How the wealth gap is reshaping politics | Xochitl Gonzalez

Elise Hu (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume.

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.

Xochitl Gonzalez (0:44)

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.

Elise Hu (0:54)

In this talk, Xochitl 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.

Xochitl Gonzalez (1:11)

Kids as young as seven can, with outrageous accuracy, correctly identify somebody else's social class just by looking at a photo.

Elise Hu (1:20)

Xochitl 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. Closing 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.

And now our TED Talk of the day.

Xochitl Gonzalez (1:54)

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.

Dramatic, a tad. But my reaction had very little to do with who I am in this moment, a New York Times bestselling 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 percent 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. From 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. And 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 aura 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 aura 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. But 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. And 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.