Hidden Brain - Money 2.0: The Rich and the Rest of Us

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Where do you stand on the income ladder? Do you think of yourself as rich, as poor, or as somewhere in between? Our perceptions of wealth — our own, and other people's — can affect us more profoundly than we realize. This week in our Money 2.0 series, we revisit two of our favorite conversations about wealth and inequality. Sociologist Brook Harrington takes us inside the lives of the über wealthy and the people who manage their fortunes. Then, psychologist Keith Payne shares surprising research about income inequality and how it shapes our minds. If you like this show, be sure to listen to the other episodes in this series, including our conversation about the mental scripts that shape our choices around money.Also, check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you'd like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org.  

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever wondered what it's like to be rich? Taking all of her for detox in the Hamptons, standardized testing has really stressed him out. Really rich? Why are you wearing a tox? It's after sex, what am I, a farmer? Extreme wealth is something that few of us will experience. We'll never jet somewhere on a private plane.

We'll never employ a butler or own a mansion on a secluded island. The gap between the Oberwelfi and the rest of us, already massive, is growing due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. The richest 10% of people on the planet now own more than 3-4% of all the wealth. And since the start of the pandemic, the world's ten richest men have doubled their fortunes. On a small scale in our own communities, it can often feel like those with lots of money

and those with less are living in completely different worlds. Today, in the latest of our Money 2.0 series, we talk with a sociologist about the mindset of the Uba Rich. The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us it's almost literally unimaginable. We also ask, what does inequality do to us? How does it shape the ways we think about ourselves and the ways we think about the people

around us? We think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain wrong with some people above us and other people below us. Where we think we stand on that ladder tells you a lot about a person's life and their life outcomes. Wealth and inequality this week on Hidden Brain. and inequality this week on Hidden Brain. Brooke Harrington is a sociologist at Dartmouth College. Several years ago she decided to explore the secret lives of billionaires. Her strategy become a wealth manager. Brooke discovered that in

order to manage money for the super rich, wealth managers learn a lot about the private lives of their clients, and the very different set of rules that govern their world. Well, it usually starts with what's called know your client activity. So, if you were to come to me with me acting as the wealth manager, I would first ask to see some proof of identity like your passport, and then we would talk about what goals you had for your wealth. And that begins the series of increasingly delicate and increasingly intrusive questions. Then usually we get into whatever real reason

is bringing you to me. Maybe you want to avoid your taxes. Maybe you really don't like your family. That's surprisingly common among wealthy people. For example, if you have a relative or if you yourself are engaging in some activity that might get you extorted, it may not be illegal, but it might be socially shameful. That's a financial risk that your wealth manager needs

to know about. If you have a son or daughter with a drug problem, that's a financial risk that your wealth manager needs to know about. There can also be issues like I think I'm headed for a divorce, but I don't want my spouse to get half my assets. How do I hide those assets? Preferably offshore, so that whatever is legally provable as mine is such a small amount that it's not worth fighting about. So it's really interesting because these professionals in some ways get to know their clients better than the clients own family or friends or even their own spouse. Yes, it's apparently something of a cliche in the offshore world that the average client is a man in his 50s with a secret family somewhere might be a gay lover, might be a common law

wife and some children, but there are usually all sorts of secrets that these wealthy folks wish to keep hidden, and that they have the additional privilege of being able to hire people to take care of in secret. So I understand you conducted about 65 interviews in 18 countries for this book. Tell me a little bit about the people you met. To be a wealth manager, you have to understand finance and the law, but this kind of role also calls for a certain psychological makeup. What kind of person becomes a wealth manager?

