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Worth reading Robert Sapolsky on the topic of inequality here[1]. Inequality itself (not poverty, and accounted for the material disadvantages), causes about ha

Worth reading Robert Sapolsky on the topic of inequality here[1]. Inequality itself (not poverty, and accounted for the material disadvantages), causes about half of the difference in health and life expectancy outcomes in developed nations, makes people at a neurological level opportunistic and causes biological stress in populations which results in violence, crime, isolation, mental illness, and so forth. That's empirically backed by research and stands in stark contrast to the technocratic myth of "we just have to make everyone wealthier" that's dominated for the last 30-ish years. It's not surprising at all that a population that is running on extreme levels of stress tends towards political polarization. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-inflicts-real-biological-harm/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-ineq... edit: short video interview summarizing it because of the paywall: https://youtu.be/aNRPuBJ02MM https://youtu.be/aNRPuBJ02MM

civilized 5y ago
I don't believe it. I think it's woo. There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I think this is another social science fad, another victim of academia's ideological blinkers and confirmation bias avalanche. It'll be in and out, just like how eggs and wine and chocolate are good for you on Tuesday and bad for you again by Thursday. EDIT: Yes, I'm sure envious people can tie themselves in knots over inequality, but I don't see this as a social problem. It's a personal psychological problem for those people. And I am skeptical that it is so common as to be my problem.
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- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  It's not that they have more. It's that you know they have more, that it's not fair they have more because they are not better than you, and the path to get more is blocked / unfairly policed. And that eats you up inside. And that eating up is constantly firing stress hormones and heardening your heart. In short, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Then the research is inaccurately described. They should talk about perceived injustice, not merely inequality. Even the Chinese Communist Party came to realize that people must be allowed to reap unequal rewards (based on their talent and labor) to escape desperate poverty. Their agricultural productivity tripled when they let people sell some of their produce rather than turning it all over to the state [1]. This is how Deng Xiaoping began his rise to power in a country gripped by the madness of Maoism. By accepting inequality even though the Communists have always demonized its socioeconomic manifestations. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform
  - Natsu 5y ago
    The problem is that, no matter what the actual causes are, self interest bias generally makes it so that nobody can accept that another person worked harder or used better strategy or whatever. For example, in games, it's always lag/bad teammates/etc. that keep them in "Elo hell" and they want to 1v1 you despite it being a team game and they ignore game winning objectives to score meaningless kills or whatever. Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time. Yes, yes, bad lag can have an effect on the margins, but some of the best players I knew were playing from another continent with terrible ping and bad lag doesn't have any effect on bad tactics. I've been in, and climbed out of that Elo in plenty of games, and I know just how sharply the mindsets change as you climb.
    - hotpotamus 5y ago
      > Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time. In a game sure, but does this seem to reflect lived reality? Edit: in fact, I don't know what game you're refering to, but imagine a game where your opponent was given an order of magnitude more HP or an hour to level up/prepare before you entered the game. Is this a game you would want to play?
      - Natsu 5y ago
        I don't want it to be about one specific game because it happens in lots of games. There's always someone who will make horribly bad tactical decisions to ignore game winning objectives and blame that on "lag" or something ridiculous. And the ones I have in mind are such that people do start with the same resources every time. Though if you want to discuss P2W games, those where actual skill is involved not infrequently have no-skill whales lose to skilled players. In those it depends on the scale of the P2W and how much skill plays into the actual contest, though. Finally, to your edit, yes, many people play MMOs and even join ones where other players have already maxed everything before they created their first character. Not everyone feels the need to be #1 or even cares if someone has more than they do, because obsessing about that stuff is a sure way to hurt your own mental health.
- umvi 5y ago
  > There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. You would think so, but I've read several articles that suggest this isn't the case. One example that comes to mind is that in some communities kids experience social stress/bullying if their SMS bubbles aren't blue (because it implies you are too poor to afford an iPhone and can only afford a "lesser" Android): https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-... From the article: > Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.
  - ghotli 5y ago
    Fuck apple for this. Their walled garden is nice if you can afford it / deal with all the other shortcomings of modern iOS vs modern Android. Goes both ways in some respects, but the iMessage thing is way past time to have nice interop. Comes down to greed, I guess
  - civilized 5y ago
    So is it the different colored text bubbles (the inequality) or is it the bullying that's the problem here? I don't think it's a hard question.
  - wetpaws 5y ago
    This is not inequality, this is tribalism
    - sutuplesu 5y ago
