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

people adopt conservative ideologies as a response against threats to the social order,

The perception of the other player as biased and irrational was driven entirely by the group who were told that they did better than their peers. Something about feeling superior in profits made people feel superior to other players about their opinions, too.

From an economist’s point of view, poverty is very different from economic inequality. Poverty concerns what a person has or lacks, while inequality describes how money is distributed, charting the distance between the haves and have-nots. From a psychological point of view, however, poverty and inequality are intertwined. We perceive our own wealt

Rawls used the veil of ignorance to argue that once self-interest is removed, anyone can see that equality ought to be preferable to inequality.

But categorizing people by their politics is another way that our stereotypes of people are much more rigid and extreme than the actual people themselves.

Subjects did not choose complete equality: They still believed the top fifth should have a far greater proportion of the total wealth than the bottom fifth.

We normally speak of conservatives and liberals, not conservative moments and liberal moments. The truth is that we experience both. Sometimes we think through an issue based on our principles and end up at an ideological conclusion. At other times we take our cues from a particular situation and find an ideology that fits the moment. When we refle

pushing ourselves up the ladder in our own minds is not the only way we make the most of our social comparisons. Sometimes we pull other people down.

The tendency for the rich to vote Republican is stronger in poor states than in rich ones.