Well, several of the people I spoke to describe themselves in only somewhat joking terms as social workers for the rich. So you have to have empathy and a desire to help people, but also a very high tolerance for people who would otherwise seem to be so extremely privileged that you might be otherwise inclined to smack them around and say snap out of it. You're lucky. You write in your book about the extreme lengths that some managers go to please their clients or to provide services to their clients. You write about a manager named Eleanor and Geneva

who said that one of her clients once called her from outside a restaurant in London. Tell me that story. So this is one of the first stories that I heard that really made my eyebrows raise. It was, while I was training to be a wealth manager, Eleanor told this story over lunch of receiving a phone call from a client who was in another country saying, I've just lost my bracelet outside of a restaurant,

helped me find it. And the client didn't identify the restaurant by name. So imagine having someone call you from another country. I mean, obviously the country was identified, but not anything remotely approaching a location. So you have to sort of marvel at the immaturity of the client expecting someone else to help her fix a problem like this. But Eleanor somehow did it. She determined where the client was and what exactly had been lost and got the local authorities on the case, found the bracelet, and build the client for all the time, and apparently the client was happy to pay.

There are sometimes clients do make requests like this, not because they are acting childish, but because they actually have an ulterior motive. They actually want to test the loyalty's or ability off the wealth manager. You tell the story of a wealth manager in Hong Kong named David. Yes, he got a call early on in his relationship with a client in which the client said that he was in Japan and he was meeting with a Japanese gentleman who had expressed a desire for smoked salmon, and that this client had promised him, I think, a thousand sides of smoked salmon straight from the factory in Scotland, and was now calling David saying, get me the salmon.

And David said, well, I'm your wealth manager, not your fishmonger. And the client said, well, today you're the fishmonger. And so David happens to know someone who knew the head of the Smokesammon factory in Scotland, and he fulfilled the client's wish. And the client later told him, I basically made up that story. I wasn't sitting across from a Japanese fellow who wanted a thousand sides of Smokesammon. I just needed to see that you had the connections and the will to do what I wanted when I wanted and not ask any questions.

It was almost a test of his ability to jump and sort of perform this outlandish request, perhaps as a guide to sort of other requests that would come further down the road. Exactly, and also it was a test of what kind of powerful social connections this wealth manager might have. Because one of the wealth manager's roles is to set up private markets for deals. So it's not uncommon for them to have several clients, each of whom owns incredibly valuable real estate, art collections, yachts, and so forth. And since these clients are very, very concerned about maintaining their privacy, they don't want to list these things on the open market for sale. If they need to raise cash, they want to do the sales as quietly as discreetly as possible, with as little public recording as possible.

One thing that I got from your book is that there are important ways in which the very rich are very much like the rest of us and ways in which they are not. So wealthy people, unsurprisingly, turn out to have troubled marriages and wayward children, just like, you know, everybody else. But wealth, you argue, can compound those challenges. Well, apparently it's not uncommon for the wealth manager to be asked to find or recommend rehab facilities for kids, or a parent will ask a wealth manager to break some bad news to the next generation to his or her own children.

Sometimes the the wealth manager has to broker a truce between feuding family members. So one family member feels that they've been done done by unfairly in the inheritance plan and has to be somehow brought back in so that they don't sue the family. The big risk here is if you have a disgruntled family member who sews, the lawsuit process in many countries makes public many, many private documents that would reveal the extent and nature of a family's wealth, all of which has been carefully guarded secrets. In the course of her many interviews with wealth managers, Brooke talked to one professional

at Switzerland who told her a revealing story. So this wealth manager and her boss had been summoned to a country outside of Europe by a client who was sending a private plane for them. She showed up at the Zurich airport with her boss waiting for this plane, and she discovered that she'd left her passport back home in a different purse, and she said to her boss, I've got to go home and get my passport because we're leaving Europe. And he said, don't worry about it. And she said, again, no, they're going to check my passport. They won't let me leave Switzerland, much less enter another country. I've got to go home and he said, no, really, don't worry about it.

So she didn't say anything for their figuring, you know, it would be his problem if she got refused the right to leave. Sure enough, the private plane pulls up, they get on it, nobody checks the passport. It lands in this other country outside Europe. Nobody checks a passport. They get into the private car sent by the client. They're taken to the client's home. They have their meeting. Private car takes them back to the private plane. Private plane flies them back to Switzerland. They get off the plane and go home. At no point has anyone encountered passport control or a customs agent.

And this wealth managers's comment was, the lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us. It's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.

