Contra Pinker on Inequality

Inequality’s Psychological Toll

In an article for BigThink, famed psychologist and author Steven Pinker makes the following claim: “The starting point for understanding inequality in the context of human progress is to recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being.” He goes on to argue that not just income inequality, but all economic inequality “is not itself a dimension of human well-being”. Pinker’s assertion suggests that as long as absolute poverty is addressed, relative economic disparities between individuals in a society are irrelevant to their sense of well-being.

I emphatically disagree.

This perspective, while perhaps appealing from a purely rational standpoint, fails to account for the deep-seated psychological impact that perceived inequality has on human happiness and social cohesion. Equality, I argue, is indeed a fundamental component of well-being, and Pinker’s view overlooks crucial psychological and social realities of human nature.

The Frankfurt Defense

Pinker leans heavily on American philosopher Henry Frankfurt's 2015 book On Inequality. Pinker tells us:

Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty. If a person lives a long, healthy, pleasurable, and stimulating life, then how much money the Joneses earn, how big their house is, and how many cars they drive are morally irrelevant.

[...]

The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that.

I agree that thinking of wealth as a lump sum is a fallacious way to view modern economies, but I think Pinker is mistaken in thinking this is why most people believe that inequality is bad. Pinker is attempting to apply reason to their moral positions, when moral positions generally don’t come from reasoning. They come from an intuitive, felt sense of what is right and wrong.

People might feel compelled to justify their morals with logical arguments, even when those morals are fundamentally intuitive, so they attribute their moral beliefs to external sources like religion or attempt to ground them in logical arguments. Yet these explanations rarely reflect the true origins of their convictions. If scholars discovered the sixth¹ commandment had been mistranslated for millennia and actually read ‘Thou shalt kill,’ we wouldn’t see Christians abandoning their opposition to murder.

Some people may cite the lump sum fallacy as their justification, but this isn’t load-bearing for their belief; it’s a post hoc rationalization. These rationalizations are like heads of a hydra—cut off one head, and another appears. The absence of a strong rationale doesn’t make people easier to persuade; rather, the very fact that they didn’t reason themselves into a position suggests they can’t be reasoned out of it.

I predict that if you got a bunch of people together who oppose inequality and explained the lump sum fallacy to them, few or none would change their minds. I wonder if Pinker would take the other side of this bet.

By focusing on logical fallacies like the lump sum error, Pinker overlooks the deeper psychological underpinnings of why people oppose inequality—and why rational arguments are unlikely to change their minds.

The Heart Wants What It Wants (Even If It's Irrational)

Pinker, channeling Frankfurt, tells us that “what is objectionable is poverty.” But we’re descriptivists and consequentialists here: We don’t derive morality from logic; we observe what people object to and the consequences those objections track.

It’s a simple framework:

1. Humans eat strawberries, happiness results. Therefore eating strawberries is good.

2. Humans eat hemlock, unhappiness (and, you know, death) results. Therefore eating hemlock is bad.

Now, apply this to inequality:

1. Humans perceive inequality, unhappiness results. Therefore, inequality is bad. Its mere presence is morally objectionable because people morally object to it.

Pinker might wish for a world where inequality has no effect on happiness, but wishing doesn’t make it so. As he argued in his book The Blank Slate, humans aren’t born as empty vessels waiting to be programmed by society. We come with certain predispositions and tendencies hard-wired into our brains, and one of those tendencies appears to be a sensitivity to relative social status. In The Blank Slate, he wrote: “If people’s sense of well-being comes from an assessment of their social status, and social status is relative, then extreme inequality can make people on the lower rungs feel defeated, even if they are better off than most of humanity.” I stand by this. I wonder if he still does.

