To begin, I think I need to defend my choice of question.

Why not ask, How can a country with vast Croesus-like wealth contain poor people? Thats a reasonable question, but I dont think responding to it will help me or anyone else understand why some people are so passionate in their hostility to increasing the minimum wage. To explain my thinking, Ill need to jump into the gangly, ungainly body of my essay. It seems fairly clear to me that people who oppose an increase in the minimum wage do so because they think it serves a social function. In the minds of a few people, low wages are supposed to be coercive: they are supposed to bully you into working harder and striving for better circumstances. More than a few of my friends, family, and acquaintances agree with Representative Paul Ryans logic that we dont want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives. In this modelthe Work B**ch! understanding of the labor marketpoor people are poor because they are shiftless, complacent and lazy. If they were driven, energetic, and ambitious they would not be poor. Theres a problem with this type of thinking. Poor people often work very hard. The minimum wage is currently set at $7.25 per hour. Even working full-time, a minimum wage worker with children is still living below the federal poverty line. I know some will protest that minimum wage jobs of the sort Im describing arent strenuous or taxing and, as a consequence, dont deserve higher compensation, but the reality is different. I worked for a relatively brief time in the fast-food industry (concocting the sugary toxin called cherry limeade) and came to appreciate a few of the physical stresses it imposes on its servitors; I could never really appreciate the mental and emotional toll these jobs take on those who perform them. I never encountered financial insecurity as I made chili cheese coneys and never learned what it feels like to have dependents relying on an uncertain income. Minimum wage workers, far from being the complacent hammock hunters presented in market-centric rhetoric, cope with constant stresses that come with financial insecurity, doing so while performing jobs that are some of the most demanding in our economy. They often spend long hours standing; doing strenuous or wearying physical labor, and interacting with a public that neither values nor acknowledges their work. They prepare the food we eat, care for our children, clean our hotel rooms, and tend to our old or sick relatives. They do all this without the health coverage, retirement plans, paid sick or maternity leave, or other benefits commonly meted out to bourgeois workers. Poor people work damn hard. That paragraph sounds like leftist treacle, but its substantiated by social scientific research. Timothy Smeedings Poor People in Rich Nations: The United Nations in Comparative Perspective, (published in the winter 2006 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives), found that In almost every case, poor Americans work much longer hours than do most any other nations workers. Poor American single parents average over 1,000 hours per year. This, Smeeding found, was almost twice as much as the poor of seven other nations he examined. My personal experiences, limited as they may be, corroborate these findings. I worked beside a man who spent eight hours every daya third of his lifestationed above a fryer and a grill plate. He was the most proficient fry cook Ive ever seen, unflappable under strains that would have easily overcome me. And when he finished his shift at Americas Drive-in, he removed his greasesmeared apron and put on another: this time for Pizza Hut. He worked a second shift there, presumably spending more precious, irrecoverable hours in a confined, stressful, and hot env ironment. I dont know what happened to him. Perhaps he is now a participant in our ownership society. Somehow, I doubt it. Poverty does not result from an absence of work ethic; it results from an absence of money. If Americas poor are workingand working hardwhy arent they entering the middle class? Smeeding found that Americas poor were more likely to remain poor than their counterparts in other countries. Insecurity, hunger, and toil, far from incentivizing them, function as millstones around their necks, enervating them and spoiling their escape from poverty. Poverty does this in a number of ways: low-wage jobs pay workers so little they cannot accumulate enough money to transition into better circumstances; they control workers schedules, making it hard for them to apply for other jobs, take second jobs, or arrange for child care; and they break the bodies of the workers who perform them. Its not easy to be a maid, waitress, house-cleaner, or a burger flipper though its comforting for those of us who spend our days staring into the lambent glow of computer monitors to think it is.