      Are they not interlinked? It seems to me that inequality often begets tribalism, as people defensively form bands. Which then reinforces the spiral downwards.
      - 5y ago
- chinchilla2020 5y ago
  Furthermore, none of these studies are reproducible.
- brewdad 5y ago
  One obvious example is housing. Those that have more than you can afford to live in safer neighborhoods. Those less well off but still able to afford to own a home will be forced to live in neighborhoods with higher crime, higher levels of pollution, "food deserts", or any other number of negative factors. Sure, you can opt to drive til you qualify and avoid some of those problems but now you spend an hour or more each way in your car. That too comes with negative consequences to your health.
  - civilized 5y ago
    That's poverty though, not inequality per se.
    - chongli 5y ago
      It’s not poverty though. If you can afford a car, an iPhone, laptop, plenty of food to eat, TV, refrigerator, washer and dryer, and all sorts of other toys and time saving appliances, you’re not in poverty by any global or historical standards. You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty.
      - civilized 5y ago
        > You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty. But this sentence contains no reference to how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer. It contains a description of how Y could be better off if Y had more. If inequality was eliminated by making it so no one had access to safe schools, it would not solve the problem at all. If you don't want to call the problem poverty, whatever, but it's definitely not inequality.
        meowkit 5y ago
        I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment. "how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above you in the hierarchy of A (A is whatever measure you want, usually its financial wealth or social status). This involuntary comparison allows you to derive your relative position, and this is a biologically stressful activity when you are toward the bottom of the hierarchy. This constant reflexive update is not great for people in a highly unequal society because its a constant stress inducer and has direct physical and mental health implications that bleed over into things like the political sphere. Both "pointy" hierarchies and flattened hierarchies are bad. Flattened hierarchies are when we are all equal, and thus society stagnates. Pointy hierarchies are the traditional kings at the top, serfs at the bottom. These inevitably collapse at some point for multitudes of reasons. There is probably a happy, more stable medium. Societies that are becoming unequal have a gradient trending toward the pointy hierarchy state. Poverty is a specific threshold of material wealth, and is related, but ultimately orthogonal to the discussion.
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- rodgerd 5y ago
  > I don't believe it. I think it's woo. [...] ideological blinkers and confirmation bias Physician, heal thyself.
- scrozart 5y ago
  Do you have research and data to back you stance, like OP provided?
  - jl6 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume a study is correct just because a contradictory study or replication failure has not yet been published. This particular study seems to be a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. If true, the implications are enormous: medical justification for a wealth cap! Something which has never been attempted anywhere in the world in all of history.
- jl6 5y ago
  > There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. Being angry all the time can harm your health. Maybe being envious all the time can too.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Then envious people can work on themselves, as we've always understood envy to be a moral problem.
    - jl6 5y ago
      Quite. I’m just proposing a mechanism. The solution could quite well be psychotherapy rather than communism.
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      Well, but is it possible that this is a very fundamental part of human psychology and thus not very easily overcome, especially on a societal level? Maybe we’re as hardwired to be stressed and anxious when we see someone else with more resources as we are to start looking for food when we’re hungry.
      - civilized 5y ago
        Or maybe it's something people can and should get over, as many traditional moral systems have taught.
        Cederfjard 5y ago
        And people should definitely stop raping and murdering each other, do you have a realistic plan for making that happen in the foreseeable future? You’re being very flippant about something which is extremely challenging, changing human behavior at scale. If you want to be pragmatic you can’t just sit and pout that people aren’t behaving as well as they could - unfortunately that’s something you most likely will just have to live with.
    - 5y ago
- Frondo 5y ago
  Since you're asserting that you don't believe the results of this research because it's "woo" -- can you explain what type of evidence, or what degree of impact, or how deep or impeccable the link must be established for you to accept it? Is it even possible that you are, as you say, open to being proven wrong? (I ask this in good faith, because I've been arguing on the internet for 25+ years, and whenever someone says this, I end up asking them what would persuade them and the answer is usually "nothing," which, ... okay ..., but I am an eternal optimist and I strive to take people at their written word.)
  - civilized 5y ago
