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

“Inequality affects our actions and our feelings in the same systematic, predictable fashion again and again. It makes us shortsighted and prone to risky behavior, 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 as we want it to be rather than 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.”

This quote concisely sums up Payne’s main thesis, which he spends the rest of the book unpacking. There is both a positive and a normative element to Payne’s thesis. Positive because it makes a clear causal connection between inequality’s presence in a given environment and its outcomes. Normative because Payne is clearly arguing that these are negative outcomes, and we should try to reduce inequality to reduce the magnitude of its consequences.

“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.