It's potentially very, very dangerous. And I think she's right about that. You spoke with the wealth manager named Dieter. I think this was a German wealth manager who talked about how his job allowed him to shmooze with powerful people, but also in some ways discover things about foreign countries before even the citizens of those countries would find out about those important things. Yeah, he was very proud of the fact that when he was working in Africa, he would have parties and the heads of state of the various countries he lived in would come to his house

and he'd get them drunk and they'd be spilling state secrets by two in the morning. And then people like Catherine Graham, the late publisher of the Washington Post, would call him up for advice. And you know, he could speak authoritatively about at least affairs in some African countries because he'd heard it directly from the mouths of the people who made those policies. It reminds me a little bit about what we learned when the Panama Papers scandal broke. I kept seeing photos or drawings of the faces of people whose names turned up in the Panama Papers, and it was really a rogue's gallery of people from all walks of life, as well as heads of state and corporate leaders.

People who you would think have nothing in common with each other. But at one level, the fact that they are so rich gives them these very important things in common which is to say for them national boundaries and laws are all optional. Taxes are optional, all forms of law are essentially optional at that level of wealth. During the 2016 election then presidential candidate Donald Trump talked with pride about finding ways to avoid federal taxes. He didn't pay any federal income tax. So, if he's paid zero, that means zero.

I asked Brook to talk a little bit about whether the sentiment was widely shared by other wealthy people. Some of them actually do sound a lot like Donald Trump. When I heard Donald Trump say that not paying taxes made him smart and that if he had paid his taxes, they would have been wasted anyways. I was like, yep, he's the voice of a lot of very wealthy people around the world and and their wealth managers who said essentially the same thing to me. They they're very committed to neoliberal ideology and very committed to the idea that these elite clients are doing the world of favor as wealth creators and that their initiative should be protected

against the government and what they regard as theft by taxation, by incompetent governments that would just waste any money they collected anyways. They also, by the way, regard redistribution of collected tax as immoral because it creates some dependency on the part of the poor. So I'm fascinated because what you're saying is that, in effect, the wealthy and their tax managers don't just think they're doing something that's practical and expedient, you're saying they actually feel like they're doing the moral thing? There is a very strong component of ideology here and you see this in the Wealth Management training program, you see it among at least about a quarter of the people I interviewed really seem to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of their

clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft and they view government in general as being incompetent at best, corrupt at worst, and they're deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative. So the picture you've painted for me broke of the wealth manager, someone who is a loyal person, a resourceful person, trustworthy, and I fully imagine that lots of wealthy people are probably very good people, high-minded people, but I want to talk for a moment about the professionals whose clients are very clearly sleaze bags. How do you as a wealth manager, serve the

interests of someone who is cheating his country on taxes, cheating on his wife, cheating his employees? How do you serve a client like that and then go home, tell yourself that you're a good person and sleep well at night? Well, some of them don't, and I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing a wave of leaks recently, that some people are so troubled by what they're seeing that they just can't stomach it any longer. And they blow the whistle, often with dire personal consequences. About a quarter of the people I interviewed, I would characterize as being conscious stricken about the larger impacts of their work. And they had a range of strategies to reconcile themselves,

to the implications of that for their own conscience. One of the ways that they dealt with it was to encourage their clients to donate to charity, to offset the negative impact of depriving the state of revenues. Other people I interviewed, including one gentleman in Panama City, said he would actually lecture his clients on the work of a Marchus N and Joseph Stiglitz, basically on the theory

and practice of inequality in the world. And he would point out to them that as they sat in his office in Panama City a couple miles away, people were living in cardboard shacks and had no access to clean drinking water. And what did the client think about that? Now that may seem mild, but it's a fairly risky strategy to pursue with wealthy people who are used to having people fawn over them and not challenge them. And frankly most wealth managers are replaceable. There aren't a lot of them in the world, but

