Nathaniel Whittemore

Once someone is typecast as a moral agent, i.e.

a powerful CEO making decisions affecting millions, they are perceived as less capable of suffering.

Some in the public simultaneously see themselves as moral patients or victims of the system.

Sarah Conrath of Indiana University wrote, What looks like an empathy crisis towards a specific person might actually reflect the public's moral judgments about who deserves empathy.

Now what makes this such a caustic environment for this right now is that we have both real economic trouble and inequality, as well as even more perceived inequality, with social media widening the gap and research suggesting that perceived inequality matters more than actual inequality.

Now, I don't think anyone will disagree that the material basis for economic grievance is real.

Home prices are now up 60% since 2019.

The median household must now spend 47.7% of income to own a median priced home, which is far above the 30% affordability threshold.

The median age of first-time homebuyers has risen to 40, and the top 1% of U.S.

households now own 31.7% of wealth, which is the widest gap since the Federal Reserve began collecting data in 1989.

And yet, research consistently shows that perceived inequality drives political radicalization more powerful than actual inequality.

The EU-funded DARE project, standing for Dialogue About Radicalization and Equality, studied radicalization across multiple countries and concluded, people who perceive themselves as unequal are more likely to become radicalized than people who live in the same conditions but who do not consider themselves as unequal.

A systematic review of 141 publications in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence found that perceived sociopolitical inequality matters significantly more than objective economic conditions when it comes to radicalization.

Another paper in the European Journal of Political Economy called Perceptions of Inequality found that citizens, quote, perceive economic inequality spectacularly wrong and that these misperceptions, not reality, correlate with demand for redistribution and class conflict.

A 2025 study demonstrated a causal chain.

Visual wealth exposure on social media increases upward social comparison, which increases relative deprivation, which increases hostility towards the rich, which provokes aggressive behavior.

And what's more, this causal chain is increasingly observable beyond just the anecdotal.

Another recent study published in Science shows that algorithmic content ranking could shift partisan political feelings by approximately two points on a feelings thermometer in a single week, comparable in size to three years of change in the US.

And in a study that's incredibly important for bringing it back to our example of AI,

A paper published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2022 found that it is not static poverty or even current inequality that motivates political violence, but projected economic decline.