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

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

1 " ...high inequality is associated with higher rates of crime, greater risk of stress-related illness, and greater political polarization. "

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

2 " Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they're not. "

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

3 " Just as people often confused inequality with poverty, they often confuse the goal of reducing inequality with the goal of fostering economic growth. But the findings on the critical role played by inequality itself - on health, decision making, political and social divisions - argue that economic growth by itself is not sufficient. "

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

4 " I believe we have to view inequality as a public health problem. "

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

5 " high inequality is associated with higher rates of crime, greater risk of stress-related illness, and greater political polarization. These problems degrade the quality of life for everyone, including the affluent. This may be why people are happier in more equal places even after adjusting for their individual incomes. "

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

6 " Following that 350-year period of perfectly legal subjugation, a mere half century—less than a single lifetime—separates us from whites-only lunch counters, water fountains, and schools. How much have things changed since then? "

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

7 " In study after study, subjects who see the world as a threatening and dangerous place tend to be more politically conservative. Those who see the world as safe, and who are motivated by exploring and trying new experiences, tend to support more liberal views. "

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

8 " In every country tested, respondents dramatically underestimated the degree of actual pay inequity. In the United States, for example, people estimated that CEOs earned about 30 times the average worker. In reality, the researchers point out, the average CEO earned $12.3 million in 2012. That is about 350 times the average worker’s income of $35,000. "

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

9 " The subjects who thought their earnings were inferior wanted to increase redistribution, as before. But they wanted everyone’s vote to count equally, regardless of whether the other player agreed or disagreed with them. The subjects who thought they were superior wanted to reduce redistribution, and they also voted to reject the votes of those who disagreed with them. The more they saw the other player as incompetent and irrational, the less they wanted his vote to count. This research was the first to show that feeling superior in status magnifies our feeling that we see reality as it is while our opponents are deluded. It supports the idea that as the top and the bottom of the social ladder drift further apart, our politics will become more divisive. That is exactly what has happened over the past several decades. "

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

10 " Because we habitually make social comparisons to the people we encounter in everyday contexts, another way to manage the effects of inequality is to change those contexts. So in addition to changing your comparisons, you can choose your situations wisely. "

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

11 " We are especially likely to manufacture meaningful patterns when we feel powerless. "

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

12 " Although we would all like to believe ourselves to be members of the “not racist” club, we are all steeped in a culture whose history and present is built on massive racial inequality. "

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

13 " To believe in a conspiracy, you trade a bit of your belief that the world is good, fair, and just in exchange for the conviction that at least someone—anyone—has everything under control. "

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

14 " In order to maintain the certitude that the world was fair, subjects manufactured flaws in the woman’s character. "

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

15 " Sometimes the ideological principles we turn to depend on what we have been thinking about lately. If I read a news story about a crime committed by a homeless person a few minutes before my walk down Franklin Street, I am more likely to think about the next panhandler I see in negative terms, simply because those ideas have been brought recently to mind. Psychologists call this phenomenon “accessibility. "

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

16 " The next time you find yourself thinking about how you worked hard and deserve what you have earned, ask yourself what lucky breaks you had along the way. "

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

17 " The beliefs they had taken to be strongly held turned out to be props that they could pick up and set aside as needed. These studies do not demonstrate that people lack political convictions, but they do show that, in at least some cases, the reasons we articulate to explain our decisions are not the real basis of those decisions. "

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

18 " The surveys that reveal little prejudice are the outlier here, which raises the question of to what extent those self-reports can be trusted. When we look at actual behaviors, we see the persistence of bias again and again. "

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

19 " What work means to people often has less to do with what tasks they are actually performing than with how they relate to and compare themselves to other people. "

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

20 " Bloom found exactly the opposite to be the case. The teams with the greatest levels of pay inequality performed worse than those with less inequality. Similar effects were found in an NFL study: Football teams with greater inequality won fewer games. This research also revealed an interesting wrinkle: Higher pay inequality was associated with higher team revenues. The most likely explanation for this finding is that spending huge amounts of money to attract superstars increases fans’ willingness to pay for tickets and media to watch these celebrity players, even if their expensive contracts undermined the team’s overall performance. "

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