Robert Sapolsky found the the most obvious predictor of stress in primate societies (measured via cortisol levels) was inequality. Speaking as a member of a highly inequal primate society, it makes sense to me.
I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.
I don't know about that. Some people absolutely, but most people just want to belong to something and be a valued contributor. Like I really don't care about having the biggest house on the block, but some people having huge places and others stuck in tiny studios rankles me quite a bit.
>> I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group.
> But we also seem hardwired to want to feel superior and special.
Nonsense. A healthy person in a healthy society desires to be valued by their peers above everything else. Only in the absence of this belonging does one pursue the antisocial behaviors you describe. Capitalism is barbarism.
Most people in every society want to increase their social status. The metrics vary by society — could be dollars or touchdowns or wooly mammoth meat quantity — but this is nearly universal. And in a closed society this is essentially a zero sum game: in order for someone to rise in status someone else must fall. Whether this competition is "healthy" for people or society is irrelevant since it's not going to change.
But there aren't 100 people, there are 8.1 billion of us. If your relationships are such that the only way for me to be a winner is for you to be a loser, when we can both be winners, it's sad.
If it's a closed system, like a race, then that makes sense. Only one person can finish first. But life's not a closed system like that, so I can win at the races and you can win at the slots, and we can go for a nice dinner together. Maybe a bit pollyanna, but not everything has to be a competition. My happiness doesn't come from the expense of someone else's.
You really missed the point of my comment. I am blessed with an abundance of healthy relationships. But for society as a whole, status only exists on a relative scale. The slope of the curve may differ but most people are striving to move up that curve.
Global income inequality has slightly decreased since 2000 [1] due to globalization. For the same reason, quality of life has greatly equalized across the world. The utility gained from switching between flying coach and flying a private jet is less than the utility gained getting access to electricity or antibiotics. If you want equality, you should want capitalism.
I see this argument trotted out and it's a huge dodge that implicitly acknowledges the zero-sum nature of capitalism as practiced by modern societies. It's true that global quality of life has increased and the examples you gave are true. But it's critically important to note that in many developed countries quality of life within that country has stagnated or regressed on many key metrics. If the only we way we can make the world richer is by making the rich countries poorer, I don't think it's a shining endorsement of that social system. We already have many other social systems that can do about the same thing.
I've always found this to be a massive flaw in analyzing policy from a Pareto criterion. Economists love to show the very simple arithmetic that a Pareto improvement is strictly better but my intuition was always that the theoretical increase in total surplus didn't actually lead to a better real outcome.
> It's much simpler to be valued by your peers if it is perceived that you're value has surpassed theirs instead of perfectly balanced.
One flaw in your comment seems to be the assumption that "superiority" is a one-axis quality. You could have a group where everyone is superior, just at different things.
That’s a great point, so I appreciate that first of all. How would you prevent extraordinary or lucky people from encroaching on the “market share” (hate using this metaphor honestly) of their peers?
I am concerned that your (good) point assumes that we can reasonable assume that there’s enough opportunities for individuals to provide value to others to match the number of people looking to do so. What if there’s an imbalance? Which seems inevitable.
I.e. What if it turns out there’s not ways for all the people on earth to distinguish themselves in the way that you describe?
I feel like his point is not homogeneity, but that humans have an inherent need of status through love and admiration. Healthy people will prefer their close circle to satisfy it, less healty people will settle with strangers (fame), and even less healthy people will resort mainly to material wealth.
What is equality other than homogeneity? And how is enforcing equality "from above" (or whatever you want to call it) ever going to work other than "cutting the tall grass" or "hammering down the nail that sticks out"?
The work to improve the bottom of society is about 7 billion times more work than to punish the top, just by numbers. And that is ignoring that shooting someone is a lot easier than the years of mental health help followed by years of training the bottom requires to improve.
To say nothing of the fact that, obviously, a separate class in society needs to be empowered to hammer down those pesky nails ("the KGB"). Which is another way of saying that socialism needs gunpoint-enforced inequality to keep existing. So does capitalism, of course, but since they accept inequality it seems less of a problem. And (mostly democratic/social-) capitalism needs a LOT less violence in practice. I get it, it needs more than zero violence and that sucks. However ...