if you find one a little too in your face you could always go get another one or get another one within a different company. I think a lot of people have impressions of the lives of the very wealthy and imagine what life must be like when you're jetting around in a private plane and being waited on by service staff all the time. And I'm wondering in your conversations with wealth managers, whether any of your own assumptions or beliefs about the connections between wealth and happiness were either confirmed or challenged? I was struck by a man I spoke to in the Channel Islands who talked about how suspicious wealthy people are. It jibed with some things that I've seen personally. And what he said was, when you're really wealthy, it's not uncommon to have the experience

that everyone is out to get a piece of you. It's like what happens to a lot of re-winners, all sorts of so-called relatives come out of the woodwork, asking for loans, asking for help of some sort. con artists come out of the woodwork, looking to get a piece of you, but that's what happens throughout the lifetime of wealthy people and so it breeds a kind of suspicion. Why do you want to be my friend? Why are you being nice to me? Are you just trying to get me to give you something? And that must be very unpleasant and you can see how that would lead at the extreme to a sort of Howard Husey and retreat or isolation from people. Because if you can't trust anyone, why bother? I mean the sad thing that you're saying is that the

wealth manager might end up being perhaps among the very few people that a rich person can trust. Yeah, I think that seems to be a common story. It's wealthy people and their servants. It almost comes to the point where you can, if you're a wealthy person, you are more trusting of the people you pay to be in your service than the people you don't pay, because with your family, you might have sort of a kinglier problem,

which of my children actually loves me and which are out to get something from me. But at least when you are having a transactional relationship with an employee, at least the boundaries there are clear. You're paying them for certain services and you can assess whether they are giving you those services at the standard you require. If they're not, you fire them. If they're doing a good job, you keep them on.

There's a simplicity to that that is not present in emotional relationships. Brooke Harrington is a sociologist at Dartmouth College. She's the author of the book Capital Without Borders, Wealth Managers, and the 1%. Coming up, how financial inequality affects our work, relationships and even our physical well-being. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Are you rich? Are you poor?

Or are you somewhere in between? The answer isn't just a matter of your salary or how much money is in your bank account. It's also driven by your perception of the people around you. Is your house nicer than your next-door neighbors? Does your best friend drive a more expensive car than you do? What about the neighborhood you call home? Is it more upscale or more modest than the one your parents lived in? At the University of North Carolina, psychologists Keith Payne studies how we think about those who have more than us and those who have less.

He's the author of the Broken Ladder, how inequality affects the way we live, think, and die. Keith, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me. I want to begin with a personal story that you've told in the book and elsewhere, Keith. This goes back to your childhood when you told in the book and elsewhere, Keith, this goes back to your childhood when you were in the fourth grade. You were standing in line at a cafeteria in your school and you had your first visceral experience with the awareness of inequality. Tell me that story.

What had happened was we had a new cashier, a new lunch lady in the line that day, and when I got to the cashier's desk she asked me for, I think it was a $1.25 and that was the first time that anybody had ever asked me to pay for my lunch because I had always been on free lunch and but I didn't know it because nobody had ever pointed it out or talked about it and previously the cashier had just waved me on as part of the normal process, but this new person didn't know how things worked and so she asked me to pay for my lunch. And there was this awkward moment. I didn't have any money, of course,

and I didn't know what to do about it. And so that moment of awkwardness made me suddenly realize that, wait, some of these kids have been paying for their lunch all along and some of us haven't. And all of a sudden, it dawned on me why that was, that, you know, we got free lunch, that that meant that we were the poor kids and that that had never occurred to me before. And so that awkward moment standing in the lunch line suddenly increased my awareness of not only the inequality in my classroom, but the implications of what it meant to be one of the poor kids.

