-all contest.” In the meantime, he seeks to help people understand the behavioral science of inequality, to “help us live more gracefully in this vertical world.”
Where I’m At:
This book resonated a lot with me, putting words and giving explanations to things I’ve long wondered about or struggled with. Growing up, my family wasn’t poor. We went on vacations, owned a home, always had food and steady incomes from both parents. Yet, I acutely remember thinking that we were for the longest time. In our affluent suburb, my friends had bigger houses, moms who didn’t work. They didn’t shop the sale rack or wear their sibling’s hand-me-downs or eat at McDonald’s. I remember feeling ashamed, then ashamed of feeling ashamed, when I was old enough to understand that so many people had it so much worse. This book doesn’t change that my feeling poor wasn’t accurate when confronted with the fact, but acknowledges that those feelings are still real, and still have an impact.
More recently, (and this is going to be one of those fun Allie-rants-about-her-ex sections) I dated someone who came from (and currently made) significantly more money than me, and I realized for the first time how much that bothered me. When he would tell me a story and mention a passing detail that his family was flying first class, I’d ignore the rest of the narrative to fume and exaggeratedly roll my eyes at his nonchalance (I was being a b*tch). When we went to a fancy dinner and he’d assume we split the check, I’d burn with resentment, knowing that if I’d been bold enough to voice an opinion I’d never choose something so pricey. With his higher salary and sophisticated tastes that I indulged, shouldn’t he pay more? But I was also too ashamed to say a word, just put down my card and gritted my teeth at the receipt. Who do you think you are? a voice would sneer in my hear. Go to a f*cking Chili’s.*
Ironically, I originally started this book back in May with said ex, with whom I’m still friends. I picked it as a jab (and because it’s been on my list for a while) after he chose the neoliberal/capitalist-friendly Why Nations Fail as a jab at me, and perhaps as a not-so-subtle way to show him something I failed to articulate in our relationship, in spite of so many related arguments.
Of course, he did not end up reading the book. The point is still unmade, and I think at this point I can let it die.
The Broken Ladder also interested me because of my background in studying Political Economy. I was always more interested in policies instead of traditional economic theories, skeptical of convenient graphs and bored by math. I liked reading the poli-econ philosophers because they talked about what it all meant, how it affects people. Though not at all philosophical, this book did something similar – went beyond the numbers, beyond money, and showed at a human level, why we should care.
Getting Into it:
Where to begin. This book is great, and as a not-psychologist, I don’t really feel equipped to assess it, so here are just a few general thoughts.
The two chapters I found most interesting were the ones on the health impacts of economic inequality, and the intersection of racial inequality. Payne argues that inequality is a public health problem, explaining the numerous negative effects on the body when one lives in a state of stress, which humans can live on for months or even years. He explains that stress redirects energy, causing functions like digestion and growth functions to shut down, while the hormones released during stress are essentially powerful drugs a doctor would only use sparingly. It can put people at greater risk for diabetes, autoimmune diseases, allergies, etc. This sort of thing fascinates me. I’ve seriously considered getting a Public Health degree for my Masters.
Payne opens his chapter on the intersectionality with race:
Racial inequality is qualitatively different from income inequality. Rich and poor exist among all racial groups and racial discrimination affects the lives of African Americans and other minority groups even when they are not poor. Although racial and economic inequalities are separate issues, they have been intersecting more and more often in recent years as racial inequality stumbles ever so slowly downward and income inequality steadily rises. In this chapter, we will discuss how widening inequality throws fuel on the fire of racial prejudice and how racial stereotypes are used to justify and preserve that inequality.
Through the chapter, Payne explains that despite the Civil Rights Movement, the income gap between white and black families has remained more or less the same, while the wealth gap has increased. He explains that race and inequality are tightly intertwined, as inequality creates an us-versus-them mentality that heightens race bias, while a deeply ingrained sense of connection between “race, poverty, and deservingness” creates a major obstacle to reducing economic inequality. Obviously, this chapter was especially pertinent.
The book is also just really well-written. It’s accessible without talking down to the reader – you don’t need to be a psychologist, economist, public health expert, activist, anything, to really get his point and get something out of the chapters. The combination of both personal anecdotes and research will soothe the heart and the head – the two are blended together flawlessly. He focuses on the human, even managing to keep his tone civil when he talks about politics or gently calls out privilege.
An example of the latter:
If it seems obvious to you that it is better to sacrifice today for larger returns in the future, then you have probably been raised in an environment in which that kind of conscientious investment pays off. If you believe most people can be trusted, you probably came of age in a world where most people were trustworthy. And if your stress response stabilizes once a stressful event is over, you are probably accustomed to being in a world that is essentially safe. If you have the good fortune to have these are you default settings, then you are being lifted in an upward spiral. Your future is likely to be bright, because in the modern economy your instincts are productive ones, aimed at long-term success rather than immediate crisis.
I don’t really have critiques. You should read this book. If I were to write a non-fiction book (I don’t want to) I’d want it to be something like this. It’s approachable, it’s thorough, and it’s short! I think some studies and stories are arguably more convincing than others, but I really think anyone will still walk away having learned something important, and see this problem in a way that’s just more human.
*I will defend Chili’s forever. Chili’s is great.
