Psychological effects of inequality

Foreword and Introduction

Income inequality has perhaps always been a fact of life – right from the early days of mercantilism – there have always been some who earn more than others, some significantly more, but the gap between the rich and the poor is widening – has been widening now for some time – until it has reached gigantic proportions – billionaires on the one hand, practically destitute people on the other – and not in some far flung rotting outpost, but in the land of the free – the United States of America, and in that bastion of freedom and democracy, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

With this massive inequality in what people earn, and what people are worth, as we say, inevitably there are psychological effects: jealousy and fear – to be expected where there is even the slightest difference in fortunes, but something else – a feeling of hopelessness and despair among the young, and the resignation in older people that nothing can ever be done about the parlous state of the economy.

The ultimatum game: this is a ‘game’ in which two players must divide a sum of money thus: one decides how much each is to get and the other can either accept it, in which case both get amounts decided by the first player, or the second can reject the division, in which case neither one gets anything. It is rather like the situation in which two children are given some chocolate cake, to be divided up, one cuts and the other chooses, and if there is any bickering, Mum takes the cake away and neither child gets any!

The ultimatum game usually ends with either the sum being cut 50/50 or both getting nothing; the second player being hardly ever willing to accept unfairness, and although this is ostensibly a game, it illustrates the thinking and feeling behind people’s mentality; that fairness is a higher good than any benefit.

With this in mind, is it any wonder that many feel cheated by what they see and read about – the huge gap in incomes.

In what follows, a citizen (C), discusses the situation with a denizen (D).


Citizen: We know that the ultimatum game is just that – a game, but don’t you think it mirrors reality – particularly in the way it is generally played out – as a sort of zero sum game in which neither side comes away with any tangible reward.

Denizen: But they are rewarded; neither side gets the upper hand over the other. That is something that can be valued, is it not?

C: I suppose so, but I meant that neither side wins.

D: Both win.

C: And both lose.

D: But both come away with something more than money.

C: And what might that be?

D: Their prestige and their self-esteem intact.

C: And you imagine that is worthy of their time, do you?

D: Indeed, else we would have had a ‘winner’ – someone with a larger purse.

C: Whereas what we have in most cases is both left with nothing. Why do you think people prefer that outcome?

D: For that one simple reason, as I have already stated; their integrity, their self-esteem, and their prestige remain intact.

C: In whose eyes?

D: In their own, first and foremost, and that is their prime concern – one of them, let’s say. The other must be that they are surely held in higher esteem by those who observed the game – after all, nobody likes to see someone done down at the hands of another, do they?

C: I would say that they do, if the game shows on TV are anything to go b y.

D: That is different; spectators on those shows are primed – most probably chosen – because of their propensity to look down on losers, whilst most decent people, in situations that are real ones, would prefer that either both side gain, or neither side does. It is a cultural thing, I think.

C: But culture is not a closed system- things can and do change within cultures, surely.

D: They do indeed, and you are right when you suggest that attitudes change – they do, but some spark of the old remains in most people, and in general, if a culture values fairness – fair play, then that sense of right prevails over time, and nobody values fair play like the English do.

C: So what you are going on to say, is that evidence suggests that the public perception of how things are panning out in the economy colour how they feel about how they themselves come out of it – generally on the losing side.

D: More often than generally, I think, for most people are well down the ladder when it comes to the amount they earn when compared to those top few percent whose earnings are through the roof, so to speak.

Consider a man or woman who has worked hard all his or her life, always lived within the dictates of decency and honesty, obeying the laws of the land in everything that is done, how do you expect such people to feel about someone who makes – I do not want to sully the word ‘earns’ – hundreds, possibly thousands of times more than they do for doing less, and whilst paying less income tax and such? Is it any wonder people feel aggrieved by what is going on – and that is here in Britain, where income inequality, whilst high, is nothing like as astronomically high as it is in the USA? What must the poorer section of that country feel about what is going on, about what is being allowed to go on – how do you think they feel?

C: They must feel angry.

D: Permanently angry, would you say?

C: I think only psychotic people are permanently angry.

D: And the rest of us, the 99%, what do we feel most of the time?

C: We get on with our lives, most probably, and try not to think about what angers us – income inequality being but one of those things.

D: But a major one, wouldn’t you say? One we are reminded of every time we find we haven’t enough money to do the things we do – which for most of us is most of the time.

C: But we have to live within our means, surely?

D: We most certainly do, and I would say that the majority of people do just that, most of the time. But that still doesn’t mean we can easily forget that some people earn thousands of times more than we earn, does it?

C: But there have always been people whose earnings are higher than ours. Isn’t that true?

