The Spiritual Impact of Inequality

Words of Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, from the back of our hymnal:

"The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice. It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed."

So let us unveil those bonds that do connect us – and together let our vision widen and our strength be renewed. We live in a time of great polarization – and the political polarization is itself an outcome of the income and wealth inequality.

On November 2, 1980, my daughter Morgen was born. She was born into a country that certainly had poverty, but did not see the sort of wealth disparities we have now. Two days after she was born there was the 1980 presidential election, and Ronald Reagan won it. Morgen turned 43 last November, and over the course of her life so far there’s been a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy.

In 1979, the poorer half earned 20% of the nation’s pre-tax income. By 2014, just 13%. If the US had the same income distribution it had in 1979, each family in the bottom 80% of the income distribution would have $11,000 more per year in income.

From 1947 to 1979, we all grew. In those 32 years:

• For the bottom 20%, income rose 116%.
• For the second quintile, income rose 100%.
• For the middle quintile, income rose 111%
• For the fourth quintile, income rose 114%.
• For the top 20%, income rose 99%.

So: all quintiles rose a comparable amount – but the bottom 20%, by a small margin, grew most of all. And the top top 20%, by a small margin, grew least of all. That was during the 32 years from 1947 to 1979. But from 1979 to 2007, it was a completely different story. In those 28 years:

• For the bottom 20%, income rose 15%.
• For the second quintile, income rose 22%.
• For the middle quintile, income rose 23%.
• For the fourth quintile, income rose 33%.
• For the top 20%, income rose 95%.

In 1980, the richest one percent of people got eight percent of the income -- which means they were getting eight times the mean income. Eight times the mean income would seem to be plenty. Who could want more than that? Surely that’s more than enough. But in 2011, the richest one percent brought home 20 percent of all income -- 20 times the mean.

"During the 1950s and 60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. In 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times. By 1990 it was 100 times. By 2007, CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned.” (Robert Reich, Forward to Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.)

Modern life is tough. Living the way we do is hard on people: anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community. Not all of that would go away if suddenly, magically tomorrow all income and wealth distribution were at 1979 proportions again. Now, I need to say that I’m always suspicious of any scenario invoked with “if suddenly, magically tomorrow” – because there are no magic wands, and HOW we get somewhere is always going to be a huge part of what it means to be there. So what would it take? It would take some massive programs to create more jobs, bills to ensure that they paid well, lots of aid and assistance, like what we saw during the pandemic, only more – and to pay for it all, a progressive income tax of the likes we had in this country in the 1950s.

The top marginal tax rate is now 37% It’s been in the 30s – or even briefly as low as 28% -- ever since the Reagan administration. But back during the top marginal tax rate was 92% -- then in came down to 91% and stayed there through 1963. In 1963, for a single filer, any income above $200,000 was taxed at a 91% rate. That was 60 years ago, and general cost of living then was about a tenth of what it is today, so $200,000 then was about equivalent to $2 million now. Imagine taxing all income above $2 million at 91%. What’s actually much harder to imagine is our congress approving such a change. It would take a huge and drastic popular movement that voted into office very different representatives than we have now. The building of that movement would involve substantial attitude shifts in a lot of people. It would take a moral awakening of mass numbers of people to really care about the well-being of everyone. And if THAT happened, we’d already be in a very different world, quite apart from the effects of the legislation we would then be able to pass. Just living in a world where most people really cared about the well-being of all people would itself go a long way to easing the anomies of modern life: anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community.

The state of huge disparities of income – and the even huger disparities of wealth – make everything that’s tough about modern life is worse. What may be an even bigger factor is the practical political reality that we live in a country that allowed this to happen, that has been voting into office the leaders that made it happen ever since my daughter was born. We live in a country that is largely unmotivated to rectify it. I, for one, veer between anger and sadness at this reality.

There are a lot of different ways to measure inequality: the top X percent versus the bottom Y percent. But any X or Y we might choose reveals about the same trends, and about the same differences between nations. One common metric, which I will highlight because the UN uses it, is the ratio of the income at the 80th percentile to the income that’s at the 20th percentile. This 80th to 20th ratio is, in the US, as of 2022, at 8.6. It’s been running at about that for over a decade, though during the pandemic we had a temporary drop down to 7.1. Canada, Japan, and most of Europe are below 5. When this 80th percentile to 20th percentile ratio is less than 5, then we find a society generally maintaining some shared assumptions about wealth and about each other. Roughly, when that ratio is about 5 or less, the attitude of the populace will resemble something like this:

“If there are somewhat wealthier folks among us, that’s OK. I can accept that some people are luckier, or more skillful at work that society prizes, or they’re more driven to work hard, and they end up wealthier. That’s fine – and as it should be. The relatively wealthy serve as a reminder to me of what good schooling and hard work and a little luck might make available to my children. If the town doctor has a big house on a hill, that’s OK – ze’s smart and had a lot of training, and ze’s using that to help us when we get sick, so more power to zir. Maybe my kid can get a scholarship and be a doctor.”