And so I started thinking about myself differently. I started seeing my friends and my peers differently. I started seeing my friends and my peers differently. And all of a sudden, this relative difference between me and the other free lunch kids versus those who paid for their lunch, all of a sudden loomed larger than it ever had before, at least for me. And the interesting thing is, you know, that it's not like I was poorer the day after that than I was before. Nothing objectively had changed, but because of that subjective awareness, now everything seemed different to me. I want to talk about a wonderful analogy that you've explored in the book, and it really grows out in some ways of this conversation we're having about what happened in your school lunch cafeteria. Let's say I'm boarding a plane and on my way to seat 36J in economy as I make my way down the aisle of a traditional plane, tell me what I see and how that affects me. So usually you enter at the

front of the plane and you're walking down the aisle past the first class section with the large seats in the leg room and everybody's already settled in because they boarded first. And you're walking past that to go to where I usually sit, which is in coach, right? So as you go to find your way, you're literally walking along this sort of status hierarchy that's laid out in front of you. And so there's the wonderful study that shows the psychological and behavioral consequences of experiencing that kind of hierarchy embedded in the airplane. The researchers looked at data from millions of flights to look at what predicted incidents

of air rage, that is cases where passengers were unruly or disruptive or violent in some way. And they found that in planes that had a first-class cabin, incidents of air rage were several times more likely to happen than in flights that didn't have a first-class cabin, which suggests that to witness that inequality seems to have some kind of psychological effect on people that really ramps up the disruptive behavior.

Now, it's worth noting that planes with a first-class cabin might be larger with more passengers and longer flights. More people and more time spent in the air could also increase the likelihood of air rage. But there are some other indications that seeing the inequality between first class and coach does affect passengers. For example, some planes don't start boarding with their first class passengers. They board from the rear of the aircraft, and Keith says, that makes a difference. Yeah, there's a difference in the sense that if you've bored a plane in the middle or

at the rear and don't have to walk past the first class cabin, there's a much lower incidence of air rage in the coach cabin. Hmm, I remember a scene in the movie, Bridesmaids, Christian Wigg plays a woman named Annie. She's an economy, but all her friends are flying for class. You cannot be up here. Hiddledgrip. I'm sorry. I just want to be here with my friends, because I'm with this group. The sign

just went off. Can't she stamp a flick of it? Absolutely not. Coach Passengers are not allowed up here in first class. It's policy. I'm sorry. Oh This is a very this is a very strict blame that I'm on. Welcome to Germany So Keith of all of Annie's friends or an economy she would feel a lot better wouldn't she? Right the feeling that she deserves to be in first class because her friends are in first class is really powerful because she didn't have any connection to the people in first class. She might pay less attention to them.

So it's that feeling that not only do I not have something that other people have, but I deserve that thing that other people have that makes that relative comparison so much more painful. Why is it that the comparisons we make are invariably upward comparisons? So if the folks in coach are comparing themselves to the folks in first class, the folks in first class are probably comparing themselves to the folks who fly private jets. There's a pronounced tendency we have to make upward comparisons in all areas of life. And it's not always the case. Sometimes we compare downward or to other people who are similar to us, but we have this pronounced bias to compare upward.

And the reasons for that upward bias are not fully understood, but it seems to have something to do with the fact that upward comparisons on the one hand feel painful because you're comparing to somebody who has something that you don't. But on the other hand, they're also potentially inspiring, potentially motivating, and so they can sort of get you moving to work harder in some cases as well. So there's something adaptive about it, but also something painful. I remember whenever there's stories and the press about inequality

and you read the comment section, you will invariably find someone writing in from New York's Upper West Side saying, a million dollars isn't what you think it is. It really doesn't get you all that much. I'm barely keeping up with all the people around me, but this is how nearly everyone feels at every income level. That's right, and it's incredibly frustrating

for ordinary people to read those kind of comments, but you can kind of see the psychology at work, right? Because if you're a middle class person being frustrated at that New York or saying that, just think about how you're a middle-class person being frustrated at that, New York or saying that, just think about how you're viewed by other people who are not middle-class Americans. Either they're people who live in poorer countries around the world, or they're people who are struggling to make insme in the United States. That same dynamic happens all up and down the income ladder.

dynamic happens all up and down the income ladder. We increasingly live in a world where you have extremes of inequality. The world's 2,000 or so billionaires together have more wealth than about 60% of the rest of the world's population. That's 4.6 billion people. I ask Keith to explain how his book title, The Broken Ladder, captured the staggering divide. One of the images that I used throughout the book to capture the relative differences between people is this idea of a status ladder that we think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain wrong with some people above us and other people below us.

And where we think we stand on that ladder tells you a lot about a person's life and their life outcomes. And as the scale of inequality gets larger and larger as it's been doing in the United States and other advanced economies around the world, it becomes harder and harder to climb that ladder for a number of reasons.

And so when the scale of inequality gets out of proportion to what we can psychologically handle, the ladder is essentially broken. It becomes harder and harder to occupy the wrong that we think we ought to be on. When we come back, the deep and insidious ways that inequality affects our lives. You are listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Financial inequality affects how we perceive ourselves and the world. It can fill us with envy and a sense of injustice.

But those are just the surface-level ways that inequality affects us. At the University of North Carolina, psychologists Keith Payne has found that inequality shapes us even more deeply than we realize, with measurable effects on both our bodies and our minds. Inequality does a few different things to the way that both our minds and our bodies respond. One is that it makes us focused on the short term. It makes us impulsive, focused on the here and now. And it makes us more willing to seek out risks and engage in high-risk, high-reward sort of gambling behaviors. It also affects our bodies in ways that are similar to physical threats. So the social threat of feeling lower on the status ladder than somebody else provokes

very similar reactions physiologically to a physical stressor. So we react as if we were about to be physically attacked. We react with stress responses as if we were about to face a literal physical challenge. And the total of all of those effects adds up to feeling that we're constantly in crisis. I asked Keith to talk about the difference in the homicide rate between countries that are equal and countries that are less equal. If you look across countries, one of the strong predictors of homicide rates, as well as other kinds of violent crime, is the level of income inequality in those countries.

Now, we have to make an important distinction here between wealthy developed countries and poorer countries because in poor countries the best predictor of crime and lots of other bad health and social outcomes is actually poverty because we're talking about countries in which poor people may not have their basic physical needs met. But when we look at wealthy countries like the countries of Western Europe and North America, poverty ceases to be the strong predictor of things like homicide rates and inequality becomes the stronger predictor. Because once people's basic physical needs are met, it becomes the relative comparisons

to other people that becomes one of the major stressors that affect people. Now, of course, it's important to mention that some of these findings are correlations. You're basically looking at patterns. You're not actually conducting an experiment where you're varying how unequal people are and then measuring the outcomes and things like homicide. But tell me about another correlation that people have looked at that has to do with politics, the relationship between inequality and political polarization.

If you compare either across countries or within the United States over time, you see a pretty strong correlation between the level of income inequality and the level of political polarization. So it's not that inequality makes people more conservative or more liberal per se. It's that people who are already on those sides go further into their corners when inequality is high. What is it about inequality that causes people to drive into that separate campski? There seems to be a back and forth dynamic between how much money people have and what they see around them and how certain they feel in their own opinions. So people who are wealthy tend to feel that they deserve it and they earned it and that

tends to make them favor more sort of free market policies and ideologies. And people who are struggling, who are working hard to get ahead, but can't seem to do so, tend to feel like the market system is rigged against them. They favor more progressive taxation and redistribution policies. And both sides tend to think that the system is rigged largely by the other side. And so the spreading of inequality in terms of money has also spread apart our politics and increased our confidence that we're right and the other side are not only wrong, but out to get us. You know, as I was preparing for this interview, Keith,

I came by this interesting study that Daniel Zizzo had conducted. He gave money to volunteers, some got more, some got less, and he found that volunteers were willing to spend their own money if it allowed them to reduce the money that other people had. Zizzo called this burning other people's money, and he found that a substantial number of people were willing to reduce their own wealth if they could also reduce the wealth of other people. In other words, inequality has such strong effects on us that we are willing to make great

sacrifices to level the playing field. And from an economic point of view, that's just crazy behavior, right? But from a psychological point of view, it makes perfect sense because we're not judging these things the way an accountant or an economist would, we're thinking, what do I have compared to what that other guy has? And that relative sense of entitlement and having enough compared to what other people have is so powerful. Keith the researcher is Michael Norton and Dan Ariela, once asked volunteers, what kind

of a country they would like to live in. The first option was a country where the top 20% owned a third of the wealth and the bottom 20% owned 10% of the wealth. Option 2 the top 20% owned 84% of the wealth, the bottom 20% owned 0.1% of the wealth. What do the volunteers say? Most people chose by an overwhelming margin the more equal option. And of course this was not even a small difference. 92% of Americans apparently chose the first option and that first option doesn't look a lot like America, does it? No, in fact those pie charts that you just described were taken from actual data, the

first one which describes Sweden and the second, very unequal one, which actually describes the United States. Almost universally, people preferred the first option to the second. The survey, which was conducted in 2005, found that of those who had voted in the last presidential election, 90% of those who voted for a Republican, and 94% who voted for a Democrat, said they preferred option 1 to option 2. I ask Keith why this preference for equality doesn't get translated into policy. What explains the mismatch between what we say we want and what we do?

Well the important thing in that study was that the charts demonstrating those different levels of inequality were not labeled, right? And so if you were to add the labels that this is the United States and that's Sweden, now people would start sorting themselves out and choosing the United States or Sweden based on their beliefs and for those on the right they see it through largely through a lens of meritocracy where you work for what you get and you deserve whatever that outcome is whereas people who are more on the left see it through lens of fairness and differential starting places. So the gulf there gets mixed up with lots of aspects of our identities and that makes it very difficult to discuss.

One of the places where you can see this tension between meritocracy and fairness is in the world of professional sports. In 2019, the Los Angeles Angels awarded baseball player Mike Trout a contract worth more than $400 million. I asked Keith if he thought the Angels were paying Mike Trout too much. Well, if you look at teams, whether it's baseball or basketball, that have extreme levels of inequality, which are driven by paying superstars, astronomical salaries, they don't outperform other teams that have more equality. And that's counterintuitive if you think that paying the superstars huge salaries

means that they're going to work harder and perform better. You would expect better scores and more wins. But in fact, in team sports like that, higher levels of inequality and extreme pay for the superstars is associated with poorer performance and subsequent seasons. And of course, this idea might be explained what you said earlier, which is that even if you buy the idea that maybe the superstar does perform very well, the resentment and unfairness that others experience

might income at a cost to the team's performance. That's right, the team coordination seems to be a critical factor here. So extreme disparities like that, overall, tend to be destructive to teamwork and cooperation. So in team sports, that interferes with overall performance. Although in other kinds of sports, like golf or NASCAR racing,

where it's just the individual performing their best, their higher stakes, larger pay, do seem to incentivize better performance for the individual. So let's think about what happened to Mike Trout just a little bit more closely. Let's say that the angels read your book and they decided we want to do away with inequality. And let's take the extreme thought experiment example. Where they basically said we're going to pay everyone on the team the same amount.

We're going to pay everyone, let's say they're 40 players on the team, everyone gets $4 million instead of some people getting $500,000 and some people getting $30 million. Do you think that would be a better outcome? And what kind of problems do you think it would cause if the angels would do that? Well, there are trade-offs here. So probably your highest paid superstars would be very angry at that and maybe they would leave the team. So that would be very angry at that and maybe they would leave the team. So that would be a problem.

But if you had a more equal level of compensation, it would also increase teamwork and coordination. So that would benefit the team. So in most cases, the argument here is not for absolute equality so that everybody makes the same. It's that people should be compensated in proportion to their contributions, but the scale could oftentimes be much more compressed so that the superstar isn't making 30, 40, 50 times what other people are making and could still be compensated in proportion to how much they're bringing to the team.

I want to switch gears just a little bit. The newspaper The Sacramento Bee published the salaries of every California state employee. What happened when people discovered that they were being paid less or more than other people who are working for the state of California? The effects of learning what you made in comparison to what other people made Depended on whether you are a higher earner or a lower earner to begin with so People who were below average when they learned that other people were making much more than them, they felt very dissatisfied. People who were higher up when they found out how well they were doing compared to other people, ironically it didn't have the same effect.