D: It is, but now, as we know, there are some in our country who earn these fabulous, fantastical sums of money at the same time as some have nothing – or close to nothing. That cannot be right, can it?

C: I think you are looking at it from the wrong viewpoint.

D: If you are poor, what other viewpoint is there? Please don’t tell me that what one can do any can do. That is plainly not true, as the figures show. No, if you are poor, you will probably stay poor, and so will your children, whilst the rich – the super rich especially – will stay rich and their kids will be rich, and their kids after them and so one. Tell me that fact, because it is a fact, does not get under the skin of each and every normally rewarded person in the country.

C: It must do, but how does anything change. Some people get angry, what of it?

D: People with issues invariably find ways of coping with them, I think I am right in saying. However, I am not saying that the ways people find to cope with such issues are not damaging to them. On the contrary, many such ways are very damaging indeed.
Take substance abuse for one; from alcohol to what are euphemistically and dangerously called ‘recreational drugs’; being addicted to any of those takes its toll on health, life and on those around the addicted.

C: Some people don’t need an excuse to find something to ret ‘high’ on , do they?

D: Probably not, but the fact remains that substance abuse, among others, is a way of coping with other problem areas in life.

C: But you cannot blame the wealthy for that.

D: I am not in the business of apportioning blame – at least not on individuals.

C: On what then. What do you blame, if you blame anything?

D: The system that allows some to become outrageously wealthy whilst others are utterly poor, the system and other systems that allow it to happen, or overlook that fact that it does happen. Do you not think that many feel let down by governments they themselves have had a hand in electing, when those same governments, those same senators, congressmen and Presidents do little to change a system that appears to be rotten to the core. Don’t you think that makes them angry? Don’t you think that adversely affects their psyche? Don’t you think they are right to feel that way? Don’t you think it is grossly unfair, grossly offensive to every citizen of this country that such a situation not only exists but is perpetuated by the inactivity of legislators?

C: But you cannot take away the rewards of success. If you did, America would not be the country it is, and people would no longer strive – work hard – to become successful.

D: At which point do you think people imagine that working harder rewards them? They clearly have no chance of being rewarded like the super rich. What incentives are left to them? Don’t you think the system rewards some unjustly and disproportionately?

C: It does, yes. But it cannot be altered, at least not without spoiling much more.

D: What is spoiled already? Is a poor child’s health not spoiled when its parents aren’t covered by even the most rudimentary health care?

C: I take your point.

D: Which is?

C: Which is that any system that allows – even actively condones – such massive inequality in income, which adversely affects the lives of millions of American citizens – cannot and should not be allowed to continue.

D: And, I would add, such a rotten system should be changed to one in which we can never return to this same situation: one which throws people on the scrapheap without a moment’s hesitation, and is seen to do so by people who are ostensibly democratic in principle.

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C: But I do feel that we must examine the ways income inequality adversely affects people’s health, their sense of well-being, their mental health if you will.

D: Let’s take the man who has a job, not a good one, and poorly paid too. Let’s start with him as a sort of benchmark – he is not destitute, but neither can he afford any luxury in his life – still he must get himself to work every morning, even as he detests and loathes every minute there. What does he feel?

C: He is surely in a sort of dilemma; on the one hand he must work even for the pittance gets in wages, and yet he yearns to be free of it, dreams of not being forced to do the demeaning work that drains his dignity and parts him from his one true self.

D: Does the fact that some earn a thousand – ten thousand times – more than he does really make his lot more unbearable than it already is, I wonder?

C: Well, I am sure it must for how cannot it but affect him; the constant knowledge that some earn in an hour what he can never in his lifetime earn – that must pall.

D: But how does he know there are such earning vast sums?

C: He gets home tired, switches on the TV, reads a newspaper, learns every day that the film star earns what he can never hope to earn, learns of the property tycoon making another cool billion by some quirk of the stock exchange, house prices falling, some dealing that is protected by a complicit and tacit government organization. He knows it so how can he not b e affected by it?

D: But how will such things affect him?

C: In growing bitterness and remorse inside him; in his guts as in his mind; his resent grows daily until he takes it out on what he can; the quality of his work suffers, his mind is elsewhere, or else if it is on the task, he makes sure it is half done – a backhand swipe at his employer who is creaming off the top all he can from this enterprise.
He trudges home, resentment in every fibre, until he crosses his threshold, finds something to curse – somebody – and if not, he finds something in himself to strangle out of life – any love or sense of belonging is murdered in his soul.

D: Come, I think you are painting too black a picture; is there not some light gold on your palette?