That kind of thinking was still pretty much the largely-unspoken norm on the day 43 years ago when I first held my newborn daughter in my arms. But that attitude loses purchase, begins to slip away, if the rich-poor gap grows too large. That outlook that prevailed through my growing up and my parents lives up until 1980, has now come to seem quaint -- an echo of a bygone time. Few, it seems, think like that anymore.

Things changed during the time of my daughter’s growing up. The two key features of the old outlook were:

1. the higher levels of wealth were attainable by those who weren't already rich; and
2. those who had wealth deserved it.

These two features are connected, for when upper-class wealth seems attainable – when the perception of most people is that anyone with the right combination of talent, drive, and luck can become upper-class – then those who do make it to society’s top wealth echelons are presumed to deserve it. But when the gap becomes as enormous as it has in the US, the folks at the bottom and middle can no longer see the wealth of the ones at the top as either attainable or deserved.

By the time my little girl was graduating from college in 2002, the world she was commencing into had become profoundly different from the one she was born into. The country had become a place where we could no longer feel we were all in this together.

Now, I know that the idea that there once was, up until 1980, a halcyon time of general social solidarity overlooks the deep racism that has divided our country throughout its history. I know that, given the horrors of Jim Crow segregation, gauzy nostalgic impressions of togetherness are delusional. Even so, whites could see rich whites as attainable, and blacks could see wealthier blacks as attainable. But in this century, even that has fallen apart.

There is an argument that we should be concerned with poverty, but not with inequality. It’s our business as a society to make sure that everybody has enough, this argument goes, but not our business how much more than enough the rich have. Here’s the thing, though. What we want is to care and be cared for. We want, and need, to be in relations of mutual care. And when that need is not met, it makes anxiety, depression, and social alienation more likely. Societally, when inequality becomes great, we lose the sense of community, lose the sense that we’re all in this together.

Researchers into “social health” typically measure it as an amalgam of ten factors. The lower the rates of:

• homicides
• obesity
• teenage births
• infant mortality
• imprisonment rates
• mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction),

and the higher the:

• life expectancy
• children’s educational performance
• social mobility
• level of trust

then the higher a nation's social health.

Using this definition of social health, researchers have then found that a country’s wealth does not correlate with its social health. A country may be rich, medium, poor, or extremely poor (less than $10,000 per person per year). Except in extremely poor nations, more wealth has no effect on social health. Equality, however, does correlate with social health. Countries with high inequality, whether rich or poor, have low social health. Countries with low inequality, whether rich or poor, have high social health. The US is quite wealthy, but on the measure of social health we’re doing worse than most countries that have only half that much per-person income. After meeting a certain minimum, more wealth doesn’t do us any good. Equality does. In statisticians' terms, the mean income, as long as it’s above $10,000, doesn’t matter. It’s the standard deviation that matters.

Social health means a better quality of life for all of us. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett write in their book: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

“The evidence shows that reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us . . . this includes the better off.”

A relatively equal society – where the ratio of the 80th percentile to the 20th percentile is less than 5 -- can sustain a shared understanding among its members. But if, as in the U.S., that ratio is close to 9, there’s a disconnect. We lose the shared understanding of the legitimacy of things. The wealthy are beyond attainability, and beyond any credible story of deservingness. We lose the sense that we’re in this together. The wealthy become “them.” And "they" don’t care about "us" -- so we don’t care about them. Anomie and division set in; anger and alienation become the social mood. Sensing the resentment of most of society, the wealthy, in turn, retreat behind gated communities, which further increases the disconnect.

We begin to believe the game is rigged; we don’t have a chance. When we believe that, we become more likely to behave in ways that make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rich and poor alike feel the division, the disconnect. The result is that phenomenon I mentioned: everything that’s tough about modern life is exacerbated. Higher levels of depression, higher levels of consuming things that aren’t good for us: from drugs to alcohol to junk food to mindless TV shows to mindless consumer products. As I wrote in my column in this month’s issue of Connecting: When you compare nation to nation, there’s no correlation between wealth and life expectancy or mortality. No correlation. Rich countries have about the same life expectancies and mortality rates as relatively poor countries, until you get into the really poor end of the spectrum. As long as a nation has per-person income above about $10,000 a year, further increases do nothing to increase life expectancy. That’s the nation-to-nation comparison.

But when we do a zip-code-to-zip-code comparison, we get a different picture. The poorer zip codes have higher mortality than the richer zip codes. If you took several of the poorest zip codes, created a new island in the Pacific, put them all there, maintained their per-person incomes as they were, made a new island nation of them, they’d have decreased mortality. They’d be fine. But because they live near the wealthier areas, they perceive that difference. They see all around them the inescapable fact that they live in a society that is set up to work for others, but not for them. They are reminded daily that they are not in a society of mutual care. And THAT wears them down much more than relative material deprivation.

Wilkinson and Pickett write:

“At the pinnacle of human material and technical achievement, we find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, worried about how others see us, unsure of our friendships, driven to consume, and with little or no community life.”

Wilkinson and Pickett go on to note:

“The unease we feel about the loss of social values and the way we are drawn into the pursuit of material gain is often experienced as if it were a purely private ambivalence which cuts us off from others....As voters, we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.”

A complex web of interrelated factors has brought us to this pass, and growing income inequality is a key node within that web. It fosters the sense of divide. If we’re going to get back to a sense of common good – where political differences are differences of strategy for promoting general welfare rather than the drawing of enemy lines to delineate who must be defeated – then it will be necessary to reduce income inequality.

Equality has benefits that show up all over. They show up, for example, on baseball teams. “A well-controlled study of over 1,600 players in 29 teams over a nine-year period found that major league baseball teams with smaller income differences among players do significantly better than the more unequal teams.” (Wilkinson and Picket, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, 237). When people feel like they stand on equal footing with their neighbors or teammates, there’s a cohesion that lifts spirits, heals wounds, and improves performance.

Unitarian Universalists care about our world. And it’s clear now that

“further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth. The issue is now community and how we relate to each other.” (Wilkinson, Pickett)

The issue is building a world in which most of us care about the well-being of all of us. The issue is not only at the economic level but at the spirit level. The wound is to our spirits, yet, wounded as they are, the resolve to heal must also come from our spirits.

“The religious community is essential,” as Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed said, “for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed."

May it be so. Amen.

A Statement of Conscience

Income Inequality, part 3

“The unease we feel about the loss of social values and the way we are drawn into the pursuit of material gain is often experienced as if it were a purely private ambivalence which cuts us off from others....As voters, we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.” (Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level 4)

What we saw manifesting in the elections of 2016 November was years of decline in voter interest in thinking about the common good for all our sakes, and years of corresponding increase in interest in sticking it to “those other people.” What we saw in the elections of 2017 November and December (in Virginia, New Jersey, Alabama) was the stuck side sticking back. Was there any real concern for the common good for all our sakes?

I’m inclined to see voters were sticking back on behalf of a greater good for more people, but that’s not quite the same thing as the common good. The tide that turned in the more recent elections – and remember, we have no idea if it will last, or how far it extends into states that didn’t have elections – wasn’t a tide that seemed very interested in attending to the pains and frustrations of Trump voters. I see it as motivated by greater and more widely-shared goods, but not really by a sense of the common good. It feels like in this climate there can be no such thing.

We’ve become a place where people like me find the most inspiring and energizing banner to march under bears one word: resistance. And I am down with that. The current regime is authoritarian, kleptocratic, utterly-truth-disregarding and reality-uninterested – hence, willfully ignorant -- impulsively vindictive, and ideologically incoherent except for the coherence of its embrace of white supremacy and patriarchal privilege. Resistance to that regime really is, I believe, our most pressing priority. But how did we get here?

Thirty-seven years ago I was a brand-new father. My first child had just been born. If you’d asked me about resistance as a political ideal, I’d have thought in terms of resistance to special interests on behalf of a common good for all. Today it’s hard to picture common good, so it isn’t in the picture.

A complex web of interrelated factors has brought us to this pass, and growing income inequality is a key node within that web. It fosters the sense of divide. If we’re going to get back to a sense of common good – where political differences are differences of strategy for promoting general welfare rather than the drawing of enemy lines to delineate who must be defeated – then it will be necessary to reduce income inequality.

It’s necessary. Would it be sufficient? Given what would have to happen in order for that inequality to return to 1979 levels, and all the side effects of such a mass effort for equality, then probably, yes, the panoply of conditions that it would take to bring the top quintile/bottom quintile ratio to below five, probably would, all together, also be sufficient for regenerating a robust sense of common good. (And this time, my dream would be, the prevailing sense of “common” would not harbor tacit white supremacist assumptions and exclusions.)

Our denomination collectively decided in 2014 to take up income inequality as study/action issue. After three years of study/action, Unitarian Universalists last summer produced a Statement of Conscience, "Escalating Economic Inequity." The full statement is about 2200 words – please take a copy and give it a look: HERE.

Let’s think about this. Just as the delegates at general assembly adopted a statement, let’s have a CUUC statement of conscience about this. We could, as a congregation, adopt the statement as is. Or we could amend it.

There are parts of this statement that we will need to debate. I love this statement – it’s bold and inspiring. But I love being a part of a community where other brains different from mine can add to mine. As I imagine the diversity in this room right now – the wonderful diversity – I imagine some things some of us wouldn’t immediately exactly jump to sign on to. There’s an allusion to “capitalism” as a key factor in economic inequality.“Automation” is implicated as one of the forces driving income inequality, but maybe some us see automation as creating as many jobs as it displaces. Let’s plunge in and study up on that. Let’s really do this “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” thing, and do it together, and let our disagreements come out and make us stronger. Similarly, there’s a call for advocacy for revising bankruptcy laws. We would want to examine what sort of revisions might actually be helpful, and consider harms of such revision. The statement says that a moral economic system would include “a guaranteed minimum income for everyone,” and also “an open immigration system.” Those are ideas this congregation might have some fruitful debate about.

