Ep15 -- Fair Warning

 There's a famous exchange between F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, where Fitzgerald says, "The rich are different from you and me."  And Hemingway replies, "Yeah, they have more money."  

There are a couple of interesting things about that exchange. First of all, it never happened.  What did happen was Fitzgerald wrote his line in an essay called "The Rich Boy"  in which he's got some pretty critical things to say about the very rich, like they're soft, cynical, and we'll always feel superior. Even if they sink below us.  10 years later, Hemingway is out to lunch with his editor and literary critic Mary Colum. Hemingway says, "I'm getting to know the rich". And Colum replies, "The only difference between the rich and other people is the rich have more money."  

So Hemingway tucked that line away and used it in his 1936 short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro in which he wrote,  "The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon.  They were dull and they were repetitious [which is a great self dig by the way].  He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald in his romantic awe of them. And how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me."  And how someone had said to Scott, "Yes. They have more money."  

Fitzgerald was rightfully pissed, and wrote something in his personal notebook about "Ernest's wisecrack."  Then after Fitzgerald died, the contents of his notebooks were published and there was a footnote added explaining that "Fitzgerald had said 'the rich are different from us.' And Hemingway had replied, 'Yes, they have more money.'"  Finally.  When Lionel Twilling reviewed that book of Fitzgerald's notes he referred to this "famous exchange" that "everyone knows," and thus a legend was born.  Now the other interesting thing about that exchange is, so what?  What difference does it make if the rich are inherently different or just have more money?  To me, the nature of "the rich" is less important than the overall effects of extreme richness.  Demonizing rich people --while often satisfying and sometimes well-deserved --   is less interesting and less important than noticing the impact on individuals and on society of an extreme imbalance of wealth like the one we currently have in America.  So this week, I want to look at some of those connections between extreme inequality and our social challenges.  Connections that those who are quite happy with the current inequality very much don't want us to see.  Stay tuned.  

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting,  a podcast about the way we've all been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first, a word about a sponsor.  

Everybody loves Nestlé, right? I mean, come on. Kit-Kats Haagen Dazs, Hot Pockets!  But you know, who really loves Nestlé? Babies in India, Africa, and south America.  And that's because unlike in Europe and elsewhere, Nestlé adds sugar to its followup milk formula Nido and Cerelac, a cereal aimed at children between six months and two years old.  Now of course, Nestlé says their products comply with local health standards, which is true.  But they're clearly capitalizing on less strict regulations in poorer countries. 

And will happily profit of the negative health effects on babies there.  But what's really the sugary, tooth-rotting icing on the cake is how Nestlé itself talks about added sugar on its own websites.  For example on the South African webpage for Nido, there's a quiz called Sugar: Fact or Fiction.  It includes such entries as:  Fact: Children can become accustomed to sweet foods. The use of sweetened foods may accustom toddlers and children to sweetness, resulting in a preference for sweet foods later in life and a refusal to less sweet options.  No shit.  Pediatricians recommend that toddlers and children should be introduced to the natural tastes of different food ingredients and not to the expectation that their food and drink will always be sweet.  And then there's another one: Fact. High sugar intake leads to both short and long-term risks in children.  The immediate effect of high intakes of sugar is a quick increase in blood sugar levels. And subsequent insulin secretion.  This is a normal regulatory process of blood sugar levels, but frequent spikes and drops of blood sugar levels is not advisable to anybody.  Long-term there is growing scientific evidence that too much and, or too frequent consumption of added sugar may lead to weight problems later in life. Really.  Now Nestle is of course trying to do the right thing. In their response to the report of their added sugar in select markets, they replied, "Our infant formula for babies under 12 months old does not contain added sugars. [Even though their cereal does].  For the so-called growing-up milks for children aged between one and three years, we started to phase out added sugars quite some time ago.  

Well, kudos Nestle. Congratulations on starting to be less awful than you were some time ago.  

And we're back.  

There was a fascinating 2016 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found on airplanes, air-rage incidents were four times more likely on planes that had first-class sections.  And of those, air rage was twice as likely if passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats back in coach.  And even in first class, there was a 12 times greater chance of air rage if the coach passengers had to walk through first class to get to their seats.  Now. I'm not suggesting that airlines should abolish first-class or, as I'm sure some will suggest, I don't believe there should be no hierarchy in society and we should all have the exact same income and wealth.  And clearly there could be other factors at play other than just social comparison. I mean, obviously being crammed into a flying steel tube is stressful and uncomfortable and not normal.  But there's something going on here. 

And I think it gets at the element of our human nature -- although it's not exclusively human -- that values fairness. It's not that we must have absolute equality to have a peaceful society; it's that there must be a general sense that things are fairly distributed.  I think the COVID pandemic provided as stark, an example of unfairness as one could ever imagine.  While today millions of Americans are struggling financially and dealing with post-pandemic inflation that's still being felt, we see statistics like over the first couple years of the pandemic, about $42 trillion in new wealth was created.  Of that  about 60% or $26 trillion went to the wealthiest 1% of the world population. That's about 600,000 people, and that average is out, if I'm doing the math correctly, to about $70 million per person.  Increase over two years.  The remaining 16 trillion was divided among the other 99% of humanity or around 8 billion people for an average increase of about $2,000 per person on average.  The vast majority got nothing. 

Now for pretty much everyone, there's no way to consciously notice the effects of that kind of inequality.-- even though we might be outraged when we see those numbers on a meme online -- but that doesn't mean there isn't a significant and impactful effect. 

And by the way, similar to how we think about income inequality, without thinking about how it really affects all of us.  We often hear about billions of dollars without  consciously absorbing what that really means. I recently heard a good way to wrap your head around it.  If you saved a hundred dollars a day  and just stuck it under your mattress, no compound interest, no nothing. Just adding $100 each day.  You would have $1 million in 27 years.  You know, that's a long time, but in the scope of a human lifetime, it's not beyond the imagination.  To get to $1 billion would take 27,000 years.  In one sense that's obvious right after all, we all realize that a billion is a thousand millions. But when you actually take a moment to think about it, a thousand millions.  That's a lot of millions and a million is already a lot.  

So what evidence is there that an unfair level of inequality is detrimental to society?  There are lots of studies linking levels of inequality to violent crime. Like our air rage example, but on the ground, let's call it ground rage. There have been studies showing that increased levels of inequality are associated with less life satisfaction on all levels of society, including those at the very top.  There was a 2014 study in the Oxford economic papers, which showed that crime increases faster when wealth disparities are more visible, through conspicuous consumption, than when they're more discreet. It gets back around to our sense of fairness....

This all reminds me of a funny story.  Around 2009 or 2010 my kids were really little, like five and two.  For anyone who has, or has had kids that age you know, it's exhausting. You would kill for just a couple hours of peace and quiet.  And a friend of mine suggested that we go to a family-friendly Club Med.  And I said, I don't know, Club Med really doesn't sound like our kind of thing.  And he said, you have two young kids, it's exactly your kind of thing.  Now at the time it was just after the 2008 financial crisis and tourism to Mexico was really struggling. So the cost of taking a family of four to Club Med Ixtapa was insanely low. So we went.  And it was...great. 

It was exactly what every parent with young kids needs. I mean, drop the kids off at the kids club and go for a relaxing coffee, a two-hour lunch, volleyball till dinner. Oh, man. It was perfect.  

But I noticed something interesting.  Now I know, even as cheap as it was back then,  that kind of trip is beyond a lot of people's means. But it's all-inclusive and it's not super fancy. I mean, it's probably the same as a week-long visit to Disney World.  So I assume there was a pretty broad socioeconomic representation among the guests there.  But it was hard to tell.  You didn't have the normal markers of status that you saw all around in the regular world.  There were no cars. It was really hot so we're no fancy clothes.  People really didn't talk much about work.  And everyone had access to all the same stuff.  And yes, we were on vacation and maybe it was the rivers of alcohol we consumed, but there was something liberating about not having any concern or even awareness of your place in the hierarchy.  

It's one of those pressures of everyday life that you don't notice until it's gone.  I think of it kind of like a knitted scarf. If you stretch it, so with greater inequality, those little connections are pulled further apart so less social cohesion,  and there's more space in between that you could fall through. So there's more stress. When it's less stretched, there's more cohesion and the whole thing holds together better.  

So, what does all this mean?  It's really a reminder that our fundamental human nature values fairness. 

We don't need absolute parity or a total absence of hierarchy, but when we look around we expect to see a distribution of incomes and wealth that falls within a reasonable range of fairness.  And we have to remind ourselves that when we see things like rising crime or a decrease in social cohesion, it's likely that it's in no small part because the level of inequality has gone beyond what most people would think of as fair.  Now, what we do about that is an open question.  But what I would suggest is just to keep in mind that whenever anyone suggests that it would be unfair to try and limit income and wealth inequality, it's worth considering that maybe the current situation is the unfair one,  and making things less unequal would actually be good for everyone.  

Well, that's it for this week. Until next time,  be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and as always, use your damn turn signal.