How the wealth gap is reshaping politics | Xochitl Gonzalez

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. About a year and a half ago, writer and inequality expert Xochitl Gonzalez went to buy a cup of coffee and her card was declined. She had other cards on her and other accounts. She was by then a New York Times bestselling author and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. But at that moment, none of that registered. Her chest tightened, her cortisol spiked, and she walked out of the place and burst into tears. Because the panic she felt wasn't about that day. It was about a childhood spent with very little.

0:44Scientists have found that your social class of origin plays nearly as large a role in shaping your identity as your race, gender, or sexuality. In this talk, Sochiel digs into the science of social class. how growing up with financial security or without it shapes who we become, how we think, and even how we see politics. It's one of the least discussed forces in American life, she says, and one of the most powerful. Kids as young as seven can, with outrageous accuracy, correctly identify somebody else's social class just by looking at a photo. Sochiel makes the case that class isn't just personal, it's civic, and that the growing distance between how different Americans live has become a threat to democracy itself.

1:30Closing that gap starts not with policy alone, but with something more human, actually knowing the people whose lives look nothing like our own. That's coming up right after a short break.

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4:18And now, our TED Talk of the day. I'm here to tell you a story about getting a cup of coffee. Or I should say, attempting to get a cup of coffee, because when I went to pay for it, I couldn't. This is about a year and a half ago, and there was nothing wrong with my card's chip. The store's reader was fine. The problem was with my bank account. It was empty. Now, a rational person would have just taken out another card, but in that moment, there was nothing rational about me. My chest tightened, my jaw clenched, my cortisol spiked. I lost all awareness of a purse with a wallet and other pieces of plastic inside of it, and instead I just apologized profusely walked out the door and burst into tears.

5:04Dramatic, a tad, but my reaction had very little to do with who I am in this moment, a New York Times best-selling author, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a homeowner, and it had everything to do with who I once was, a working-class girl from South Brooklyn who didn't grow up with much. Despite our nation's reputation as a land of opportunity, The truth is upward social mobility in America is actually quite arduous, and less than 10 % of people that start out like me on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder ever managed to make it to the top. And somehow, I did. So while it was a temporary problem paying for the coffee that day, you know, I moved things around, other accounts, that panic in my body was known from before.

5:51From 2009, when I was struggling to get my small business through the Great Recession. from 1998 when I was working my way through college and there was no other account to pull from or parent or relative to call, all the other times that I was living like so many of my fellow Americans from paycheck to paycheck. It's no secret that we are living in a time of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, but too often it's talked about with the clinical distance of other people's problems, an inconvenience that we wish somebody would do something about. And far less discussed is the shared, urgent threat that this poses to our democracy.

6:34And if we don't start talking about income inequality like the civic issue it needs to be, we will surely slide further towards autocracy than we already have. Maybe irrevocably so. Part of the problem is, even though we're a capitalistic society, We fascinatingly hate talking about money. Like a lot of you, I have an Oura ring, and the day of the coffee incident, it told me I'd experienced an unusual amount of stress that day, and it gave me a few reasons, work, bad sleep, and maybe it's because Oura is from Finland, but money wasn't an option, which is unfortunate because in America, financial anxiety is linked to things like hypertension, depression, and even reduced lifespan.

7:23But it all got me thinking, well, if money can impact our health, how does having money or not having money impact our behavior and our thoughts? How does our socioeconomic situation impact the way we see politics and the way we vote? And for the last year, I have been on a deep dive into the sociology and psychology of social class. and what I've discovered may surprise you. We're accustomed to thinking about our social class as little more than a matter of what's in our bank account, if you own a home or if you rent. But scientists have found that your social class of origin plays nearly as large a role in shaping your identity as your race, gender, or sexuality.

8:05And that children become aware of their own social class standing just a little later than they become aware of their race and gender. In fact, kids as young as seven can, with outrageous accuracy, correctly identify somebody else's social class just by looking at a photo. Your social class doesn't just impact who you are. It impacts the way you think. It's one of the least discussed topics in America, and yet it's silently at play in so many aspects of our society. Growing up with resources or growing up in scarcity affects the way you see the world, your place in it, how you make decisions and how you see big abstract things like the role of government or the very idea of democracy itself.

