Taking a longer, harder look at the research that shows that more equal societies also turn out to be safer societies

Overwhelming majorities of us, the polls tell us, feel that the answer involves some sort of meaningful limits on who can get guns and what kinds of guns they can get. But most of us also seem to feel that our ongoing epidemic of mass shootings reflects much more than public policy missteps on how we do guns.

In fact, elsewhere in the world, we have nations —like Mexico and Brazil — that have tight controls on private firearms and still suffer high levels of homicidal violence.

Other nations with high homicide rates have more permissive laws on guns. But nations that experience rampant homicidal violence do share one communality. All these nations have high levels of economic inequality — just like the United States.

How does economic inequality translate into homicide? One link: mental health. Nations with high levels of inequality also exhibit high levels of mental ill-health. The constant stress that life in deeply stratified societies creates, researchers have detailed, undermines both our physical and mental well-being.

But mental illness hardly tells the full story either. Those who shoot and kill don’t always happen to be deranged. They do, on the other hand, typically tend to feel disrespected.

Analysts all around the world have noted the power of these “triggers to violence.” In South Africa, by some measures the world’s most unequal nation, the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation has traced the vast majority of homicides to “arguments that got out of hand.”

In the United States, FBI statistics show, over half of our murders stem simply from “the sense that someone had been dissed.” In unequal societies, “minor” slights routinely turn into major tragedies

But why? What does inequality unleash within us? Social scientists have a hunch. The more unequal a society, they note, the more status matters. With rising inequality comes rising status anxiety. None of us want to be seen as “losers,” and we especially want to avoid that status in societies where a rising gap between “winners” and ‘losers” has upped the competitive stakes.

So we do we can to be seen as winners. We buy, for instance, the consumer goods that signal success. We even go deep in debt to buy them. And if we can’t afford these “usual markers of status,” as Maia Szalavitz noted this past December in a Guardiananalysis, we cling ever more ferociously to our only remaining source of value, our self-respect.

“If your social reputation in that milieu is all you’ve got,” explains Martin Daly, a neuroscientist at Canada’s McMaster University, “you’ve got to defend it.”

In more equal milieus, by contrast, these intense pressures to save face — at any cost — do not poison our every social interaction. We can be bumped without feeling bruised.

In these more equal societies, where we rank on the status hierarchy simply matters less, since most people stand on the same economic rungs. But if the gaps between those rungs should start widening, then where we rank can trigger us to fury.

“Economic inequality,” as University of Melbourne pychologist Nick Haslam sums up, “has very real psychological and social consequences.”

Real — and much too often deadly.

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. Among his books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. His latest book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, will appear this spring. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online.

In 2014, Barack Obama sat in the White House. By that year, the Affordable Care Act — legislation that both increased health benefits for lower-income Americans and increased federal taxes on higher-income Americans — had gone almost fully into effect. But those changes, the new CBO report shows, didn’t turn out to be enough to reverse rising inequality.

U.S. household income, the report documents, remained “unevenly distributed” in 2014, with households at the top of the income distribution receiving “significantly more income than households at the bottom of the distribution.”

How much more significantly? After totaling all varieties of income and government benefits — and subtracting out federal taxes — the CBO researchers found that poorest 20 percent of U.S. households averaged $31,100 in 2014. Households in the top 1 percent of the nation’s 2014 income distribution averaged $1,178,600.

This gap would have been considerably wider without the government benefits the CBO labels “means-tested transfers,” the cash and in-kind services lower-income households receive from programs like Medicaid. In 2014, these programs increased the incomes of the poorest fifth of American households by an average 64 percent.

Overall, the combined impact of transfers and taxes increased the bottom 20 percent 2014 share of U.S. income by over 3 percentage points and decreased the top 20 percent share by almost 7 percentage points.

A sign of egalitarian progress worth applauding? Most certainly. But that progress, after only a year-plus of the Trump administration, has faded. Tax rates on our richest have sunk, as has budget support for basic social benefits.

But in 2014, even with that progress, the divide between America’s rich and everyone else was still widening, continuing the income tilt to the top that the new CBO report tracks back to 1979.

Between 1979 and 2014, after figuring in all taxes and social program transfers, the after-tax incomes of America’s top 1 percent rose over three times faster than average incomes in the bottom 20 percent — and over six times faster than incomes in America’s statistical middle class, those households in the exact middle 20 percent of the nation’s income distribution.

Between 1979 and 2014, these middle class households saw their incomes increase by $9 per week. Top 1 percent households, over the same years, gained on average an extra $450 every week, 50 times more than middle class households — and 64 times more than the $7 dollars per week that average households in the nation’s poorest 20 percent gained.

Middle- and low-income Americans have paid a heavy price for those few extra dollars per week. Their schools have become more overcrowded, their streets more potholed, and their college costs much more expensive as tax giveaways to the rich and powerful shrink the budgets for basic public services.

Average Americans have a right to be upset. Wealthy Americans like Donald Trump have no right to exploit their anger.

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. Among his books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. His latest book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, will appear this spring. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online.

More from Inequality.org, Chuck Collins and the team!

Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce, and Kevin Quealy, Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys, The New York Times. Black boys raised in America, even if they live in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced millions of life histories.

Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise, The Intercept. Puerto Ricans and ultra-rich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island.

Dean Baker, Are the Trump Tax Cuts Working and Does Anyone Care? Truthout. The investment boom the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy are supposedly spurring exists only in the realm of political propaganda.

Lenore Palladino, Who Is Watching Wall Street? Boston Review. A perceptive history of stock buybacks that takes us into the Trump era.

Ben Joravsky, Let’s make Pritzker and Rauner pay more — a lot more — in state income taxes, Chicago Reader. The two billionaires slugging it out in the Illinois gubernatorial race may be in for a surprise.

Nicholas Johnson, Hidden New Tax Breaks for Wealthy Households, Corporations Risk State Revenues, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The massive changes that the GOP December tax cut has generated have created a climate that has states rushing along huge new tax breaks for America’s richest households.

How inequality undermines mental health

Getting Granular on America’s Income Distribution

A Congressional Budget Office report once again reveals a rich outpacing — by a wide margin — everyone else.

BLOGGING OUR GREAT DIVIDE

MARCH 22, 2018

Share this:

Like this: