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

The first and most obvious is that conservatives generally want to preserve tradition and the status quo, while liberals want to see changes in society.

it was easier to hate from a safe distance than from within the intimate terror of battle.

the truth is that, politically speaking, we all contain multitudes.

These trends are dangerous, because when opponents become enemies, people can justify almost anything in responding to them. After all, how can you expect to reason with idiots and maniacs?

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

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

When you feel that you have nothing, even the cells in your body start demanding to take what they need now and worry about the future later. Inequality accelerates this process by making everyone feel less secure.

Do these emotional tendencies predispose people toward particular political ideologies, as the theory predicts? Or do conservative versus liberal mind-sets lead people to tune in to different emotional channels? Or are they both just a reflection of some other factor that causes both?

Feeling poor made people more willing to roll the dice.