    I'm sure that envious people can impose suffering on themselves by obsessing over those who have more than them. But I don't see another causal pathway. I'd like to see the causal pathway. Otherwise it's on a scientific level with ESP.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Many studies show chemical markers of these things, it's not just psychological behavioral studies (which are often quite dubious) but easily measurable outcomes. If you're thinking quite narrowly, your point seems reasonable, it's probably below significance to say your neighbor with the bigger house and nicer car is "healthier", but this is a lot different than them vs the family that sometimes skips meals because they can't afford to put food on the table with the knowledge that a lost job will mean homelessness. Good arguments are resources by Robert Sapolsky https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00DTO688C https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... or any of the books he has published (many have significantly overlapping content)
- pm90 5y ago
  You either believe in science or you don’t. A lot of scientific findings don’t make intuitive sense (like relativity). So we rely on the scientific methods to guide us to the truth rather than our primitive ape minds. Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.
  - glerk 5y ago
    There is a difference between physics and economics/social “science”.
  - civilized 5y ago
    > Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful. Have you ever been a scientist? Scientists react this way to published research all the time, especially in fields like psychology where epistemic and empirical methods are weak.
    - pm90 5y ago
      The OP did not claim to be a social scientist so I assume they are a layperson and not a trained scientist.
  - kansface 5y ago
    Just the opposite - consider the replication crisis. Our a priori belief should be that any published paper in the social sciences is junk without extremely compelling evidence to the contrary. This is an evidenced based position! Or, let’s completely disregard the studies themselves and look at the fruits of their labors. Is eg education noticeably better now than it was a generation ago? Is our mental health better now than then, etc etc.
- ahoho 5y ago
  Ironically, I think you're letting your view of academia distort your own thinking here. The mechanism isn't that complex. Anywhere resources are limited can lead to outcomes where an unequal society is worse off than an equal one. If I have a finite supply of doctors, for example, then the wealthy will be the ones who receive care while the poor go without. The wealthy also tend to set up systematic barriers to ensure that the resources they fund serve them alone [1]. In the US, this is probably best exemplified by public education: schools are funded by property taxes, so rich districts have better schools, which in turn further increases home values (a process exacerbated by policies that prevent construction of cheaper, higher-density housing---policies supported by, naturally, the wealthy). Schools in poorer districts are therefore worse off than they would be if wealth weren't as concentrated. Even if you take the perspective that, net, an equal amount of dollars is going toward education (or healthcare, etc.), it's fairly obvious the marginal benefits are different. A second violin teacher isn't as meaningful as adding a calculus class; elective cosmetic surgery isn't equivalent to treating diabetes. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
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  - civilized 5y ago
    This is just your speculation. A bunch of other people in this comment tree say it's not about outcomes in an unequal society being worse than outcomes in a (hypothetical, possibly unachievable) equal society with the same resources. Instead it's about a hardwired biological stress response that people lower in the social hierarchy have when they observe people higher up. So before we go lecturing about how it "isn't that complex" let's make sure we understand what this thing is that's supposedly not that complex.
    - ahoho 5y ago
      Where's the speculation? I shared a concrete example. Places without that method of funding have more equitable education systems. I'm not really concerned what others are saying. You made the claim that "There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me." I just gave an intuitive explanation of how this could happen. And you can see this happening on a global scale: wealthy countries attract more higher-skilled workers, like doctors. These are educated, capable people not contributing those skills to their home countries (to be clear, I wholeheartedly support open immigration policies, but that doesn't mean "brain drain" isn't real). EDIT: ah, I was not reading carefully, and realize you are saying "I see no reason for my health to be harmed by the sole fact of being poorer than someone else." I am not familiar with Sapolsky's research and can't speculate. In principle, I do see why you'd think it's hard to disentangle the material impacts of inequality from the psychological.
rich_sasha 5y ago
Who is going to do the redistribution and how? It sounds nice, these people have too much and these have too little, let’s optimise. But redistribution via taxes imho leads to politicians having larger budgets for scoring political goals. And anyway how is it meant to work? If you equalise assets, you’ll find wealth drifting away from it again, as some eat through their assets and some invest/save. It’s a known effect that lottery winners often end up in poverty, having quit their jobs and spent all the money rather quickly. If you do a Robin Hood tax, how do you distinguish between good/poor standing in life due to starting point vs work input? I’d argue someone who had an unlucky start to life has a different entitlement to support than someone who didn’t but can’t be asked. It’s ok if people don’t want to work harder and earn more, but why should I fund it? I feel very different about the opposite case, people who through bad luck can’t make way forward in life. My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Fund these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education. Provide professional courses for adults, financial support to those who want to upskill. Maybe do state sponsored grants so that lower/middle class people can try becoming entrepreneurs: a high risk & high reward move otherwise. Im not against redistribution per se, i just havent seen that as an actual equaliser, just an article of faith. There are some very egalitarian countries (Nordics come to mind) where tax redistribution is part of the picture, but it seems to me it is just a part of a much bigger picture. As a counterpoint, Poland is on a massive redistribution spending spree right now and it’s never been as polarised as it is now. Because, guess what, the redistribution is a hugely polarising matter (among other things).
