Includes bibliographical references and index.

Lunch lady economics: why feeling poor hurts like being poor -- Relatively easy: why we can't stop comparing ourselves to others -- Poor logic: inequality has a logic of its own -- The right, the left, and the ladder: how inequality divides our politics -- Long lives and tall tombstones: inequality is a matter of life and death -- God, conspiracies, and the language of the angels: why people believe what they need to believe -- Inequality in black and white: the dangerous dance of racial and economic inequality -- The corporate ladder: why fair pay signals fair play -- The art of living vertically: flatter ladders, comparing with care, and the things that matter most.

"A timely examination by a leading social scientist of the physical, psychological, and moral effects of inequality. Today's inequality is on a scale that none of us has seen in our lifetimes, yet this disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. While conservatives look at poverty and see its roots in personal failures and liberals attribute it to a lack of opportunity, what both sides miss is that the psychology of inequality causes both poor opportunities and personal failures. Understanding how and why this occurs is our best chance at addressing it effectively. In The Broken Ladder psychologist Keith Payne examines for how inequality influences us as individuals, affecting our brains, our bodies, and our values. Inequality divides us not just economically, but has profound consequences on how we think, how our cardiovascular systems respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and how we view moral ideas like justice and fairness. Experiments in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics have not only revealed important new insights on how inequality changes people in predictable ways, but have provided a corrective to our flawed way of viewing poverty as the result of individual character failings. The central argument of this book is that among modern, developed societies, economic inequality is not primarily about money, but rather about relative status: where we stand in relation to other people. Regardless of their average income, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social problems we associate with poverty, including lower average life expectancies, serious health issues, mental illness, and crime"--From publisher.