inequality

Inequality is typically measured by the Gini coefficient for either wealth or income (the rate of change in wealth), with 0 being perfect equality and 1 being perfect inequality. Looking at the Gini coefficient for wealth, the United States is among the most unequal countries in the world.

As the philosopher Harry Frankfurt points out in his 1987 paper “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, inequality itself is not the core problem, otherwise reducing everyone to the same state of poverty would seem an acceptable solution.

Further Learning

• The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption”. The book’s research shows how for eleven different health and social problems—physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being—outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.
• Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth makes the case that extreme inequality should not exist, with practical alternatives
• Realtime Inequality charts the most up-to-date statistics on income and wealth inequality in the U.S.
• The Yard-Sale Model explains how in a simplified version of our economy, random chance favors the already-wealthy, causing wealth to “trickle up”.

A Threat to Democracy

We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
—Louis Brandeis, Associate Supreme Court Justice

Rising inequality, coupled with the 2010 Citizens United vs. FEC decision removing any limits on money in politics, puts more power in the hands of the few to shape laws and institutions to their benefit, a reinforcing feedback loop causing government to grow less and less responsive to the needs of most citizens, and thus less and less democratic. Case in point, in 2016 after decades of rising inequality the United States’ democracy index score fell out of the “full democracy” range into that of a “flawed democracy”.

A Threat to Public Health

From Behave, how rising economic inequality leads to worse health in a population:

A neo-materialist explanation has been offered by Robert Evans of the University of British Columbia and George Kaplan of the University of Michigan. If you want to improve health and quality of life for the average person in a society, you spend money on public goods: better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal healthcare. But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average, and thus the less direct benefit the wealthy feel from improving public goods. Instead, they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good: a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, “the more unequal our incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have to mount effective political opposition, e.g. lobbying.” Evans notes how this “secession of the wealthy” promotes private affluence and public squalor, meaning worse health for the have-nots.

In a vicious reinforcing feedback loop, rising inequality takes resources the poor need to maintain good health while at the same time insulating the wealthy from having to care.

Sapolsky then claims “inequality also makes for more crime and violence” in the same way, which would make sense (poverty leads to desperation which leads to crime) but doesn’t match the evidence: income inequality has grown steadily over the past decades while the national crime rate has plunged to historic lows, although these are national numbers which may hide trends within cities and communities.

Further reading from Dr. Sapolsky on the mutually-reinforcing effects of economic inequality and health inequality.

Research by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel on telomeres—the tips of chromosomes that degrade as we age—show that the chronic stress of poverty shortens telomeres, effecively accelerating the aging process of (and stealing years of life from) people held in poverty. Furthermore, in a talk by Jack Kornfield on renunciation he mentions hearing Dr. Epel at a conference speak of a finding that in highly unequal societies, even the wealthy tend to have shorter telomeres (primary source needed), suggesting that inequality harms us all (though of course not equally). It’s interesting to speculate what could explain this. Perhaps stress resulting from fear of the have-nots. Or a deeply-seeded response to the suffering of others. Or perhaps cause flows the other direction: societies that equate wealth with dignity tend to produce the kind of vicious competition that causes both wealth inequality and high levels of stress across income groups.