Critic’s Notebook: How Inequality Became a Hot Topic in Economics

Yes, most of us agree that inequality is a problem — even if we can’t agree on what that actually means and what to do about it. Incomes have stagnated, except for the very rich, whose incomes have more than quadrupled since 1980. The left calls for higher taxes and solidarity; the right calls for slashed taxes and closed borders. Centrists try to tiptoe their way between the two poles, to nobody else’s satisfaction. The epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett consider inequality a “social poison” that erodes the very things we need — empathy, a sense of security, trust in one another — to combat inequality in the first place.

Even the response to Deaton’s own research has fractured along ideological lines. He notes how officials in the Trump administration used deaths of despair as an argument against lockdowns during the pandemic, suggesting that suicides would increase if people were forced to stay at home. Deaton says that the data doesn’t support this contention, just as he rejects claims by conservatives like Charles Murray, who insist that the problem isn’t a surfeit of despair but a lack of industriousness. Deaton, perhaps in a nod to some of his critics, also pulls back from his original focus on white men. In his new book, he speaks more generally about despair among the less educated, pointedly discussing the persistence of economic disparities between Black and white Americans.

As I was reading “Economics in America,” I recalled the argument briefly fashionable around the time of the 2016 election that “economic anxiety” among white Americans was driving support for Donald Trump. A year later, “The Broken Ladder,” by the psychologist Keith Payne, conceded that white Americans with a high-school degree continued to fare better economically than similarly educated Black Americans, but a “history of privilege” meant that working-class white people were “dying of violated expectations.” Such observations emphasized our shared vulnerabilities, though like so much in our zero-sum political discourse, the subject of inequality also got warped and weaponized. Trump spoke the language of populism, promising to deliver for the little guy while pushing through policies that favored the richest.

But inequality hurts the richest, too — at least that’s what the philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues in “Limitarianism,” a book coming out early next year. She talks to wealthy people who are exhausted by “the unending rat race provoked by status goods.” Extreme wealth isn’t just socially and ecologically destructive; it can be psychologically corrosive, as those who have it try to rationalize disparities to themselves.

Some become “class traitors,” giving away their riches and demanding to be taxed; others double down, insisting that they are merely reaping their just rewards. Robeyns allows that worrying about the emotional health of the 1 percent might be a hard sell, but, she points out, more money means more power, so whatever depletes the stores of empathy and compassion of the most powerful has implications for us all.