- colechristensen 5y ago
  You don't directly redistribute. You set taxes and economic policies to target free-market wealth redistribution. That is, find instances where there is significant distribution of money from the poor to the rich and find ways to add friction to those markets. Like landowners renting out housing. Suck large amounts of money out of the housing market by taxing commercial loans used for residential real estate, doubling property taxes for non-owner-occupied residential real estate and vacant real estate, and putting caps on mortgage vs income though some means or another. Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices. So much money and effort is sucked away from people into bank interest and "cost of capital" for people who already have lots of it. Maybe go to the extent of statutory redistribution of ownership of housing, 2% per year. If you rent a house for 50 years it's yours. This can't raise rents because rent pricing is based on maximizing what the market will pay.
WalterBright 5y ago
Maybe it's crime, violence, and mental illness that causes inequality.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Haven't we been doing "tough on crime" policy for decades now? We had the entire war on drugs, which we're really only just now collectively pulling back from and realizing was a mistake. We passed prohibition on alcohol. We did stop-and-frisk, all that crud. And our mental illness diagnoses and treatment processes are better today than they've ever been (even if the overall health care system is a mess). We know more about mental illness today than we did in the past, and we have more effective medication and psychological techniques for dealing with it. The overall reduction in violent crime over the long-term in America is a success story, we genuinely have made America safer and less violent. And yet, here we are. So my question to anyone who acts like there's a very simple causal link from violence/crime/illness to inequality is, "why isn't your strategy working then?" I think this kind of stuff is generally a lot more complicated than pointing to a single cause; I don't think that inequality is the single cause of every social problem. But if I am going to point to a single cause, it's probably not going to be based on the strategy that we aggressively targeted for multiple decades that didn't yield the results people are now promising. I get a little bit annoyed by people who keep saying, "no you don't understand, if we're even tougher on crime, then we'll see the results. We just haven't been tough enough yet." At some point, it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    1. Crime causes stress in high crime neighborhoods. 2. Crime impoverishes neighborhoods by causing people to spend money to protect themselves, hiring security guards, armoring their businesses, and simply driving businesses away. 3. Crime impoverishes families when members get jailed. 4. Crime impoverishes criminals because a criminal record greatly restricts opportunities for productive employment 5. Crime prevents criminals from getting an education 6. Crime is a zero-sum, adversarial economic system. Cooperation in a free market is far, far more productive to those who participate in it A person committing crimes will impoverish himself, his family, and his community.
canjobear 5y ago
Such studies are either correlational, and therefore cannot establish causation, or experimental in settings that are so abstracted and scaled-down from real world experience that they have no relevance to societal questions.
js8 5y ago
See also the book The Spirit Level, which shows that inequality also negatively affects those who are well-off - they become stressed about their social standing too. This is why naive explanations of inequality that blame the poor or the envious are false.
- civilized 5y ago
  I don't think it proves envy false as a cause. It just means envy is of a piece with status anxiety more broadly. I doubt that anyone of any historical period would be shocked by this.
  - js8 5y ago
    The stress of falling from the current social position (for example, in the US, the risk of inability to pay medical bills or student debt) also affects people who are not envious and comfortable with their current salary and social standing. So it's not just envious people causing psychological harm to themselves, it's the unequal system that harms mostly everybody.
    - civilized 5y ago
      I think you haven't understood what I said. I know that envy is not the only form of harmful status anxiety, and that the wealthy can suffer from non-envy status anxiety. I just think that, envy or not, it's a personal problem that those people can and should get over. They're not victims. They do it to themselves. And struggling to pay bills is a different problem from inequality per se.
1193 5y ago
How does this negate the idea of making everyone wealthier? Inequality might account for why the super rich have a higher life expectancy than the sorta-rich, but that does not mean the sorta-rich would live longer otherwise.
zozbot234 5y ago
Realistically once you go beyond the simple case of extreme deprivation, inequality in social capital is going to matter far more towards outcomes in health, biological stress, violence, crime, isolation, mental issues etc. than anything strictly limited to income or assets/wealth. What are you going to do to help the social-capital-poor, those most marginalized today by their own fraying communities and neighborhoods? Merely redistributing physical and economic resources is a blunt, costly approach which does not even begin to mitigate the underlying issues.