And then there are the comparative silences. The statement’s first sentence is: “Challenging extreme inequity locally and globally is a moral imperative.” But then very little is said about the global part. Perhaps we’d want our statement to acknowledge that the wealth gap between nations, not just the wealth gap within our nation, is a significant problem. Or else not name challenging global inequity as a moral imperative.

So stay tuned. Your social justice coordinating committee is looking to plan events for discussion. Perhaps we can present some formal debates on certain of the provisions. Let’s really engage this issue! Let's see where we go together – our vision widened and our strength multiplied.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Income Inequality"
See also
Part 1: Modern Life Made Tougher
Part 2: Feeling We're In This Together

Feeling We're In This Together

Income Inequality, part 2

There are a lot of different ways to measure inequality: the top X percent versus the bottom Y percent. But any X or Y we might choose reveals about the same trends, and about the same differences between nations. One measure is called "the 20:20 ratio" -- it's the ratio of the income of the top 20 percent to the income of the bottom 20 percent. It's a very common metric, and the UN uses it, so let’s look at that one.

Update: Not much change. Data from the OECD (HERE) indicate the 20:20 ratio for the US staying about the same for the most recent years for which data is available.
2013: 8.6
2014: 8.7
2015: 8.3

When the ratio of the top quintile to the bottom quintile is less than 5, then we find a society generally maintaining some shared assumptions about wealth and about each other.

Roughly, when that ratio is about 5 or less, the attitude of the populace will look resemble something like this:

“If there are somewhat wealthier folks among us, that’s OK. I can accept that some people are luckier, or more skillful at work that society prizes, or they’re more driven to work hard, and they end up wealthier. That’s fine – and as it should be. The relatively wealthy serve as a reminder to me of what good schooling and hard work and a little luck might make available to my children. If the town doctor has a big house on a hill, that’s OK – he’s smart and had a lot of training, and he’s using that to help us when we get sick, so more power to him. Maybe my kid can get a scholarship and be a doctor.”

That kind of thinking was still pretty much the largely-unspoken norm on the day 37 years ago when I first held my newborn daughter in my arms.

But that attitude loses purchase, begins to slip away, if the rich-poor gap grows too large. That outlook that prevailed through my life and my parents life up until 1980, has now come to seem quaint -- an echo of a bygone time. Few, it seems, think like that anymore.

The two key features of that outlook were: (1) that the higher levels of wealth were attainable by those who weren't already rich; and (2) those who had wealth deserved it. These two features are connected, for when upper-class wealth seems attainable – when the perception of most people is that anyone with the right combination of talent, drive, and luck can become upper-class – then those who do make it to society’s top wealth echelons are presumed to deserve it. But when the gap becomes as enormous as it has in the US, the folks at the bottom and middle can no longer see the wealth of the ones at the top as either attainable or deserved.

By the time my little girl was graduating from college in 2000, the world she was commencing into had become profoundly different from the one she was born into. The country had become a place where we could no longer feel we were all in this together.

Now, I know that the idea that there once was, up until about 37 years ago, a halcyon time of general social solidarity overlooks the deep racism that has divided our country throughout its history, and that given the reality of the deep and hostile racial divide, gauzy nostalgic impressions of togetherness are delusional. Very true. Even so, whites could see rich whites as attainable, and black could see wealthier blacks as attainable. But for the last 15 years or so, even that has fallen apart.

A relatively equal society – where the ratio of top quintile to bottom quintile is less than 5 (as it is in places like Japan, Scandinavia) -- can sustain a shared understanding among its members. But if, as in the U.S., that ratio is 8 or 9, there’s a disconnect. We lose the shared understanding of the legitimacy of things. The wealthy are beyond attainability, beyond any credible story of deservingness. We lose the sense that we’re in this together. The wealthy become “them.” And "they" don’t care about "us" -- so we don’t care about them. Anomie and division set in; anger and alienation become the social mood.

Sensing the resentment of most of society, the wealthy, in turn, retreat behind gated communities, which further increases the disconnect. We begin to believe the game is rigged; we don’t have a chance. When we believe that, we become more likely to behave in ways that make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rich and poor alike feel the division, the disconnect. The result is that phenomenon I mentioned: everything that’s tough about modern life is exacerbated. Higher levels of depression, higher levels of consuming things that aren’t good for us: from drugs to alcohol to junk food to mindless TV shows to mindless consumer products.

When you compare nation to nation, there’s no correlation between wealth and life expectancy or mortality. No correlation. Rich countries have about the same life expectancies and mortality rates as relatively poor countries, until you get into the really poor end of the spectrum. As long as a nation has per-person income above about $9,000 a year, further increases do nothing to increase life expectancy. That’s the nation-to-nation comparison.

But when we do a zip-code-to-zip-code comparison, we get a different picture. The poorer zip codes have higher mortality than the richer zip codes. If you took several of the poorest zip codes, created a new island in the Pacific, put them all there, maintained their per-person incomes as they were, made a new island nation of them, they’d have decreased mortality. They’d be fine. But because they live near the wealthier areas, they perceive that difference. They see all around them the inescapable fact that they live in a society that is set up to work for others, but not for them. They are reminded daily that they are not in a society of mutual care. And that wears them down much more than relative material deprivation.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Income Inequality"
See also
Part 1: Modern Life Made Tougher
Part 3: A Statement of Conscience

Modern Life Made Tougher

Income Inequality, part 1

"The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice. It is the curch that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed." (Mark Morrison-Reed, Singing the Living Tradition #580)

"To unveil the bonds that bind each to all." That's the “central task of the religious community,” says Rev. Morrison-Reed. Unveil the bonds. The bonds are already there, but are veiled, hidden. We don’t see them. But in religious community – that is, community explicitly oriented toward ultimate concern – together we remove the veil for one another. We learn from and with each other to perceive the bonds. We learn to pay attention – to take in the moment just as it is.

Our choir sang words that translate as “listen to the wind blowing through the night, breathing peace to all.” Listen. Attention itself cultivates peace. Becoming mindful of those ever-present yet often undetected bonds “inspires us to act for justice.” Because we’re together, and see how thoroughly we are conjoined, we know we are not alone in struggling for justice. “Alone,” as Morrison-Reed says, “our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done.” But once we see those bonds unveiled, and live out of the awareness of them, the vision widens and the strength multiplies.

So, what shall we do with that wider vision and multiplied strength? I’m here particularly to talk today about income inequality, and what we as a people of faith, energized by a deep awareness of our bondedness, can do about that.

On November 2, 1980, my daughter was born. She was born into a world that certainly had poverty, but did not see the sort of wealth disparities we have now. Two days after she was born, Ronald Reagan won the election for president. And over the course of her life so far – she turned 37 this month – there’s been a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy

In 1979, the poorer half earned 20% of the nation’s pre-tax income. By 2014, just 13%. If the US had the same income distribution it had in 1979, each family in the bottom 80% of the income distribution would have $11,000 more per year in income.

From 1947 to 1979, we all grew. In those 32 years:

• For the bottom 20%, income rose 116%.
• For the second quintile, income rose 100%.
• For the middle quintile, income rose 111%
• For the fourth quintile, income rose 114%.
• For the top 20%, income rose 99%.

The gain of the top 20% was about the same as – though actually slightly less than – the other quintiles.

But from 1979 to 2007, it was a completely different story. In those 28 years:

• For the bottom 20%, income rose 15%.
• For the second quintile, income rose 22%.
• For the middle quintile, income rose 23%.
• For the fourth quintile, income rose 33%.
• For the top 20%, income rose 95%.

In 1980, the richest one percent of people got eight percent of the income. Eight times the average income would seem to be plenty. Who could want more than that? Surely that’s more than enough. But in 2011, the richest one percent brought home 20 percent of all income.

"During the 1950s and 60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. In 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times. By 1990 it was 100 times. By 2007, CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned.” The ratio is down a little since then – but in 2016 CEOs were still making 271 times what the typical worker made. Don’t let this lull you with a sense of improvement: it’s fluctuating a bit within the range of the egregiously horrible.

Modern life is tough. Living the way we do is hard on people: anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community. Not all of that would go away if suddenly tomorrow all income and wealth distribution were at 1979 proportions again. Yet everything that’s tough about modern life is made worse by such huge disparities.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Income Inequality"
See also
Part 2: Feeling We're In This Together
Part 3: A Statement of Conscience

Addendum: Income Inequality and Political Polarization

On Tue Jan 13, The Liberal Pulpit posted this graph:

The graph shows how one of the effects of rising inequality of income is a polarizing of our political system. Or vice-versa. "House polarization" is a measure of the internal homogeneity (low diversity of viewpoint) among House Democrats and among House Republicans, and the ideological gap between an average House Democrat and an average House Republican.

The Gini Index (or Gini coefficient) was developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist, Corrado Gini in 1912. It measures equality or inequality of distribution. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 (where every person has exactly the same income) to 1 (where one person has all the income there is, and everyone else gets none).

Getting the Gini index and the House polarization index to map so neatly onto each other is, of course, partly a matter of adjusting the graph's two scales to get the best match. But that's not all there is to it. However we  set the scales, we're going to see both the Gini and the polarization indices going sharply up since the late 70s -- and every 0.1 increase on the polarization index corresponds to about a 0.017 increase on the Gini index.

Growing inequality of income tends to encourage political polarization -- while political polarization leads to policies that further widen the gap between the rich and the poor. How do we break out of this vicious cycle?

For example. In 2012, six-term Indiana Senator Richard Lugar and three-term Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, both Republicans, lost in their party's primaries to tea-party hardliners. Lugar and Snowe were dealmakers within the Republican party, willing to work with Democrats to compromise rather than effect gridlock by standing firm on ideological principles. Our political polarization continues to worsen.

