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

The distinction between relative poverty (i.e., inequality) and absolute poverty is crucial to Payne’s arguments. Absolute poverty refers to those who live in material deprivation, while relative poverty refers to the difference between the richest and the poorest in a given environment. Although we tend to focus on absolute poverty, Payne’s main argument is that inequality matters more than poverty because determining who is rich and who is poor is more complicated than it seems. Most people living below the poverty line have modern conveniences such as televisions, cell phones, and refrigerators, which even the richest did not have in the past. However, poverty and wealth are always relative to what other people have in a particular time and place.

The Status Ladder is a psychological concept used to gauge how people subjectively rank their social status. While you may expect the richest, the best educated, and those with the best jobs to place themselves high up on the ladder, studies show that there is a surprisingly small relationship between these traditional markers of status and how people rate their own status. This is significant because those who place themselves low on the ladder are more likely to suffer from the negative consequences of poverty and inequality, such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, poor decision-making, and poor job performance, regardless of their actual income. In other words, the Status Ladder shows that feeling poor matters more than actually being poor. Payne uses this to highlight the importance of inequality. If we are living in an environment of high inequality, we are more likely to rank ourselves lower on the Status Ladder because we perceive those around us to have a much higher status than us.

Our stress response system is the pathway through abstract concepts like inequality are translated into concrete health problems, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and mental illness, which are caused by our bodies’ response to crisis. This crisis-response mechanism evolved to save us during short-term crises at the expense of long-term health. The stress response system releases large amounts of energy in response to perceived crises or opportunities by speeding up the heart and lungs, diverting water, and triggering inflammation. However, because it cannot create new energy, the stress response system diverts energy from elsewhere, shutting down other bodily functions. This is problematic because this system activates when we perceive threats, and the response can last for years. Because inequality causes us to perceive threats to our social status, its presence activates this stress response system, leading to long-term health problems like those listed above.