Keith Payne - The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

T he flight from Washington, D.C., to Jacksonville, Florida, takes two hours, more than enough time to change a life. No one knows why Joseph Sharkey stood up on that flight, turned around, and placed the passenger seated behind him in coach in a headlock. Maybe the passenger was talking too loud. Maybe he was bumping the back of the seat with his foot. According to witnesses, the passenger did nothing to provoke the attack. The ruckus brought the flight crew scrambling to break it up. Sharkey, undeterred, kneed a flight attendant in the groin. He then walked to the emergency exit door and tried to open it in midflight. The flight attendant and several passengers finally managed to overwhelm him and placed him in plastic handcuffs. He was arrested when the plane touched down, and faced up to twenty years in prison.

Bad behavior in first class has a different flavor. In 2009 Ivana Trump was on a flight from Palm Beach to New York when some children seated nearby started making noise. She put on headphones to drown out the commotion, but then a crying baby pushed her too far. She flew into a rage, calling the children little fuckers as officers escorted her off the plane.

Airplanes are microcosms of our world and the everyday anxieties we encounter there. We are thrown together with hundreds of strangers, forced into a level of intimacy ordinarily reserved for loved ones or professional colleagues. We are crammed into a narrow metal tube, triggering our evolved fear of enclosed spaces. Once the plane is aloft, there is no escape, and time seems to drag on without end. We find ourselves thousands of feet in the air, triggering our evolved fear of heights. The aircraft rumbles and shakes just enough to never let us forget that we are stranded in the air with nothing, so far as we can see, holding us up. So we sit, lacking control over when we depart and when we arrive, and when we can use our approved electronic devices. We wait, unsure of who is on board with us, how well the flight is going, or who owns the armrest. All the while, we are reminded of our mortality. What experience could be more existential?

But even more than the anxieties they provoke, there is another aspect to airplanes that makes them a notable microcosm of life. Airplanes are the physical embodiment of a status hierarchy. They are a social ladder made of aluminum and upholstery in which the rungs are represented by rows, by boarding groups, and by seating classes.

Picturing the seating plan of a plane in these terms helps explain why people attack strangers and curse at children in the strange confines of the friendly skies. A recent study led by psychologists Katherine DeCelles and Michael Norton showed that the status hierarchy of air travel is a dramatic, if hidden, force on our behavior while flying. The researchers analyzed data from millions of flights to identify what factors predicted the incidence of air rage. First they compared flights that had a first-class section to those that did not. They reasoned that if status inequalities were driving bad behavior, then we should see more air rage on flights that have a first-class cabin than those that dont. As they discovered, the odds of an air rage incident were almost four times higher in the coach section of a plane with a first-class cabin than in a plane that did not have one. Other factors mattered, too, like flight delays. But the presence of a first-class section raised the chances of a disturbance by the same amount as a nine-and-a-half-hour delay.

To test the idea another way, the researchers looked at how the boarding process highlights status differences. Most planes with a first-class cabin board at the front, which forces the coach passengers to trudge down the aisle, dragging their baggage past the well-heeled and the already comfortably seated. But about 15 percent of flights board in the middle or at the back of the plane, which spares the coach passengers this gauntlet. As predicted, air rage was about twice as likely on flights that boarded at the front, raising the chances of an incident by the same amount as waiting out a six-hour delay.

This air rage study is revealing, but not just because it illustrates how inequality drives wedges between the haves and the have-nots. What makes it fascinating to me is that incidents of rage take place even when there are no true have-nots on a flight. Since an average economy-class ticket costs several hundred dollars, few genuinely poor people can afford to travel on a modern commercial airplane. Yet even relative differences among the respectable middle-class people flying coach can create conflict and chaos. In fact, the chaos is not limited to coach: First-class flyers in the study were several times more likely to erupt in air rage when they were brought up close and personal with the rabble on front-loading planes. As Ivana Trumps behavior can attest, when the level of inequality becomes too large to ignore, everyone starts acting strange.

But they do not act strange in just any old way. Inequality affects our actions and our feelings in the same systematic, predictable fashion again and again. It makes us shortsighted and prone to risky behavior, willing to sacrifice a secure future for immediate gratification. It makes us more inclined to make self-defeating decisions. It makes us believe weird things, superstitiously clinging to the world as we want it to be rather than as it is. Inequality divides us, cleaving us into camps not only of income but also of ideology and race, eroding our trust in one another. It generates stress and makes us all less healthy and less happy.

Picture a neighborhood full of people like the ones Ive described above: shortsighted, irresponsible people making bad choices; mistrustful people segregated by race and by ideology; superstitious people who wont listen to reason; people who turn to self-destructive habits as they cope with the stress and anxieties of their daily lives. These are the classic tropes of poverty and could serve as a stereotypical description of the population of any poor inner-city neighborhood or depressed rural trailer park. But as we will see in the chapters ahead, inequality can produce these tendencies even among the middle class and wealthy individuals.