Paul Krugman (click here), makes the point that:

If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971,...Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed. But that was then. Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality. ("Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity," New York Times, 2012 May 3

Growing polarization makes it increasingly difficult for either side to see a distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph -- though Krugman finds that it is the Republicans who have become especially unable to see such a distinction.

For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

Our country has managed to break out of this vicious cycle before. The graph above starts in 1947. Let's look further back to 1879:

We have had high levels of polarization before. From 1879 until the mid-1920s political polarization was about where it is now -- and income inequality was similarly high then. How did we break out of the vicious cycle before?

Let's remember our history. The constitutional amendment allowing a federal income tax was passed in 1916. Oh, and look -- that's about when the trend toward decreased polarization began. Factors that plausibly facilitated the continuation of that trend include the crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, the creation of Social Security and a slew of other safety net programs under FDR, and World War II.

With a return to the income tax rates we had in the 50s and 60s and renewed commitment to social safety net programs, maybe this time we can skip the need for a World War. But, dear and gentle reader, we will not get those policy changes without a spiritual shift toward greater connectedness with our neighbors.

To break the vicious cycle of domestic abuse generation after generation requires intentional work at counseling and creation of social structures of accountability. To break the vicious cycle whereby inequality fosters polarization which fosters further inequality will require a similar intervention of intentional creation of habits of building connection, and being accountable to one another for doing so.

Equality is Good for Us

If I’m poor, and I’m going to be poor anyway, how does it hurt me if you’re rich? That seems like a reasonable question. I might not know how to articulate the answer, but if I’m poor, and you are, too, then I can feel like we’re in this together. I have a sense of common cause with you. We may not have much, be we’ve got each other.

Societies with low inequality (the ratio of the income of the top 20 percent to the income of the bottom 20 percent is less than 5) maintain some shared assumptions about wealth and about each other. Roughly, the attitude is like this:

If there are somewhat wealthier folks among us, that’s OK. I can accept that some people are luckier, or more skillful at work that society prizes, or they’re more driven to work hard, and they end up wealthier. The relatively wealthy serve as a reminder to me of what good schooling and hard work and a little luck might make available to my children. If the town doctor has a bigger house on a hill, that’s OK – he’s smart and had a lot of training, and he’s using that to help us when we get sick, so more power to him. Maybe my kid can get a scholarship and be a doctor.

If, however, the rich-poor gap grows too large, that attitude loses purchase. In fact, in the US today, that kind of outlook is quaint -- an echo of a bygone time. Few, it seems, think like that anymore. The ones at the bottom and middle can no longer see the wealth of the ones at the top as either attainable or deserved.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here?

A relatively equal society is able to sustain a shared understanding among its members. But if, as in the U.S., the ratio of the income of the top 20 percent to the income of the bottom 20 percent is 8 or 9, there’s a disconnect. We lose the shared understanding of the legitimacy of things. The wealthy are beyond attainability, beyond any credible story of deservingness. We lose the sense that we’re in this together. The wealthy become “them.” And "they" don’t care about "us" -- so we don’t care about them. Anomie and division set in; anger and alienation become the social mood.

Sensing the resentment of most of society, the wealthy, in turn, retreat behind gated communities, which further increases the disconnect. We begin to believe the game is rigged; we don’t have a chance. When we believe that, we become more likely to behave in ways that make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rich and poor alike feel the division, the disconnect. The result is higher levels of depression, higher levels of consuming things that aren’t good for us: from drugs to alcohol to junk food to mindless TV shows to mindless consumer products. Our spirits are not whole when inequality is so massive – and our spirits long to be made whole.

Equality has benefits that show up all over. They show up, for example, on baseball teams.

“A well-controlled study of over 1,600 players in 29 teams over a nine-year period found that major league baseball teams with smaller income differences among players do significantly better than the more unequal teams.” (Wilkinson and Picket, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, 237).

When people feel like they stand on equal footing with their neighbors or teammates, there’s a cohesion that lifts spirits, heals wounds, and improves performance.

High levels of social inequality destroy the basic grounding for that community and connection. For the U.S. to make progress in rolling back the inequalities that have been growing since 1980, some combination of income caps, higher minimum wage, and a more progressive tax structure might be a good start.

Unitarian Universalists care about our world. And it’s clear now that “further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth. The issue is now community and how we relate to each other.” The issue is not only at the economic level but at the spirit level.

"Come spirit, come. Our heart’s control. Our spirits long to be made whole."

* * *
This is part 4 of 4 of "Income Inequality"
See also:
Part 1: Deconstructing the Mango Pop
Part 2: It's Getting Worse
Part 3: Inequality Harms Social Health

Inequality Harms Social Health

There are various ways to measure inequality: We can compare the top X% to the bottom Y% for any X and any Y. And all the measures very closely correspond with each other, so it doesn’t matter much which one we use. One very common measure is the ratio of the top 20 percent to the bottom 20 percent, so let’s use that one.

In Japan and four Scandinavian countries (combined), the top 20 percent bring about four times what the bottom 20 percent earn. The ratio is between 3.4 to 1 and 4.3 to 1. In the US, the ratio is 8.5 to 1 -- meaning the top 20 percent get eight-and-a half times what the bottom 20 percent get. Singapore's inequality is even higher: the ratio there is 9.7 to 1.