civilized 5y ago

I don't believe it. I think it's woo. There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I think this is another social science fad, another victim of academia's ideological blinkers and confirmation bias avalanche. It'll be in and out, just like how eggs and wine and chocolate are good for you on Tuesday and bad for you again by Thursday. EDIT: Yes, I'm sure envious people can tie themselves in knots over inequality, but I don't see this as a social problem. It's a personal psychological problem for those people. And I am skeptical that it is so common as to be my problem.

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lifeisstillgood 5y ago
It's not that they have more. It's that you know they have more, that it's not fair they have more because they are not better than you, and the path to get more is blocked / unfairly policed. And that eats you up inside. And that eating up is constantly firing stress hormones and heardening your heart. In short, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.
- civilized 5y ago
  Then the research is inaccurately described. They should talk about perceived injustice, not merely inequality. Even the Chinese Communist Party came to realize that people must be allowed to reap unequal rewards (based on their talent and labor) to escape desperate poverty. Their agricultural productivity tripled when they let people sell some of their produce rather than turning it all over to the state [1]. This is how Deng Xiaoping began his rise to power in a country gripped by the madness of Maoism. By accepting inequality even though the Communists have always demonized its socioeconomic manifestations. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform
- Natsu 5y ago
  The problem is that, no matter what the actual causes are, self interest bias generally makes it so that nobody can accept that another person worked harder or used better strategy or whatever. For example, in games, it's always lag/bad teammates/etc. that keep them in "Elo hell" and they want to 1v1 you despite it being a team game and they ignore game winning objectives to score meaningless kills or whatever. Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time. Yes, yes, bad lag can have an effect on the margins, but some of the best players I knew were playing from another continent with terrible ping and bad lag doesn't have any effect on bad tactics. I've been in, and climbed out of that Elo in plenty of games, and I know just how sharply the mindsets change as you climb.
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
    > Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time. In a game sure, but does this seem to reflect lived reality? Edit: in fact, I don't know what game you're refering to, but imagine a game where your opponent was given an order of magnitude more HP or an hour to level up/prepare before you entered the game. Is this a game you would want to play?
    - Natsu 5y ago
      I don't want it to be about one specific game because it happens in lots of games. There's always someone who will make horribly bad tactical decisions to ignore game winning objectives and blame that on "lag" or something ridiculous. And the ones I have in mind are such that people do start with the same resources every time. Though if you want to discuss P2W games, those where actual skill is involved not infrequently have no-skill whales lose to skilled players. In those it depends on the scale of the P2W and how much skill plays into the actual contest, though. Finally, to your edit, yes, many people play MMOs and even join ones where other players have already maxed everything before they created their first character. Not everyone feels the need to be #1 or even cares if someone has more than they do, because obsessing about that stuff is a sure way to hurt your own mental health.
umvi 5y ago
> There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. You would think so, but I've read several articles that suggest this isn't the case. One example that comes to mind is that in some communities kids experience social stress/bullying if their SMS bubbles aren't blue (because it implies you are too poor to afford an iPhone and can only afford a "lesser" Android): https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-... From the article: > Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.
- ghotli 5y ago
  Fuck apple for this. Their walled garden is nice if you can afford it / deal with all the other shortcomings of modern iOS vs modern Android. Goes both ways in some respects, but the iMessage thing is way past time to have nice interop. Comes down to greed, I guess
- civilized 5y ago
  So is it the different colored text bubbles (the inequality) or is it the bullying that's the problem here? I don't think it's a hard question.
- wetpaws 5y ago
  This is not inequality, this is tribalism
  - sutuplesu 5y ago
    Are they not interlinked? It seems to me that inequality often begets tribalism, as people defensively form bands. Which then reinforces the spiral downwards.
    - 5y ago
chinchilla2020 5y ago
Furthermore, none of these studies are reproducible.
brewdad 5y ago
One obvious example is housing. Those that have more than you can afford to live in safer neighborhoods. Those less well off but still able to afford to own a home will be forced to live in neighborhoods with higher crime, higher levels of pollution, "food deserts", or any other number of negative factors. Sure, you can opt to drive til you qualify and avoid some of those problems but now you spend an hour or more each way in your car. That too comes with negative consequences to your health.
- civilized 5y ago
  That's poverty though, not inequality per se.
  - chongli 5y ago
    It’s not poverty though. If you can afford a car, an iPhone, laptop, plenty of food to eat, TV, refrigerator, washer and dryer, and all sorts of other toys and time saving appliances, you’re not in poverty by any global or historical standards. You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty.
    - civilized 5y ago
      > You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty. But this sentence contains no reference to how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer. It contains a description of how Y could be better off if Y had more. If inequality was eliminated by making it so no one had access to safe schools, it would not solve the problem at all. If you don't want to call the problem poverty, whatever, but it's definitely not inequality.
      - meowkit 5y ago
        I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment. "how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above you in the hierarchy of A (A is whatever measure you want, usually its financial wealth or social status). This involuntary comparison allows you to derive your relative position, and this is a biologically stressful activity when you are toward the bottom of the hierarchy. This constant reflexive update is not great for people in a highly unequal society because its a constant stress inducer and has direct physical and mental health implications that bleed over into things like the political sphere. Both "pointy" hierarchies and flattened hierarchies are bad. Flattened hierarchies are when we are all equal, and thus society stagnates. Pointy hierarchies are the traditional kings at the top, serfs at the bottom. These inevitably collapse at some point for multitudes of reasons. There is probably a happy, more stable medium. Societies that are becoming unequal have a gradient trending toward the pointy hierarchy state. Poverty is a specific threshold of material wealth, and is related, but ultimately orthogonal to the discussion.
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rodgerd 5y ago