I would also like to point out that both indigenous primate societies are EXTREMELY hierarchical, frankly nightmarishly hierarchical. Everyone has someone directly in charge of them, and there is someone at the top. There may be groups. There usually are male vs female groups, and a dynamic between them with clear hierarchies in both groups, but not so clear a hierarchy between a given man and a given woman.
Oh and, btw, sex in indigenous human societies is somewhere between prostitution and rape. Meaning sex is either directly transactional (a good meal, as opposed to scraps, for sex), or there is direct use of force. In the most comfortable locations to live women may gather food, in trade for a measure of sexual independence/choice, but that seems to be limited even in the best situations. Furthermore, neighboring human tribes are always at war, and both tribes are growing fast in a limited resource environment: it is a matter of time before they massacre each other (because: preferable to starving to death). Humans may kidnap and rape women from neighboring tribes, or they may massacre them. And yes, when times are really good (halfway between "wars"), they will feed them and return them.
Occasionally a "romeo and juliet" from the same tribe or neighboring tribes may fall in love and run away. If they die, nothing happens, and if they survive, of course, this only results in the creation of a new tribe.
There is NOTHING any human can do in such a primitive human societies that comes anywhere close to delivering the "status and love" that massacring the neighboring tribe during war delivers in terms of status.
Meaning the "love and admiration" essentially translates to violence to get drugs (an orgasm is effectively drugs, after all) for men and prostitution (if they're lucky) for women.
Oh and kids have only one option: scraps, they're abandoned by mothers to mothers can go back to prostitution, as soon as possible. Slightly bigger kids take care of the smaller ones (meaning 6 year olds care for 4 year olds, 4 year olds care for 2 year olds, ...). Occasionally, during very good times, women join the hunt and gain a measure of independence. On the other hand, during bad times everything sucks, there's less sex, and rape is the norm, as are abandoned babies starving to death (they even have "tricks", such as putting a baby, floating, in a river. Probably slowly sinking in the river will cause the kid to lose body heat far faster than it will become hungry, and it will peacefully sleep in and die, before being eaten, and won't cry)
Is this what you mean by "hardwired for equality"? Men are hardwired to fight, using physical violence, for better social position and "love". Women are hardwired to do the same, using less direct means. Also, humans are social animals, and this is nothing special. All social animals have a "total hierarchy", enforced by a form of violence for men, and by accepting transactional and/or forced sex for women. Wolves, gnus, orcas, dolphins ... it doesn't matter. All are variations on this theme.
This point of view is not supported by anthropological evidence.
I'll give an example. In the 90s and 00s, there was a wave of Marxist attempts to cancel anthropologists who had reported on the competition for dominance, competition for status, physical and sexual violence, and overall strife present in primitive societies that were studied. The whole affair about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_in_El_Dorado is the most famous example of this. The accusations were largely discredited, but the damage was done. One consequence is that unsympathetic anthropologists were banned from Venezuela, where there is now nobody allowed to report on the slow, systematic extermination of the country's indigenous peoples.
The reduction of certain evils to economic essentialism is frequently itself a tool to assert ideological superiority--itself an 'antisocial behavior', one done not for money or profit but for the simple desire to feel superior to another, and excuse the evils of their in-group. In an ironic way, the above post is its own counterexample.
It make sense to me too. Financial strain, limited opportunities, social exclusion and perceived unfairness can all contribute to heightened stress levels and anger towards life...
It might be unfair to focus on this, but that "perceived unfairness" just jumped out at be.
My first reaction was to think "it's not just perceived"... but after a little introspecting, I couldn't help but notice how grim that statement actually is. It means that any mistreatment is fine - as long as the person can be distracted from it.
And thinking about that reminded me how every new tech since the internet/90th has been increasingly distracting. There is a reason we've started calling it the attention economy after all...
One can certainly have stress or frustration based on truly perceived unfairness.
Take the case of someone who gets more test time because of a disability and the ADA.