As a people of faith and compassion, we care about our world. We take in the wonder of this world, and we also take in the brokenness we see, and ask, “What happened?”

Let’s talk about social health. Let us define "social health" the way that researchers do, as an amalgam of ten factors. The lower the rates of:

• homicides
• obesity
• teenage births
• infant mortality
• imprisonment rates
• mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction),

and the higher the rates of:

• life expectancy
• children’s educational performance
• social mobility
• level of trust,

then the higher a nation's social health.

That's a pretty good way to define social health. You might think of some other factors that would be important. For instance, I might imagine that "high teacher salaries," "high number of bookstores per capita," or "low proportion of the population who are lawyers" might be part of a healthy society, but that might be controversial. People of all political persuasions will pretty much agree that homicides, obesity, teenage births, infant mortality, high imprison rates, and mental illness are bad, that high life expectancy, children's educational performance, social mobility, and level of trust are good, and that all these are relevant to the health of a society.

With a definition of social health thus nailed down, researchers have then found that a country’s wealth does not correlate with its social health. A country may be rich, medium, poor, or extremely poor (less than $9,000 per person per year). Except in extremely poor nations, more wealth has no effect on social health. Equality, however, does correlate with social health.

Countries with high inequality, whether rich or poor, have low social health. Countries with low inequality, whether rich or poor, have high social health.

The US is quite wealthy. Annual national income is around $38,000 per person. But on the measure of social health we’re doing worse than most countries that have only half that much per-person income. After meeting a certain minimum, more wealth doesn’t do us any good. Equality does. In statisticians' terms, it’s not the mean income that matters, it’s the standard deviation.

Remember that ratio of the top 20% to the bottom 20%. If that ratio, in a given country, is 4 or 5, then social health is going to be pretty good in that country. If that ratio is 8 or 9, then that country’s social health tends to be worse.

The US is wealthy and Portugal is poor -- yet they both have high ratios (8.5 and 8.0) and low social health. Norway, however, which has about as much per capita wealth as the US, has a low ratio (3.9) and high social health.

Social health means a better quality of life for all of us. All of us. Even the rich. The quality of life of the top 1% -- or, indeed, the top 20% -- cannot be improved with any more money. Their quality of life can, however, be improved with greater equality and thus greater social health in the society in which they find themselves.

“The evidence shows that reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us . . . this includes the better off.” (Wilkinson and Picket, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger)

* * *
This is part 3 of 4 of "Income Inequality"
See also:
Part 1: Deconstructing the Mango Pop
Part 2: It's Getting Worse
Part 4: Equality Is Good for Us

It's Getting Worse

Societally, when inequality becomes great, we lose the sense of community, lose the sense that we’re all in this together.

We’ve been seeing some pretty drastic changes in the last 35 years – since 1980. In 1980, eight percent of the nation’s total income was earned by the top one percent. The richest one percent of people got eight percent of the income. Eight times the average income would seem to be plenty. Who could want more than that? Surely that’s more than enough. But in 2011, the richest one percent brought home 20 percent of all income.

Starting in the early 20th century and continuing through the middle decades of the century, the trend in this country was toward steadily improving income equality. The gap between the top and the average of everybody else was shrinking. Then that trend reversed.

Our spirits long to be made whole, to be connected to each other on this wonderful world we share – to be connected with equals as equals. I don’t mean that we all have to have exactly the same income, but when the inequalities get this bad, it has a corrosive effect on the social contract, and on our souls as a people.

“Consider executive pay. During the 1950s and 60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker....In 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times. By 1990 it was 100 times. By 2007,...CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned.” (Robert Reich)

Even if you think inequality by itself isn’t our business, wouldn’t you want to know what’s going on to make it get so much worse?

Various studies in various ways show that when inequality is greater, violence goes up, trust goes down. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket write in their illuminating study, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger:

“At the pinnacle of human material and technical achievement, we find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, worried about how others see us, unsure of our friendships, driven to consume, and with little or no community life.”

All of those conditions of modern life -- anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community -- are connected with inequality – either as cause or as result, and often partly both. Wilkinson and Picket go on to write:

“The unease we feel about the loss of social values and the way we are drawn into the pursuit of material gain is often experienced as if it were a purely private ambivalence which cuts us off from others....As voters, we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.” (4)

When we're all in it for only ourselves, there's increased political polarization.

Gini Index is a measure of income inequality. When it goes up, political polarization goes up.

This is not a life of spiritual wholeness.

When you compare nation to nation, there’s no correlation between wealth and life expectancy or mortality. No correlation. Rich countries have about the same life expectancies and mortality rates as relatively poor countries, until you get into the really poor end of the spectrum. As long as a nation has per-person income above about $9,000 a year, further increases do nothing to increase life expectancy. That’s the nation-to-nation comparison.