> I don't believe it. I think it's woo. [...] ideological blinkers and confirmation bias Physician, heal thyself.
scrozart 5y ago
Do you have research and data to back you stance, like OP provided?
- jl6 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume a study is correct just because a contradictory study or replication failure has not yet been published. This particular study seems to be a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. If true, the implications are enormous: medical justification for a wealth cap! Something which has never been attempted anywhere in the world in all of history.
jl6 5y ago
> There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. Being angry all the time can harm your health. Maybe being envious all the time can too.
- civilized 5y ago
  Then envious people can work on themselves, as we've always understood envy to be a moral problem.
  - jl6 5y ago
    Quite. I’m just proposing a mechanism. The solution could quite well be psychotherapy rather than communism.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    Well, but is it possible that this is a very fundamental part of human psychology and thus not very easily overcome, especially on a societal level? Maybe we’re as hardwired to be stressed and anxious when we see someone else with more resources as we are to start looking for food when we’re hungry.
    - civilized 5y ago
      Or maybe it's something people can and should get over, as many traditional moral systems have taught.
      - Cederfjard 5y ago
        And people should definitely stop raping and murdering each other, do you have a realistic plan for making that happen in the foreseeable future? You’re being very flippant about something which is extremely challenging, changing human behavior at scale. If you want to be pragmatic you can’t just sit and pout that people aren’t behaving as well as they could - unfortunately that’s something you most likely will just have to live with.
  - 5y ago
Frondo 5y ago
Since you're asserting that you don't believe the results of this research because it's "woo" -- can you explain what type of evidence, or what degree of impact, or how deep or impeccable the link must be established for you to accept it? Is it even possible that you are, as you say, open to being proven wrong? (I ask this in good faith, because I've been arguing on the internet for 25+ years, and whenever someone says this, I end up asking them what would persuade them and the answer is usually "nothing," which, ... okay ..., but I am an eternal optimist and I strive to take people at their written word.)
- civilized 5y ago
  I'm sure that envious people can impose suffering on themselves by obsessing over those who have more than them. But I don't see another causal pathway. I'd like to see the causal pathway. Otherwise it's on a scientific level with ESP.
colechristensen 5y ago
Many studies show chemical markers of these things, it's not just psychological behavioral studies (which are often quite dubious) but easily measurable outcomes. If you're thinking quite narrowly, your point seems reasonable, it's probably below significance to say your neighbor with the bigger house and nicer car is "healthier", but this is a lot different than them vs the family that sometimes skips meals because they can't afford to put food on the table with the knowledge that a lost job will mean homelessness. Good arguments are resources by Robert Sapolsky https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00DTO688C https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... or any of the books he has published (many have significantly overlapping content)
pm90 5y ago
You either believe in science or you don’t. A lot of scientific findings don’t make intuitive sense (like relativity). So we rely on the scientific methods to guide us to the truth rather than our primitive ape minds. Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.
- glerk 5y ago
  There is a difference between physics and economics/social “science”.
- civilized 5y ago
  > Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful. Have you ever been a scientist? Scientists react this way to published research all the time, especially in fields like psychology where epistemic and empirical methods are weak.
  - pm90 5y ago
    The OP did not claim to be a social scientist so I assume they are a layperson and not a trained scientist.
- kansface 5y ago
  Just the opposite - consider the replication crisis. Our a priori belief should be that any published paper in the social sciences is junk without extremely compelling evidence to the contrary. This is an evidenced based position! Or, let’s completely disregard the studies themselves and look at the fruits of their labors. Is eg education noticeably better now than it was a generation ago? Is our mental health better now than then, etc etc.
ahoho 5y ago
Ironically, I think you're letting your view of academia distort your own thinking here. The mechanism isn't that complex. Anywhere resources are limited can lead to outcomes where an unequal society is worse off than an equal one. If I have a finite supply of doctors, for example, then the wealthy will be the ones who receive care while the poor go without. The wealthy also tend to set up systematic barriers to ensure that the resources they fund serve them alone [1]. In the US, this is probably best exemplified by public education: schools are funded by property taxes, so rich districts have better schools, which in turn further increases home values (a process exacerbated by policies that prevent construction of cheaper, higher-density housing---policies supported by, naturally, the wealthy). Schools in poorer districts are therefore worse off than they would be if wealth weren't as concentrated. Even if you take the perspective that, net, an equal amount of dollars is going toward education (or healthcare, etc.), it's fairly obvious the marginal benefits are different. A second violin teacher isn't as meaningful as adding a calculus class; elective cosmetic surgery isn't equivalent to treating diabetes. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
- deleted 5y ago
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- civilized 5y ago
  This is just your speculation. A bunch of other people in this comment tree say it's not about outcomes in an unequal society being worse than outcomes in a (hypothetical, possibly unachievable) equal society with the same resources. Instead it's about a hardwired biological stress response that people lower in the social hierarchy have when they observe people higher up. So before we go lecturing about how it "isn't that complex" let's make sure we understand what this thing is that's supposedly not that complex.
  - ahoho 5y ago
    Where's the speculation? I shared a concrete example. Places without that method of funding have more equitable education systems. I'm not really concerned what others are saying. You made the claim that "There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me." I just gave an intuitive explanation of how this could happen. And you can see this happening on a global scale: wealthy countries attract more higher-skilled workers, like doctors. These are educated, capable people not contributing those skills to their home countries (to be clear, I wholeheartedly support open immigration policies, but that doesn't mean "brain drain" isn't real). EDIT: ah, I was not reading carefully, and realize you are saying "I see no reason for my health to be harmed by the sole fact of being poorer than someone else." I am not familiar with Sapolsky's research and can't speculate. In principle, I do see why you'd think it's hard to disentangle the material impacts of inequality from the psychological.

