You’re Going About It the Wrong Way

If you want people, especially the powers that be, to care about income inequality, then you are going to have to appeal to them differently.

Occasionally I’ll read about how inequality leads to higher stress, or poorer health or shorter lifespan, or some such outcome. But that presumes that the wealthy and the powers that be care about such things.

What if they don’t? I mean…

They don’t care when they outsource jobs, all the while citing shareholder value and competition.

They don’t care when they automate jobs in the name of profits and shareholder value.

They don’t care when they hold down wages to keep the profit margin “healthy”.

They certainly don’t care when they hand themselves bonuses when everyone else was suffering from wealth meltdown during the height of the Great Recession.

Having done these actions for a long time, they have inured themselves from the pain of others, all in the name of shareholder value. So talking about the deleterious health impacts and shortened lifespan is not going to register on their empathy detector. Their detector stopped working long time ago.

You need to talk about how inequality will impact them.