The Last Word On Nothing

I grew up in rural and small-town midwest.  Some people were richer than we were, some poorer.  And being normal, hierarchizing humans, we always knew who was rich and who was poor.  But regardless everybody went to the same grocery stores,  schools, churches, dime stores, movie theaters, summer concerts.  In other words, nobody was so poor or so rich that they didn’t belong to the same community.  We didn’t have equal amounts of money but nobody’s nose was rubbed in it.

I was about 25 when I first went to Washington, DC, a big city divided into neighborhoods with their own stores, churches, schools, etc.  I wanted to see the seat of our government, the shining white Capitol building and all the marble government buildings.  To get there, I drove through the city’s blocks of boarded-up houses and scary-looking neighborhoods, and then abruptly, a few streets along, there was the grand federal shininess.  I hadn’t seen such poorness so close to such richness before.  I hadn’t seen neighborhood changes that were so sudden before, so extreme.  No way those neighborhoods had anything in common.  It felt deeply troublesome.  I didn’t like it one bit.

And in my own Baltimore, now:  the other day, I drove from the enormous and impressive Johns Hopkins Hospital up Greenmount Avenue, through the boarded-up, corner-liquor-store neighborhoods you see on the television riot news and the cable movies about Baltimore; I locked the car doors.  Somewhere around 34^th Street, the neighborhood started looking like working-people, rowhouse Baltimore — a change but gradual.  Then turn left on 39^th Street, in the space of maybe two blocks, I was suddenly amongst the plutocrats: the lawns were suddenly bigger and greener and the houses turned to five-bedroom brick Georgians.  This still feels deeply troublesome and I still don’t like it one bit.  

Science doesn’t like it either.  It’s called wealth or income inequality: the gap between rich and poor has been getting larger for a long time all over the world and economists say that more and more poor people drag a country’s GDP down.  And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

I’m sure that’s true but I’m bothered more by what I see.  Science is bothered by that too.  I read about a social experiment run as an online cooperation game.  Around 1500 people were put in small virtual neighborhoods, everybody with about 5 neighbors each.  They were given tokens and a set of rules: if they gave each neighbor 50 tokens, then they and all their neighbors got 100 tokens; if they gave nothing, nobody got anything.

Then the researchers did some social tinkering.  In some neighborhoods, everyone got the same number of tokens.  In other neighborhoods, some people got more tokens and some fewer.  In still other neighborhoods, some people got almost no tokens and some a great deal.  In other words, different groups had different levels of wealth inequality.  Then they played the cooperation game, about ten rounds of it.  After some rounds, they were told how many tokens their neighbors accumulated; that is, everyone’s wealth became visible.  After other rounds, they were not told what their neighbors did and wealth became invisible.

I find this experimental setup a little confusing, what with the variables of visibility, changing inequality, and cooperativeness; and the actual experiment had even more bells and whistles, so I’m not guaranteeing that I’ve got this right.  But I’m right about the bottom line:  when wealth was visible, people stopped cooperating and the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.  Or as the researchers wrote, “conspicuous inequality breeds more inequality.”  So people stopped cooperating not because of the inequality per se, but when inequality was visible, conspicuous, obvious, when their noses were rubbed in it.  That’s a recipe for an unhappy city.  And it explains why I so dislike changes of neighborhood that are so abrupt, the inequality so obvious.

So hooray for science.  The problem has been outlined, defined, and tidily corraled.  And the solution?  The researchers punt.  Given how widespread are the information about wealth and the desire to accumulate and display it, the researchers say, hiding wealth “would not be easy to do.” That’s some high-level scientific problem-solving right  there.

So what should we do? Build walls around the rich neighborhoods so no one can see such huge inequality?  Would more gated communities promote more cooperation and social restfulness?  This is ugly; dumb, and stupid — make the problem go away by making it less visible? I still don’t like it one bit.  Come the revolution, I’m going to hit the reset button and the rich won’t be filthy rich and the poor won’t be dirt-poor and they’ll be able to look at each other and still cooperate.  Meanwhile I have to stop thinking about it.  But to do that, I’ll also have to stop turning left on 39^th Street.

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photo:  Le Rétroviseur