Please read this excellent essay which brings together many important and disturbing facts about inequality but concludes on an optimistic note.
One of our abiding modern myths, as Russell Brand and George Monbiot explained in a recent episode of the Trews is: “that if you’re rich, you deserve to be rich and that story means that if you’re not rich, you don’t deserve to be rich and that means everything’s the way that it should be and nothing should change.”
This is what Melvin Lerner described as the just-world hypothesis. We have an in-built bias which makes us view the world as fundamentally just and the basic reason it exists is to make us feel more secure in ourselves as we go about our daily lives. What this means however, is that we are prone to errors in judgement such as what Monbiot refers to as the self-attribution fallacy and what psychologists often refer to as the fundamental attribution error. In essence, we not only overestimate the extent to which our successes are down to ourselves alone – we…
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