C: Very little, my friend, very little indeed. His only chance of relief from his lot is through something he takes in that brings on the delirium of addiction. He craves to be insensitive – to be semi-comatose, to escape from something he cannot alter when he is sensible. That is how he is affected; how he lives and how he dies. The thought occurs to him that there is but one life (leaving for a moment the chance of the hereafter – which he shuns anyway) – there is but one go and this has been his – his one go at life. He quickly shuts that out and turns to a bottle, but the shreds of that dreadful thought never leave him, and his dreams – once golden in boyhood - now leave him in waking nightmares.

D: The fate of millions, I suspect.

C: Millions certainly, and for what; to increase a number in one man’s already enormous row of zeros after a number – money he can never spend in his own lifetime, but which gives him the psychological boost only – that of being rich – richer than he could ever have dreamt. Millions of lives are tarnished, that he may live out some half-dream of being a latter day Pharoah – building an empire based upon suffering and pain.

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D: What else?

C: Well, income inequality of such magnitude as there is today in the US and elsewhere surely goes against the idea that all men are equal; the Welshman got it planted where it will trouble us for a thousand years, it is said, and yet the whole system militates against just that one central tenet of democracy – that all men are created equal and remain so until they die – that is plainly not nearly true.

D: But the Founding Fathers never meant that equality between men should result in their always being equal throughout their lifetimes, did they?

C: In certain fundamental senses they must have intended it to be so; in life chances, in education, in healthcare and in every area that allows one man neverto be the slave of another.

D: And yet some clearly are the slaves of others.

C: Quite so. If one man – a poor man, once allows himself to go that way in his thoughts, he might rise up and bite the hand that feeds him , wouldn’t you say?

D: Certainly.

C: And yet he does not. Instead, he bites himself and those he loves; he bites himself, and others ‘bite’ him – he is despised, even for something not of his doing, not of his making. Was he not born in America – land of the free? Has he not had every chance – the same chance as the rich man in his mansion? He has but it has all been taken from him – the chance of living a fulfilling life – he probably doesn’t know that his real desire is to do just that – live a fulfilling life.

D: Which consists of doing what?

C: Of realizing and of reaching his own true potential – of being what he is capable of being. It is that he is denied, that which is most fundamental to his own sense of worth and others’ sense of his worth. It is denied him; something in him feels it, he has to deal with it every second of his life. Is it any wonder he turns to the bottle to forget what cannot be forgotten?

D: And his mental health as well as his physical health suffers, is that what you are saying?

C: It is. He is no longer a man, but rather a bundle of impulses fashioned from deprivation – he is the rat in the cage, waiting for the bell that he may gnaw again for food, he is Pavlov’s hound, salivating for nought.

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D: And what disorders does this ‘man’, this being in the cage gnawing for a morsel, what does he suffer?

C: You mean apart from the utterly de-humanising bonds that tie him; he suffers all manner of mental disorder, as do his children: from substance abuse, to suicide; from violence to others and himself, to the death of his own spirit, and yet his metabolism will not allow him to die.
Within such neighbourhoods, if they can be called that, for ironically, each despise each in such traps of poverty; his children under achieve at school, when they go, for abstenteeism (which we used to call truancy) is so rife that many do not really benefit from their schooling.

D: But how is that? Is education not the surest way out of poverty?

C: WE have already said that it was, but is it these days? Is educational attainment the way out? Do the young of such men perceive any promise from education?

D: Most probably not.

C: Definitely not. Do they not see every day of their lives that vast fortunes made from nothing but chicanery and double dealing – all under the flag of a nation pledged by its fathers to eradicate such conditions?

D: But what do they know of the Founding Fathers, of the Declaration of Independence; of the clauses and amendments in the Constitution? How can they equate their own situation with anything that was written and declared in another age gone forever?

C: Precisely, but yet they are expected to adhere to the tenets of capitalism, that was also begun an age ago, and which has not had the legal safeguards to forbid what is happening today – the wealth and the property of the nation in the hands of the 1%, while the 99% exist, from the top down to the bottom of society in varying shades and degrees of deprivation. That is the supreme irony: that a nation calling itself democratic, from the legacies of its enlightened Founding Fathers, has fallen from such heights, to what it has become today – a land of mansions and excess to a land of nothing, all within the boundaries of each and every city, of each and every state in the country.

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D: But these problems cannot be remedied merely by an increase in Gross Domestic Product, can they?

C: Were it so, but unfortunately no. When the wealth of the nation increases, little falls down past the vast pockets of the rich – the poorer peoples receive very little, save what value that can be had from the knowledge that they live in the wealthiest country on Earth.