Those who don't know the why, may find it unfair. And there may be people that perceive it as unfair despite it being overall accepted as such.
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That said your observation is also entirely true in it's own right. You can even distract from the real problem by focusing one's attention on a different unfairness, even if that unfairness impacts them less in the short and/or long term.
And get a public figure/politician to drone on and on about it (whether they believe it or not) is an excellent way to fire up a base and get the base to stop thinking things through as thoroughly. That’s the thing that scares me - country size mobs.
The actual numbers are surprising though.
1. Most of the decrease in the middle class was driven by MC people moving to the upper class
So
2. The ratio of lower class to upper class is actually lower than in the 70s.
Interesting point I never considered. Is the cut off for UC really just 1 million dollars in net worth? Seems implausible given house prices in places like California. Is essentially every home owner UC?
I think the bigger inequality we experience is less about individual income, and more an inequality that giant corporations run so much of the world and the people have so little representation & agency.
Watching your epi-pens go from $35 to $700 is a stark & present reminder that the very wealthy corporations are predatory as fuck, and that you are prey. And that nothing will save you. (Short of Linda Khan & the FTC starting actual anti-trust activities again.)
Maybe not the only factor, but a strong contributor. It's at least a few things:
- Broader awareness, as you suggest. Police violence didn't necessarily increase, but the number of videos documenting it did, as did the distribution.
- Highlight-reel effect on social media, so it feels like your peers are richer and happier than you. With previous generations' mass media, it felt like there was a separate "rich and famous" class, but the perception of the average person was a lot like yourself.
- Tribalism from market segmentation and the echo effect. So we learn less tolerance and our convictions get stronger without reasonable, respected counter-arguments.
- Actual increase in inequality through automation and globalization, without sufficient mechanisms (e.g., higher taxes, UBI, etc) to re-distribute the gains.
Seems to me the constant harping about it (both by media and loud voices) is a self-reinforcing story. In the actual meaning of the word "meme".
The world has never been more full of choices and opportunities (as in "things that one might do" - as opposed to a more limited but fashionable "next job one step up"). And extremes in the world are still just as irrelevant to our own lives as they have ever been - whether you envy Jacques Cousteau or Jeff Bezos. In that what they have is not added or removed from your life (although what they achieved added to our lives - if you see the distinction), but you are still free to use them as models and steer your life by them.
What has changed:
- the harping
- the spectrum of actual possibilities in what we can be
- our self-awareness that we fall short of what we might have been
This varies by country. The GINI Index for the United States which measures income inequality rose sharply from 1980 to 1993 and then has been fairly flat since.
“Real stuff” retail logistics is 100% a game of physical statistics; keep enough necessities on shelves people don’t riot.
Everything else about society is conservative political ideology
Just angling for vanity rewards based upon peddling the best story, the best trauma, or best political network connections given contemporary zeitgeist; no Im the best aligned with set of virtues!. Whose family sold the most cars during the auto boom, and why we should still care…
Amazon, Kroger, Red Bull… brands… have all the capital, buy up supply, add their markups and fees, etc influence supply and demand through price fixing in abstract math games. Meanwhile the public is shackled to nickel and dime, dollars and sense finance and cannot get ahead, they tread water while also doing all the work to prop up the brands.
We need to keep stuff on shelves or people will riot. But we also need to validate the past rulers for some reason by enabling them to monopolize capital. As we cling to Anglo-babble story about risk taking. When tree trimmer was number one most dangerous job in 2023, and the rest are blue collar jobs… police not on the list, fwiw… the rich investor is using story they won for some reason to avoid real risk of trimming a tree.
But Protestant work ethic and so a generational Ponzi scheme to funnel
dads post world war welfare job money and hand it to juniors startups and hedge funds is ongoing.
Same as back in the day when landed gentry paid the church to let their kids avoid work by studying theology
What’s great is since these are social hallucinations and they aren’t real it’s belief in social hallucinations not real stuff; it’s effectively nihilism given it ignores externalities of its resource use, but dressed up in ties, animated pitches that titillate and manipulate oxytocin and dopamine