But when we do a zip code to zip code comparison, we get a different picture. The poorer zip codes have higher mortality than the richer zip codes.

If you took several of the poorest zip codes, created a new island in the Pacific, put them all there, maintained their per-person incomes as they were, made a new island nation of them, they’d have decreased mortality. They’d be fine. But because they live near the wealthier areas, they perceive that difference. They see all around them the inescapable fact that they live in a society that is set up to work for others, but not for them. They are reminded daily that they are not in a society of mutual care.

And that wears them down much more than relative material deprivation.

* * *
This is part 2 of 4 of "Income Inequality"
See also:
Part 1: Deconstructing the Mango Pop
Part 3: Inequality Harms Social Health
Part 4: Equality Is Good for Us

Deconstructing the Mango Pop

"Come spirit come. Our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole."

The delegates at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly last June voted to select a new Study/Action issue. We select only one such issue every two years. The issue selected was “escalating inequality,” thereby urging UU congregations to make it topic of concern and engage it, reflect on it, learn about it, respond to it, comment on it, and take action—each in their own way. So let us reflect.

The great catcher for the New York Yankees, Yogi Bierra, got his start in the minor leagues. Once, the team bus was winding its way through the hinterlands looking for some small town where the team was due to play. Yogi was studying the road map. He looked at his watch. "We're lost," he announced. "But we're making good time."

Our economy for the last 75 years -- the recent recession notwithstanding – has been making good time. But we got lost. We took a wrong turn when we decided that the measure of how well we’re doing is our total wealth rather than how it is distributed. We take a wrong turn every time we look at our national mean per capita income, or mean per capita spending, or mean per capita productivity, but don’t look at the standard deviation, don't look at the growing gaps between us and how that gap corrodes our common life.

There is an argument that we should be concerned with poverty, but not with inequality. It’s our business as a society to make sure that everybody has enough, but not our business how much more than enough the rich have. Comedian Louis C.K.’s illustrates that point. In one episode of his show, Louis is making dinner. There’s an extra slice of mango, which he gives to his older daughter, Lilly, and goes back to making dinner. The younger daughter, Jane, appears and says, “Can I have a mango pop?”

Louis says, "There was only one." Jane says, "Why does she get one and not me? It’s not fair."

Louie squats down to be face-to-face with his daughter at her level. He says, “Listen. The only time you should look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough. You don’t look in your neighbor’s bowl to see if you have as much as them.”

That sounds wise and mature. Envy, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins, right?

Here’s the thing. What we want is to care and be cared for. We want to be in relations of mutual care. We weren’t built to keep caring and caring if others just take advantage of us, use us, and care nothing for us in return. That’s not healthy. We need to care – and we also need some level of mutuality and reciprocity. Reciprocation need not be exact – we don’t keep score – we just need some sign that caring about each other does go both ways.

When Jane asks for a mango pop because her sister has one, it’s not about the mango pop. That’s just a symbol to test whether she’s being held in a relation of mutual care. I don't see envy going on here -- though over time, if Jane is systematically excluded from the full participation in the family's circle of care, envy might emerge. In the moment, I simply see a little girl who needs affirmation that she counts. If she gets it when she needs it when she's young, as she gets older she won't need that affirmation as immediately. She'll begin to see that, as her father says (see the full clip, below), sometimes her sister is the luckier one, and sometimes she is, and over the longer term, it balances out.

Right now, Jane's developmental stage requires a more immediate "evening of the score." Our fairness needs gets looser as we mature, but we retain them in some form. We have a need to be in relations of mutual care. And when that need is not met, it makes anxiety, depression, and social alienation more likely.

This segment from Louis C.K.'s show has been getting attention on the blogosphere and in social media. Most of that attention has focused on what a great lesson Louis offers when he says "The only time you should look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough." And that is a lovely ideal. It's worth saying even though Jane is not at a developmental stage to hear it right now. (Which is OK -- if the lesson is repeated regularly, she'll remember it when she is ready to hear it -- though, really, how many of us ever become spiritually advanced enough to truly follow that lesson?) For me, though, the greater wisdom comes a moment later, when Louis accedes to Jane's plea for fairness, grants Jane some "calcium chocolate" -- and adds, thus reinforcing the very need for fairness Jane was expressing, "make sure your sister gets one, too." So now Lilly gets a mango pop AND a calcium chocolate while Jane gets only a calcium chocolate. But that's OK. Jane's happy with that because she doesn't need precise score-keeping. She just needs to know her Dad cares about her, too.

There’s a joke about a mother explaining to a little boy, "We are here to care for others."
The little boy says, "What are the others here for?"

The answer, of course, is, we’re all here to care for each other.

It does me good to care for others, and part of that caring is wanting them to also have the good of caring for others – which, for them, includes me. Systems of mutual care are good for all of us -- not just because we all get cared for, but because we all have opportunities for the joy of caring for others.

* * *
This is part 1 of 4 of "Income Inequality"
See also:
Part 2: It's Getting Worse
Part 3: Inequality Harms Social Health
Part 4: Equality Is Good for Us