Inequality in the Lab

He cites the 2017 article “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies” by Starmans et al., which starts as follows:

We live in an age of inequality—or at least in an age of worrying about inequality. Pope Francis remarked that “inequality is the root of social evil”, while President Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time”. A recent Pew report found that Europeans and Americans judged inequality as posing the greatest threat to the world, beating religious and ethnic hatred, pollution, nuclear weapons, and diseases like AIDS.

[...]

The concern that people express about inequality is also found in controlled laboratory studies, which find that a desire for equal distributions of goods emerges early in human development and is apparent in many different cultures. As such, Frans de Waal nicely summarizes a broad consensus across many fields when he writes: “Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”

But, the authors say, a puzzle arises when we consider research in political psychology and behavioral economics, which shows that people prefer unequal societies.

The studies they mention generally follow the same format: a participant is to dole out some trivial reward—erasers in one, dog treats in another, $10 in the last—and is presented with people (or puppies) all starting in the same state: no erasers, no dog treats, and no Hamiltons. Then, the participant observes or is told that one entity does something more/better/nicer than the others. Does the participant award them equally or unequally?

Unsurprisingly, participants in these studies often distribute rewards unequally, a result that the researchers interpret as evidence that people are troubled by unfairness rather than inequality itself. However, applying this to real-world inequality is quite the jump. These scenarios, with their transparent actions and immediate consequences, bear little resemblance to the complex, historically-rooted, and often opaque inequalities that permeate our society. The researchers’ attempt to extrapolate their findings to broader attitudes towards real-world inequality is a wild overextension.

Imagine we have Alice, the daughter of billionaires. And we have Bob, who was born in a sewer in a town with no running water. Charlie is on the Harvard admissions committee and sees that Alice has a 4.0 GPA while Bob only has a 3.95. Pray tell, what exactly does a child handing out erasers teach us about this situation?

Pinker cites these studies to argue that people often conflate inequality with unfairness. While these concepts are indeed distinct in principle, their relationship in practice is inextricably intertwined. In highly controlled laboratory settings, where initial conditions are equal and all actions are transparent, people may accept minor inequalities resulting from observable differences in effort or achievement. However, this acceptance of small-scale, visibly justified inequalities doesn’t necessarily extend to the large-scale, historically rooted economic disparities we see in society. There is a chasm between accepting that one participant receives two stickers while another receives one in a controlled lab setting, and accepting the vast, multigenerational differences in wealth and opportunity that define modern inequality.

Yet somehow, the authors of the article manage to convince themselves and Pinker that “there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself.”

This is a great example of what I call “laboratory tunnel vision”. “No evidence” they say? How about walking outside the laboratory and talking to people? Or stay inside your lab and go on Twitter. Or simply introspect: how do you feel at your core about inequality? But no—if it didn’t happen in a lab, it counts as “no evidence” and might as well not exist.

The old man got better, but the treatment hadn’t gone through an RCT, so they had to put him down anyway.

Or, GO BACK AND READ YOUR INTRODUCTION about the Pope and Obama! Good Bayesians know that lots of people saying “X is true” is evidence that X is true. It’s not conclusive evidence, but it is evidence. People throughout history decrying inequality is evidence that inequality is bad. This persistence throughout history suggests our aversion to inequality is deep within the human psyche.

Inequality Outside the Lab

Let’s look at a real-world example of how our society feels about inequality, such as in the education system. Many education policies focus not on fairness but rather on reducing inequality.

It is broadly accepted that the more attention a student gets from an educator, the better off they are². Yet the students with the most potential—those who would benefit the most from this intensive attention—aren’t the ones receiving it. By the school’s standards, they don’t “need” help, so resources are directed elsewhere.

It’s the students with intellectual disabilities who get Individualized Education Plans and the most attention. This pattern is formalized in guidance from the California Teachers Association: students with intellectual disabilities have the fewest pupils per teacher, and the more severe the disability, the more attention they receive.

Why? Because society values equality. Our aversion to inequality drives us to allocate resources towards underperforming students and away from highly performing ones.

