It's possible that someone will find this very depressing. But come on – didn't most readers actually suspect this was the case before it all got quantified? The extremes of inequality might be a bit of a surprise, but in a world in which (as Kaufman points out) the richest eight people own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion, give or take a million here and there, this can't be too unexpected. What studies like these do is to shed light on that suspicion, and make it something people can point to as at least potentially true.
I find this quite heartening. As the data builds up, it gives more heft to a different conversation than the one about luck and talent. It lets people talk more intelligently about fairness, equality, and opportunity - and happiness.
When they're built on ideas about success, American theories of happiness start with an assumption: that the US is a working meritocracy. This is an old assumption, as deeply embedded in certain ways of thinking about American identity as it is in ideas about happiness. Show a little gumption and it will be rewarded, Ralph Waldo Emerson announced in 1841:
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.
Emerson wasn't the first or the last to express this. Setting Emerson next to Kaufman here is important because there's a conflict that suddenly comes into focus, between the overt, proudly-proclaimed myth of meritocracy, and a subtler underlying disquiet about it – Is this really how it works? Is life really fair? And when uneasy feelings come into conflict with a national mythical ethos, the myth wins out. But setting myth against research makes it a cleaner fight.
So for generations, Americans by the millions (if I had to guess) have been living unhappily and feeling like failures while blaming themselves, when it's entirely possible that what often gets dismissed as bitter rationalization may actually be true. (Like Ripley, and her knack for showing up where the aliens are, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can be really detrimental to one's professional prospects.[1]) So this is a bit of a win for the underdogs among us. I'm not suggesting reparations here, but at least they deserve a little vindication.
But there is another point to remember here. In the US, an economic system that promotes inequality thrives because people believe, or imagine, or like to imagine, that it's a meritocracy: people who do well do well because they deserve it.
But if we were all a little more modest about success and its relationship to luck, we could begin heading toward a better world for everyone. Those physicists who teamed up with the economist did another simulation, this time looking at what happens when scientific research gets funded in more and less equal ways. If groups that fund research want to get more significant results out of their investments, then distributing money randomly among scientists would be more effective than some of the models at work today. The worst results came when people who were already receiving healthy funding were given even more. What produced the best results? Funding everyone evenly.
So at least hypothetically, when it comes to science, being modest about merit and treating all comers equally turns out to be better for everyone.
And we can take this a step further. As Wilkinson and Pickett argue in The Spirit Level, equalitarian societies – societies in which there is relatively little distance between the richest and the poorest – are happier than societies with great inequality.[2] This isn't just because there are fewer poor people, they explain. Even the wealthy are happier, even if they have less money, when the people around them are more equal. In those societies, social problems are alleviated, segregation reduced, and, as a result, the level of general social disconnection goes down, leaving everyone better off.
The notion that success leads to happiness still works pretty well, but its concomitant idea, that we earn happiness through success, falls further and further out of date. It seems that each generation has its own way of questioning the value of the American meritocracy. But now there's good reason to begin talking about – and wondering about – its very existence.
[1] Yes, Ripley does eventually become something like a corporate consultant about the aliens, but I don't think this is where she wanted her career to go.
[2] Wilkinson, Richard and Kate Pickett
2010 The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