8:50See, the well-resourced child is born into a place of security. And with their basic needs having been met, their parents can set out to getting them to thrive. And in America, that often means distinguishing oneself as an individual. Exhibiting agency, the choices one makes about extracurriculars, what college you go to, your career, and eventually your political party affiliation, these aren't just matters of selection. They are statements of identity and essentially the way you present yourself to the world. So if you want to think about a typical middle-class hero, it would be Neo from The Matrix.

9:26He's just toiling away in that office job, and then his hero's journey begins when he makes a choice. Will it be the red pill or the blue pill? Now, for the child born into scarcity, which is almost 40 % of children in America today, things are far more precarious. Security is not guaranteed. The world feels beyond your control because at any moment something could present itself, a landlord, an unexpected medical bill that throws everything into a tailspin. And so security is found in groups and conformity is encouraged. And expressing your own sense of agency is less important than staying true to who you are in the face of constant adversity.

10:06Think about the cop John McLean in the blockbuster hit Die Hard. He doesn't show up to that Christmas party looking for trouble, but he's going to fight for who he loves, his wife, and what he took a vow to defend, the law. These two groups don't just think differently, they rarely converge, living and working and worshiping separate from each other, essentially only socializing with people of very similar circumstances. And so individual worldviews convene and hearted into class cultures, cultures with very different ideas of what good governance and leadership even looks like. Now, for generations, America's humble middle class existed between these two groups, like cartilage between bone.

10:49But as the top 1 % of households has accrued the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90 % combined, that cartilage has grown thin. And essentially, our middle class has been replaced by a comfort class. The children of the upper class who on paper may not be rich, but who live with the security of a familial safety net. Often working the kind of mid-pay, high-prestige jobs that influence a lot of American culture and policy. And the result is almost a class apartheid, where a small group of people with generational wealth control a society whose culture they don't fully understand. Our politicians, many of which are millionaires, their staffers and consultants, all come from a place where money has afforded them a sense of agency and control, such that they have a tendency to overestimate their influence on politics and the power of their own supporters' votes.

11:47The donor class, unfamiliar with that physiological panic that need can induce, tend to vote on social issues and look to support candidates who mirror their values. But that need is still very, very real. An anecdote. In college, I was paired with a lovely roommate from an upper-middle-class background, and one night I decided to splurge and go and join her for an Italian meal out, carefully packing up my leftovers. But the next day, when I went to the fridge, my eggplant parm was gone, the victim of my roommate's late-night drunchie. I flew into a rage, and my poor, bewildered roommate could not understand.

12:29But to her, it was an inconsiderate snack. And to me, it was my next meal that I thought I'd already paid for. And now I was left to stretch my dollar another day. It's easy to judge people for voting based on the price of eggs when you are certain where your next meal is coming from. But for the financially struggling in America, politics, let alone democracy, can seem a secondary concern and sometimes just an irrelevant one, which is why you see so many lower-income Americans not participating in democracy in the first place. And equally concerning is that often when they do, they tend to support authoritarian-leaning figures.

13:07From Hungary to Turkey, Senegal to the Philippines, researchers have found a consistent correlation between economic inequality, the decline of democracy, and the rise of strongmen leaders. The kinds of people that promise to fix working people's problems, often by sowing divisions and blaming an other, which is a very reliable tactic because precarity also correlates to increases of racism and xenophobia. There's still yet another group that tends to emerge in these historic moments of deep economic disparity, and they too see great benefit in autocracy and patronage and all sorts of other undemocratic practices.

13:52In the Gilded Age, we call them robber barons. In post-Soviet Russia, we call them oligarchs. Today, we call them billionaires, able to live above the law, exchanging donations for business monopolies and government contracts for very different reasons than the financially struggling. They see great benefit in autocracy. Economic inequality is like the heart disease of democracy, so often ignored until it's too late, a threat to our very way of life. To fix it, we've got to stop distancing from each other and from the issue. We need to support candidates that will buttress the working and middle class, but we also need to know each other, to have empathy outside of our backyard, to cultivate compassion beyond our socioeconomic bracket, because it's so easy to rail online at strangers and much harder to ignore the problems of our friends and neighbors.

14:48Thank you.

15:16Thank you. Sonsika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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