This focus on equality pushes us in the opposite direction of strategies aimed at maximizing the overall benefit. Instead of using resources to boost students with the greatest potential, we allocate them disproportionately to those who, by definition, can benefit the least. Giving tutelage to high-performing students might inspire them to fall in love with the sciences and possibly work on the next vaccine. The same attention to an intellectually disabled child might improve their abilities somewhat, but they’re unlikely to be the ones who will create scientific breakthroughs.

Resisting inequality is so deeply ingrained in us that rather than striving for complete fairness (equal resources for all) or maximizing societal benefits (those with the most potential get the most support), we put the most resources into those who can benefit the least.

Implications for Society

Pinker warns against passing bad policies that reduce inequality:

Indeed, a narrow focus on economic inequality can be destructive if it distracts us into [bringing those doing well down to the same level].

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When the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too.

I Agree! Inequality is an unavoidable part of society. But he conflates a positive statement with a normative statement. Saying that people innately don’t like inequality is a positive statement, a statement about what is true about the world. It makes no normative statements about how we should organize our societies.

Policies that increase inequality can be positive for everyone. This doesn’t mean all inequality is good, but it suggests that inequality can be morally justified in certain situations. Philosopher John Rawls, for example, argued that inequality is acceptable if it advantages those who are worse off. Indeed, all the following can be true:

1. Policies that lead to more inequality can be good, and make people happier overall.

2. Attempts to create more equality can make everyone worse off.

3. I would rather live in an unequal society than one where equality is the primary goal of government.

-and-

1. Equality IS a fundamental component of well-being.

The study “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies” (that we discussed above) also showed that people don’t choose a perfectly equal society as optimal. This doesn’t mean people are comfortable with extreme inequality. Rather, it suggests that people recognize the drawbacks of extreme equality. A perfectly equal society, like the one depicted in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” would likely be a dystopian nightmare devoid of liberty. People understand this, preferring some level of inequality to a rigid, enforced equality that would stifle personal liberty and diversity.

But the question of which policies are best is distinct, though related, to questions about human psychology. There is no law of the universe that says that human preferences align with rules that create the best society for them. Indeed, I believe that many good policies are counterintuitive to people.

Conclusion

Perhaps it’s a small disagreement I have with Pinker, but I think it’s important. Yes, absolute poverty is more directly harmful than relative poverty. Yes, some inequality is probably inevitable and even beneficial in a dynamic society. And yes, obsessing over inequality to the exclusion of other factors can lead us astray.

But none of that changes the fundamental psychological reality that humans are wired to care about relative status and to experience inequality as distressing. Ignoring this fact doesn’t make it go away; it just leaves us ill-equipped to deal with its consequences. Perhaps in a laboratory setting, we can show that most of this is about fairness, but in real life, the distinction is too blurred to separate.

Pinker is right that we shouldn’t let a fixation on inequality blind us to overall human progress. The world is, in many ways, better than it’s ever been. But he’s wrong to dismiss inequality as irrelevant to well-being. It’s deeply relevant, not because it “should” be, but because we’re human, and that’s just the way it is. That’s not a policy prescription or a moral judgment. It’s just a description of human psychology. Our job—as thinkers, as policymakers, as members of society—is to figure out how to work with humans as they are to create the best outcomes for everyone.

In his own field of linguistics, Pinker has argued eloquently against prescriptivism³—the idea that we can dictate how language “should” work, rather than describing how it actually does. Perhaps we need a similar shift in our thinking about inequality: less prescribing how humans should feel about it, and more describing and working with how they actually do.

1. Fifth if you’re Catholic or Lutheran.

2. For example, psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring improves student performance by two standard deviations compared to traditional classrooms. While the generalizability and exact magnitude are debatable, the broader principle that individualized attention benefits students is uncontroversial.

3. My favorite Steven Pinker book is actually The Sense of Style, which is on, among other things, descriptivism vs prescriptivism.