How Inequality Hurts All American Teenagers (with Emi Nietfeld)

There are no winners in this competition.

Emi Nietfeld is the author of Acceptance, a widely-praised memoir about her path from a troubled childhood to a Harvard education and the attainment of what seems to be the 21^st-century American Dream: a career as a software engineer at Google and Facebook. She left that career to become a journalist focusing on economic and family issues.

Emi recently published an article in Slate which I found compelling and important. The article’s subhead, “How inequality messes with teenagers’ minds,” is more descriptive than the headline itself. (Writers don’t usually choose our headlines.)  

In the article, Emi writes of

“… (a) growing body of evidence, summarized this month in a Lancet report, suggesting that inequality harms us psychologically and physically, no matter our tax bracket or the size of our house.”

She adds that inequality “makes status hypersalient, weakens social ties, and encourages us to choose prestige over purpose,” and that while experts “have long recognized a relationship between poverty and illness,” we now know that “inequality itself seems to contribute to negative outcomes—for rich and poor alike.”

Those outcomes can be fatal.

I asked Emi to come on The Zero Hour and discuss her work, and our conversation is in the video above. She talked about her own tumultuous childhood and adolescence, which included time in foster care and homeless, and about the different kinds of stressors she saw among her wealthier peers when she moved into high-status schools as a teen.

Please check out the video and article.

(Emi’s article was supported the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit journalism organization whose founders include the late Barbara Ehrenreich.)