Is it so surprising that poverty, far from erasing, actually perpetuates and immortalizes itself? I do not believe people are as guileless as they seem. I do not believe we actually expect individual efforts to be as transformative as we say. I believe, instead, that we live in a culture that abets an ingrained human longing for status and domination. Sadly, I have come to feel that we do not want to eliminate the poverty around us. For us, as a society and as individuals, the existence of poor people is soothing and indispensable. A status-conscious society like ours demands an inert, quiescentand permanent underclass. The next section of my essay may sound accusatory. I dont apologize for this, but would like to leaven my remarks somewhat by noting that I indict myself when I indict everyone around else. I have visited Chipotle and squandered $4.50 on a Sauza margarita when I could have deposited that money in the always-empty tip jar next to the shredded lettuce. Ive seen homeless people and pretended not to notice them. I am the offspring and product of our society, as much as anyone reading this. Lets start from a foundational observation: humans hunger for status and reputation. These instincts seem to inhere in our species. Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have found that humans weigh status, reputation, and money in similar ways. Caroline Zink, a postdoctoral fellow at NIMH, observed: both behaviorally and in the brain, people place an importance on social statusit's hugely influential even [when we're not] in direct competition with someone else. In discussing the games she and her fellow researchers used to arrive at their results, she added: We found that the brain reacts very strongly to the other players and specifically t he status of the other players. We derive satisfaction from accruing social standing, and this impulse finds gratification in social hierarchies. Equality is anathema to us because it dissolves hierarchies and removes the opportunity for gratification that social standing provides. Weve seen this play out in our contemporary politics. According to the General Social Survey, support for redistributive policies has plunged during the currentand ongoingrecession. The survey asked respondents whether government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. Between 2008 and 2010, agreement with this statement plummeted. And its not plutocrats alone answering these surveys. According to Princetons Ilyana Kuziemko and Harvard Business Schools Michael I. Norton, declines in support for redistribution were if anything slightly larger among minorities, and Americans who self-identify as having below average income show the same decrease in support for redistribution as wealthier Americans. Kuziemko and Norton argue that people are terrified of being near or at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This illogical terror drives people near the bottom to oppose redistribution because it might allow their social inferiors to become their equals or, worse yet, their superiors. The researchers asked Americans whether they would support an increase in the minimum wage and found that respondents making below the minimum wage strongly supported an increase and that respondents making much more than $7.25 per hour also favored an increase. In addition, they found that respondents making slightly more than the minimum wage were hostile to increasing it. Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25 were, in their experiments, absolutely unreceptive to any increases in the minimum wage. Taken together, these experiments tell us much about our species. We seek status and turn it into a commodity. And just as all commodities rely on scarcity for their value, so too does social status; the more equal the society, the less opportunities we have to gratify our hunger for station and distinction. This all sounds a little Hobbesian ("In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory) but societies can try to mitigate the worst effects of status seeking. They can try to be less status-conscious and buoyantly inegalitarian. American society does not try. This is a place so devoted to poverty, it has actually elevated it to a social good; poverty, after all, motivates us not to be poor. The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga once observed, When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years. You think about status. You think about where you

are in relation to your peers. This is surely true of people in most societies but the contemporary United States seems to have a unique culture. Indeed, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out: In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality. When we wake up, we begin thinking about status. We think about this all day, every day. Wilkinson and Pickett argue that our hunger for status is making us ill. Now that we can compare robust data for different countries, we can see not only what we knew intuitivelythat inequality is divisive and socially corrosivebut that it also damages the individual psyche, they write. But thats not what Im writing about. Im trying to answer the question of why Americans dont want their fellows to be made unpoor. The answer is that our society encourages a brute, primitive drive for status seeking. We cannot gratify this drive without poor people. They function as silent, permanent mirrors that bolster and sustain our imagined selves. Thats quite a claim, I know. And because Im writing a silly essay for Facebook its supported by some admittedly sloppy argumentation. Its a rough, unshaped outline of thesis, but that doesnt mean its wrong. What I want my silly essay to do is make people who oppose the minimum wage think about why they find a higher wage so intolerable. I dont think it's concern for the economy, and I dont think it's a misguided form of altruism. I think many people who oppose the minimum wage do so because they psychologically benefit from the existence of people who are poorer than they are. They are committed to a system that hurts everyone who participates in it, even as it convinces them that it is the best and only way to live. I want this silly essay to get people to think about povertys real function in our society.