They didn't feel overjoyed at the fact that they were doing so well. Their reaction was just sort of neutral. So, they weren't any happier, but the people at the bottom were made more unhappy. So when you look at the example of the Sacramento Bee and the publication of the salaries, it raises a question in my head about whether transparency is a good thing or a bad thing. Obviously, as a journalist, I believe that transparency is a good thing, but in this case, if you make salaries transparent and then people end up quitting their jobs and leaving, is that a good outcome? Well, I don't know whether transparency and pay itself is with very high pay is a good thing, then you would want your company to have full transparency.

So everybody in the company could see that the superstars were getting paid a lot, and that other people weren't getting paid so much, and the people who are the poor performers are getting paid very poorly. If your idea is that pay and equity increases performance, you should want total transparency. Yet what we have is a system in which most companies, most organizations want to keep their pay and equality secret. Social norms are not to talk about these things, which means that at some level, we must kind of know that there's something else going on

besides just incentivizing good performance. We know at some level that there's this negative feeling surrounding talking about differences in pay, and that that's likely to have some bad outcomes as well. Hmm. When you looked at the example of the aircraft studies that you told me about at the start of our conversation, you mentioned that in aircraft that do not board passengers

from the front or aircrafts that don't have for-class cabin at all, you have fewer of these problems. Now of course, you're gonna have rich people and slightly less rich people on those airplanes as well, but the differences are not visible and those differences therefore don't translate into some of the problems that you are you're describing. It raises the question again, if you have inequalities in a society, an organization, a community, are we better off making them visible or better off keeping them invisible? It's a good question. There's no simple answer because on the one hand, when people are economically segregated

and you have the wealthy living behind gated communities and very separate from the way ordinary people are living and the way poor people are living, it might be psychologically easier on the middle class and the poor people not to see that. But on the other hand, it creates a greater feeling of distance between the haves and have knots and less of a feeling of community. And, you know, that leads to increased polarization and lower levels of trust. So, there's no simple answer in terms of whether we want highly visible or highly transparent inequality versus less visible and less transparent inequality because there's always a trade-off

at work between what feels good versus what has negative consequences down the road. Your psychologist's Keith, and you know that there are several small warehouses filled with studies that show that comparing ourselves to others is often a recipe for unhappiness. It's clear that at a societal level, we need to sort of take heed of the lessons of inequality, the psychological consequences of inequality. Does it also translate to the individual level, our individuals better off thinking about inequality or better off not thinking about it? I think there's not really any option of not thinking about it because we're constantly making social comparisons to what others have around us to define what's normal and what's enough. But I think there are wiser and less wise ways to think about inequality and to make those social comparisons. So, one of the things I recommend in the book is that we can be more strategic in making

upward versus downward social comparisons. We talked earlier about how people tend to, by default, make upward social comparisons to those who have more than them. But we can strategically make downward social comparisons also, right? So instead of just thinking about what other people have who have more than us, we can remind ourselves that, you know, there are a lot of people around who have less than us. And upward and downward social comparisons have opposite consequences. Upward social comparisons, as I mentioned before, feel terrible, but they can be motivating.

Downward social comparisons feel great, and yet they can be demotivating. So it depends on what your goal is. Take a break from feeling stressed, well, then do some downward social comparison. Do you want to feel motivated and energized to go out and do more, do some upward social comparisons? So neither one is good in itself. It's just that we can be more mindful about the kinds of comparisons we're making on a daily basis. Keith Payne is a psychologist at the University of North Carolina.

He's the author of the Broken Ladder, how inequality affects the way we live, think, and die. Keith, thanks for joining me today on Hidden Bre. Thanks so much. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Laura Quarelle, Kristen Wong, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Keith Woods. Keith is a chief diversity officer at NPR. Over the years, Keith has offered helpful insights and guidance on a number of Hidden Brain episodes. He has also created opportunities for countless journalists to learn more about the craft of storytelling. Keith is the epitome of the inclusive leader, always ready to share his thoughts or a lenda hand. Thanks Keith.

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