D: But that knowledge alone cannot assist them of itself, can it?

C: I should day not. I should say that if anything, that knowledge – the knowledge that theirs is the wealthiest nation on Earth brings greater anguish and frustration. Here the country is being touted from the capital and elsewhere as the most prosperous land ever known to man, and yet here are people without so much as even the basics of what might be called civilised life: without basic health care when they fall ill; without proper housing; without protection of any kind from the wolves that prey upon them.

D: You mean the gangs in the streets?

C: Those, yes, but I also mean those that profit from their situation; the landowner charging so much rent that they are forced into poorer areas; the employer who pays them the least he can, forcing them to do the most demeaning work and yet still unable to afford life’s necessities; deprived of chances he was said to have been born into; inalienable rights that have been systematically eroded, right under the noses of those elected to ensure they were not. He lives a life at variance with the promises at his birth; promises enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America, and yet continually denied him and his kind, for that is what he now is, a kind of man – a carbuncle, no more than that – an embarrassment in his own land.

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D: Should he not pick himself up and start over?

C: With what? How? Be sensible, man, stay in the real world instead of the hypothetical one that faces him whenever he asks for things to change – to be changed. He is told, is he not, that he lives in the land of opportunity – when those that say so know it is nonsense to even suggest such a thing. He knows in his innermost self that what is happening is not right; not what his country promised; knows that all has been usurped in a corruption that has taken everything from him, including his hope – that one thing that keeps him working – the hope that one day things will change – it is a forlorn hope, is it not?

D: It does appear so, yes. So, what is to become of him?

C: He is destined to depart this life, having been denied from birth that which the Founding Fathers insisted was his right at birth – the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – all have been taken from him from Day One. Tell me the knowledge – for he surely must be aware of it – tell me that does not adversely affect his self-esteem, tell me it does make him seem worthless, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others; tell me that is what life is.

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D: The answer to the question of what life is, of what it chiefly consists, would be very different for the people from different social strata in society, wouldn’t you say?

C: I would, but there surely must be a sort of agreed upon notion of what life is or is meant to be or consist of.

D: Or rather, in reality, there are as many versions of it as there are people to give their opinion. What we should be better doing is try to establish a general basis and then locate people in relation to it.

C: That sounds sensible. Let’s try that.

D: But we must still acknowledge that many would disagree with our basic points.

C: That doesn’t really matter; what we are doing is coming up with a sort of theoretical construct with which to test reality, that’s it. Right, shall we concentrate on the human being or on everything around him – the trappings of life?

D: I think you answered your own question there. The trappings, as you refer to them, are just that – incidental to life. Let’s concentrate on the species – on all of them, not just on the most fortunate.

C: If we are working with a theoretical construct, as we agreed, then the individual person will be theoretical too, surely?

D: Of course, but there will be real people out there, as they say, who more closely approximate to the ideal, as we define it, than others, wouldn’t you say?

C: OK then, let’s begin : what would you say are the necessities of life, in an idealized world?

D: I would say, first of all that healthy minds in healthy bodies comes above all else.

C: And how would you define what a healthy mind is, for instance?

D: I would say that a healthy mind is one which can relate to other healthy minds in wholesome, non-threatening ways, and I would also say that a healthy mind is one which does not feed on itself; that looks outwards rather than inwards; that creates rather than destroys; that relates rather than avoids; that is rational whilst being also relational – with things like kindness to others being uppermost.

C: Isn’t this pie-in-the-sky stuff?

D: You forget that we are dealing with an idealized construct; one which the philosophers from all cultures might come together to agree upon.

C: OK, since you brought in philosophers, you might like to think about how such ideal minds might be controlled. Would you, for instance, need an all powerful Prince to dole out punishment to those who refused to toe the line; a Leviathan, in Hobbes’ terms, to maintain order in a ‘state of Nature’, one in which each person was working for his own advantage, at others’ expense?

D: I think the answer to that involves getting us back to the world in which we already live; one in which we are taught to distrust everyone around us. Can you not see that that is or shall I say, has been, has always been the construct used by so called democratic countries; countries in which rewards are very unevenly and unfairly distributed. In such a world – in this world – severity of punishment is undoubtedly been found to be necessary to protect the personal fortunes of those who were and still are advantaged by the system. The system demands it, but the system is at fault.

C: Why do you say that?

D: Because it is based upon premises of a self-fulfilling nature; we say that people cannot be trusted to mind their own business, that they cannot be trusted not to covet what is not theirs, and we do so whilst forming a system that encourages it, that works on this inequality being vital to the continued survival of the better-offs, the rich.

