Author: Keith Payne
Published year: 2017
Genres: Social Political Psychology
Status: Done
The Book in 3 Sentences
Inequity makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not.
When conditions make people feel poor, people become short-sighted as they can only focus on now and neglect the future.
Top Quotes
Airplanes are the physical embodiment of a status hierarchy.
Summary & Reflection
It’s amazing that just a single topic of inequity is fair enough to cover a whole bunch of people issues, as it affects the way we think, live and die.
As we all know, this world is quite a relative ecosystem, but how? or exactly what is that relative connection in-between everything? This book elaborates on this hard-to-explain issue from many aspects of our life. Maybe that touches human being’s sin, but inequity can really explain quite a lot.
Feeling poor matters, same as being poor. But why we can’t stop comparing with others? From the perspective of an economist, poverty is very different from economic inequity. Poverty is about what a person has or lacks, while inequity describes how money is distributed, it’s the distance between haves and have-nots. However, from the perspective of a psychologist, poverty and inequity are intertwined, because we perceive virtually everything relative to the context.
It affects our life choice
The inequity produces a wrong choice of life - “live fast die young”. People falling into this condition always have short vision, they only focus on now and neglect the future when conditions make them feel poor. If they can’t always get what they want, they will try to get what they need, even taking huge risks.
It divides our politics
The conservatives generally want to preserve tradition and the status quo, while liberals want to see changes in society.
It decides living longer or not
It shapes your religious pattern
It explains the racial problem between black and white
What about the corporate ladder?
I can’t simply summarize, I probably need to re-read and write the review chapter by chapter, to avoid missing any important points.