The Broken Ladder Quotes

“I believe we have to view inequality as a public health problem.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“...high inequality is associated with higher rates of crime, greater risk of stress-related illness, and greater political polarization.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they're not.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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?”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“In order to maintain the certitude that the world was fair, subjects manufactured flaws in the woman’s character.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“We are especially likely to manufacture meaningful patterns when we feel powerless.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“The study found that talking for five minutes about an empowering experience significantly increased willingness to enroll in benefits programs.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“Geoffrey Cohen and colleagues harnessed the power of values to combat the achievement gap between black and white students. They created an intervention consisting of several short writing exercises that were administered during the course of a school year. In the experimental group, each writing assignment involved writing about a personally important value. Students in the control group also completed the writing exercises but wrote about values that were important to other people. When researchers examined the students’ grade point averages at the end of the year, there was a substantial gap between the GPAs of the black and white students in the control group, but that gap was reduced by 40 percent in the important-values group.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“Nations, states, and regions with higher degrees of income inequality actually have less upward mobility, a relationship known as the Gatsby curve.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“I was recently on a plane from Raleigh to Boston when I overheard a conversation between two women in the seats behind me that captured the national mood perfectly. An older woman with a Boston accent remarked, “It’s gone to shit. Everything’s gone to shit. The economy is terrible. Crime is crazy—I mean, I just go to work and come home and I don’t even go out.” The younger woman, who had a Southern accent, sighed knowingly. “It makes you wonder if you want to bring a child into this world,” she said. These were women who could afford airplane tickets. They were traveling between two affluent cities during a period of historically low crime rates in the richest nation during the wealthiest period of the history of the world. Clearly, it didn’t feel that way.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“It also ignores the fact that people’s behaviors are responses to their environments, and those environments can be changed. Individuals make bad choices more often if they, like my uncle, grew up in a cabin with a dirt floor amid a family of coal miners and sharecroppers. They make those choices more often in a high-inequality country, like the United States, than a lower-inequality one, like Canada. Even the disparity between high-inequality states, like Kentucky, and low-inequality states, like Iowa, translates to significant differences in people’s life outcomes.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“When people escape an impoverished background, they, too, are gone forever in a sense. Even if they return, they think differently, speak differently, and even eat differently. A family member once told me she didn’t want to set up education funds for her children because people came back from college as atheists. And what good is increased earnings potential when compared to eternal damnation?”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“Fitza estimates than in addition to these uncontrollable elements, about 70 percent of a company’s performance, for which the CEO normally gets credit and blame, is a matter of pure random chance. When a corporation sets out to find a new chief executive, it often hires headhunters and consulting firms, spending months of work and millions of dollars to pick just the right candidate. Fitza’s research suggests that they might as well have identified a pool of applicants with the general qualifications required for the job, and then just pulled names out of a hat.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“In one comprehensive analysis of thousands of corporations over nearly two decades, management professor Markus Fitza found that only about 5 percent of the performance differences between companies could be attributed to the CEO.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“People who described themselves as politically left of center thought that CEOs should make 4 times as much as average workers, while those who identified themselves as right of center thought the ideal would be 5 times. Respondents in the lowest 20 percent of the income bracket thought that CEOs should make 4.3 times as much as average workers, while those in the richest 20 percent thought it should be 5 times.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“The best predictor of wanting to slash funding for welfare recipients is racial prejudice.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“When I looked at my data, I got about 80 percent correct. That was not a bad result, but the pattern of my errors was disturbing: I was much more likely to mistake harmless objects for guns when a black face had been flashed initially.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

“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.”
― Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die