C: But what is the alternative? Are you going to talk about the advantages of Communism?

D: That has always been held up as the only alternative to capitalism as it stands in this world of ours; we are threatened with it, and it is held up as against all forms of social good, and so the discussion is ended; this, it is stated, is the best we can do, this is the fairest system we can possibly have unless we want to live in a world in which everyone is told what they can have – again, another demonizing way of putting us off trying to find alternative systems to this one – the one that is failing us.

C: So, if it isn’t Communism, what will it be, this better system, this fairer system?

D: Well, first of all, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say, do we. We need to acknowledge that there is much that is good about the system – I should say was good – and then we should go back to examine why it worked, why the pitfalls we now experience didn’t happen.

C: But that would be putting the clock back, wouldn’t it, and I can’t condone that.

D: If we have to go back to get our future right, then I’m all for going back, as long as we don’t get sentimental about what we are dealing with, as long as we don’t long, if you see what I mean.

C: So you are saying that there was a time when things were fairer?

D: There must have been times when it was unlikely that someone could be a billionaire and live check by jowl with someone living without even the barest necessities. Britain, for example, has a National Health Service, which although not perfect by a long way, still lives up to what it was said to be at its instigation – the ‘envy of the world’!

C: And you think that could work over here? You think people would stand and do nothing while their living standards were systematically eroded?

D: I take it you mean those thriving off others’ ill health?

C: Exactly, though I wouldn’t say they were thriving.

D: Maintaining their high standards of living – their higher standards of living – at the expense of those people living - surviving – without being adequately being provided for in terms of their health, or should I say their occasional lack of it – those people?

C: Yes, doctors and nurses.

D: And people who own and run lucrative insurance schemes that systematically exclude the poor in our midst.

C: But the poor cannot afford to pay for that health insurance, can they? Why should they be a part of something to which they cannot contribute?

D: Right, there you have the essence of the malaise at the centre of our world – the concept of a sort of ‘undeserving poor’ – people who do not contribute cash.

C: What else could they contribute?

D: They contribute as the army of potential employees in a system that treats them as if they didn’t.

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: But if they don’t pay, they don’t contribute.

D: Money is everything, isn’t it? If you don’t have money, you don’t have rights – rights to healthcare, rights to decent housing, education, neighbourhoods.

C: It isn’t the state’s function to provide such things. It’s up to people to work hard to be able to buy them, isn’t it?

D: Evidently. Now can you not see how such a system fails many – the very people it was put in place to serve.

C: But it wasn’t put in place to serve them; it was put in place to serve owners of enterprises. In Britain, with the opening of factories manufacturing what had previously been made in what was called ‘cottage industry’, the new entrepreneurial classes – the mill owners – had to have safeguards to ensure their investment was secure from marauding gangs bent upon destroying the factory and the machinery in it – the Luddites, as they were called. The first police forces came into being in industrial centres like Glasgow and the much smaller Stalybridge in what is now part of the city of Manchester; they came into being to protect the property of the wealthy.

D: But wasn’t it right to do so?

C: At the time and in the circumstances, yes, absolutely.

D: So what is different now?

C: What is different now is that there are some whose dealings go against even those tenets they extol; against the so-called democratic machinery in which capitalism operates and flourishes. Who protects people against unscrupulous venture capitalists? Who is able to stop the rank exploitation of the poor in those countries in which the multi-national corporations flourish out of any control by elected officials?

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D: So you put the blame for injustice in terms of income inequality firmly at the capitalists’ do, do you?

C: There and with governments who have either turned a blind eye to what has been happening, or been actually complicit in it, yes.

D: But the capitalist system is most probably the best system there is.

C: For what? For the anonymous hand ensuring wealth is more evenly distributed? For ensuring that each and every member of the population is adequately provided for, even if it doesn’t guarantee that everybody is prosperous? Let me ask you a question: At which point are we going to agree that capitalism in its present form has failed us?
D: But what is the alternative? We have agreed, have we not, that communism is also out of the question – that has also failed – the people of the former Soviet Union can testify to that, can they not?

C: So we are stuck with nothing more or less than the best of a bad bunch, is that it?

D: It seems that way to me.

C: And it seems that way to you because no credible alternative has been proposed, I think.

D: Because there is none.

C: No credible alternative has been sought, never mind found, and yet here we are with a system that is being roundly abused, that is leaving millions in poverty while the few benefit wildly from it.
It is that refusal, that denial, I should say, that is the source of much discontent in the West, the source of much unhappiness, many heart rending conditions in which the poor find themselves in.

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Robert L. Fielding