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

Inequality affects our actions and feelings in a systematic, predictable way. It makes us shortsighted and prone to risky behavior; leads us to make self-defeating decisions; makes us believe superstitious things; erodes our trust in one another; and makes us all less happy and healthy. These are the classic tropes of poverty, but inequality also produces these effects among the middle class and the wealthy. Inequality is different from poverty, but they can feel the same to us. That is the subject of the book: how inequality makes us feel poor and act poor even when we are not. This explains why the United States, the richest but most unequal of countries, has features that make it look more like a developing country than a superpower.

The richest 85 people have more wealth that the poorest 3.5 billion, and in the United States, the richest 1% take home more than 20% of all income. Comprehending the scale of modern inequality is difficult, if not impossible, because “numbers like that are simply not on a human scale” (4). Most people think class and income distribution follows the classic bell curve, but actual income distribution is far more lopsided than we think for two reasons.