rich_sasha 5y ago

Who is going to do the redistribution and how? It sounds nice, these people have too much and these have too little, let’s optimise. But redistribution via taxes imho leads to politicians having larger budgets for scoring political goals. And anyway how is it meant to work? If you equalise assets, you’ll find wealth drifting away from it again, as some eat through their assets and some invest/save. It’s a known effect that lottery winners often end up in poverty, having quit their jobs and spent all the money rather quickly. If you do a Robin Hood tax, how do you distinguish between good/poor standing in life due to starting point vs work input? I’d argue someone who had an unlucky start to life has a different entitlement to support than someone who didn’t but can’t be asked. It’s ok if people don’t want to work harder and earn more, but why should I fund it? I feel very different about the opposite case, people who through bad luck can’t make way forward in life. My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Fund these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education. Provide professional courses for adults, financial support to those who want to upskill. Maybe do state sponsored grants so that lower/middle class people can try becoming entrepreneurs: a high risk & high reward move otherwise. Im not against redistribution per se, i just havent seen that as an actual equaliser, just an article of faith. There are some very egalitarian countries (Nordics come to mind) where tax redistribution is part of the picture, but it seems to me it is just a part of a much bigger picture. As a counterpoint, Poland is on a massive redistribution spending spree right now and it’s never been as polarised as it is now. Because, guess what, the redistribution is a hugely polarising matter (among other things).

colechristensen 5y ago
You don't directly redistribute. You set taxes and economic policies to target free-market wealth redistribution. That is, find instances where there is significant distribution of money from the poor to the rich and find ways to add friction to those markets. Like landowners renting out housing. Suck large amounts of money out of the housing market by taxing commercial loans used for residential real estate, doubling property taxes for non-owner-occupied residential real estate and vacant real estate, and putting caps on mortgage vs income though some means or another. Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices. So much money and effort is sucked away from people into bank interest and "cost of capital" for people who already have lots of it. Maybe go to the extent of statutory redistribution of ownership of housing, 2% per year. If you rent a house for 50 years it's yours. This can't raise rents because rent pricing is based on maximizing what the market will pay.

WalterBright 5y ago

Maybe it's crime, violence, and mental illness that causes inequality.

danShumway 5y ago
Haven't we been doing "tough on crime" policy for decades now? We had the entire war on drugs, which we're really only just now collectively pulling back from and realizing was a mistake. We passed prohibition on alcohol. We did stop-and-frisk, all that crud. And our mental illness diagnoses and treatment processes are better today than they've ever been (even if the overall health care system is a mess). We know more about mental illness today than we did in the past, and we have more effective medication and psychological techniques for dealing with it. The overall reduction in violent crime over the long-term in America is a success story, we genuinely have made America safer and less violent. And yet, here we are. So my question to anyone who acts like there's a very simple causal link from violence/crime/illness to inequality is, "why isn't your strategy working then?" I think this kind of stuff is generally a lot more complicated than pointing to a single cause; I don't think that inequality is the single cause of every social problem. But if I am going to point to a single cause, it's probably not going to be based on the strategy that we aggressively targeted for multiple decades that didn't yield the results people are now promising. I get a little bit annoyed by people who keep saying, "no you don't understand, if we're even tougher on crime, then we'll see the results. We just haven't been tough enough yet." At some point, it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  1. Crime causes stress in high crime neighborhoods. 2. Crime impoverishes neighborhoods by causing people to spend money to protect themselves, hiring security guards, armoring their businesses, and simply driving businesses away. 3. Crime impoverishes families when members get jailed. 4. Crime impoverishes criminals because a criminal record greatly restricts opportunities for productive employment 5. Crime prevents criminals from getting an education 6. Crime is a zero-sum, adversarial economic system. Cooperation in a free market is far, far more productive to those who participate in it A person committing crimes will impoverish himself, his family, and his community.

canjobear 5y ago

Such studies are either correlational, and therefore cannot establish causation, or experimental in settings that are so abstracted and scaled-down from real world experience that they have no relevance to societal questions.

js8 5y ago

See also the book The Spirit Level, which shows that inequality also negatively affects those who are well-off - they become stressed about their social standing too. This is why naive explanations of inequality that blame the poor or the envious are false.

civilized 5y ago
I don't think it proves envy false as a cause. It just means envy is of a piece with status anxiety more broadly. I doubt that anyone of any historical period would be shocked by this.
- js8 5y ago
  The stress of falling from the current social position (for example, in the US, the risk of inability to pay medical bills or student debt) also affects people who are not envious and comfortable with their current salary and social standing. So it's not just envious people causing psychological harm to themselves, it's the unequal system that harms mostly everybody.
  - civilized 5y ago
    I think you haven't understood what I said. I know that envy is not the only form of harmful status anxiety, and that the wealthy can suffer from non-envy status anxiety. I just think that, envy or not, it's a personal problem that those people can and should get over. They're not victims. They do it to themselves. And struggling to pay bills is a different problem from inequality per se.

1193 5y ago

How does this negate the idea of making everyone wealthier? Inequality might account for why the super rich have a higher life expectancy than the sorta-rich, but that does not mean the sorta-rich would live longer otherwise.

zozbot234 5y ago

Realistically once you go beyond the simple case of extreme deprivation, inequality in social capital is going to matter far more towards outcomes in health, biological stress, violence, crime, isolation, mental issues etc. than anything strictly limited to income or assets/wealth. What are you going to do to help the social-capital-poor, those most marginalized today by their own fraying communities and neighborhoods? Merely redistributing physical and economic resources is a blunt, costly approach which does not even begin to mitigate the underlying issues.