Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on August 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next six weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.
Kelsey Piper continues this series by answering a question I posed to her some weeks ago: How do you live with people who are better than you? Inequality is a fact of life. Eradicating inequality that stems from injustice is a big part of the work of liberalism. But what about all the other kinds of inequalities that arise from ordinary differences? Some people really are just better singers, athletes, writers, friends, and businessmen. What, if anything, does liberalism have to say about the zero-sum contests that occupy so much of our lives?
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– Jerusalem Demsas
When I teach second graders about the Declaration of Independence, they often object to the claim that all people are created equal.
No, they’ll point out, some people are just better — at sports, at school, at games, you name it. I can usually quiet their objections by pointing out that different people are good at different things: some are good at math, some at reading, some at drawing. This is an incomplete reassurance, and the second graders know it. Some people are kind of better at everything.
A stronger response is to just keep reading the rest of the sentence. The founders did not claim that we’re all equal in abilities, but that we were created equal in worth — in our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Our equal worth, in other words, is not the sum of our very unequal abilities.
Like everything else declared “self-evident” in the most radical political document of all time, this is far from self-evident — and even less self-evident is what it means. Equal protection under the law is necessary but not sufficient for a good society. Should we embrace the inequalities that arise from unequal abilities, or try to tamp them down? If income inequality is undesirable, should all jobs pay the same? Should we cancel educational programs that magnify the disparities between good and bad students?
I don’t think our society likes these questions. We shy away from answering them directly, and occasionally we back into absurd answers that no one would endorse directly. But we would probably be served by having a second grader’s willingness to admit the problem squarely. We need to find a way to build an egalitarian society that separates unjust inequalities from inevitable ones — and makes productive use of the latter.
We used to be less squeamish about this conversation. During the 1955 Brown II arguments over implementation, lawyers defending delay argued that differences in performance between Black and white students made desegregation difficult to carry out. Thurgood Marshall, exasperated, responded, “Put the dumb colored children in with the dumb white children, and put the smart colored children with the smart white children — that is no problem.”
I boggled, reading this, not because Marshall is wrong — he’s obviously right! — but because it’s hard to imagine anyone saying this in 2026.
But if we decide that it’s too awkward to talk about inequality of abilities, then the political equalities that we actually care about become harder to defend. Even if we rid ourselves of unjust inequalities — like the fact that some children grow up without access to clean air while others are taught to read before they go to school — there will still be inequality. Many inequalities are born of injustice, but there would still be some people who are smarter, faster, funnier, prettier, and luckier in a truly just world. Moreover, the circumstances we live in will prize certain skills over others in unpredictable ways, as those quants in software engineering are just now finding out.
The parable of the bins
If it didn’t exist, Birmingham, England’s decades-long war over how much to pay its garbage collectors would be too on-the-nose to invent.
In the mid-2000s, thousands of women employed by the city as cooks, cleaners, caregivers, teaching assistants, and in other predominantly female occupations argued that they were being paid less than men whose work Birmingham had placed in the same or equivalent grades. The city had to assign jobs to pay grades using factors like skill, effort, and working conditions. Very different jobs can end up receiving similar total scores, which is exactly what happened.
Municipal garbage collectors and road workers, predominantly male occupations, were eligible for bonuses that catering staff and home caregivers were not. As a result, women in the lower-paid roles sued under the Equal Pay Act, which prohibits different pay for equivalent jobs. They won.
Now, obviously, catering and garbage-collecting jobs are not equal — the former involves less heavy lifting and no direct contact with refuse, biowaste, and horrendous smells. The city, facing large payouts and the risk of further litigation, cut garbage-collector salaries.
Since then, the city has been crippled by garbage collectors’ strikes, and it is now paying twice as much for agency staff in garbage collection.
Some jobs must pay better than others because that’s the only way they’ll attract competent workers. The principle of equal human worth is not threatened by the fact that some people choose easier jobs and less pay while others choose unpleasant jobs for more pay. I don’t want to pick up garbage; you’d have to pay me insane sums to do it. I’m delighted to pay extremely generous sums to someone willing to do the work!
The resulting mess illustrates why equality is more complicated than announcing that different jobs have equal value and paying everyone based on a spreadsheet.
The upside of this dynamic — in which differences in what jobs we choose are harnessed by society for mutual benefit — is still there even when what qualifies someone for a job over me is the simple fact that they’re smarter and more capable than I am.
If men disproportionately hold dirty or dangerous jobs, paying them more may widen the earnings gap between men and women even when no woman is formally excluded (of course, one could also frame this as widening the longevity gap in women’s favor). Differences in opportunity, choice, and achievement can accumulate into durable disparities between groups defined by immutable characteristics like sex. But - while such a disparity might be a warning sign to investigate further for injustice - we have to keep in mind that our objective is to identify and redress injustice, not difference itself. Sometimes unequal outcomes are evidence of sexism and will vanish in a better world. Sometimes they are the mechanism by which society persuades people to haul away our garbage.
A positive-sum world
If you had just been shipwrecked on a tropical island, you’d be delighted to find out that your shipmate is a genius survivalist who has built lean-tos out of palm trees for fun and knows the edibility of all plants. If you take your child to the emergency room with unusual symptoms, you’d feel some relief to learn that the attending doctor was the best student at a top medical school and is world-renowned for their expertise. It probably wouldn’t occur to you in either case that you need to measure up to these dynamos, even in your own areas of strength.
In other contexts, of course, it’s hard to interpret another person’s competence as anything but bad news. If you’re lining up for a job interview and learn that the person next to you clerked for Supreme Court justices before founding a billion-dollar company and then leaving to cure cancer, it would take truly remarkable equanimity to go “Wow. getting the chance to work with that person would be very cool” instead of “Welp. no job for me.”
When we’re in positive-sum situations — where other people’s success makes us better off, or at least not worse off — it’s easy to delight in their successes and trust that they delight in ours. In zero-sum and negative-sum situations, where anyone else’s success comes directly at our own expense, it’s much harder.
Many misapplications of the principle of equality arise from confusing positive-sum and zero-sum scenarios. And things get particularly heated when these situations involve children.
Some kids are ready for advanced math earlier than others. Deep discomfort with this fact has driven campaigns to remove algebra education from middle schools across the country. In Oakland, where I live, parents were assured that the delayed-algebra curriculum would ensure “equal access to the same high-quality learning experiences.”
That is true in the sense that, if every child gets nothing, they all have equal access.
Except some kids have parents who can afford private tutoring. So instead of cutting down on racial and class disparities in math performance, this simply perpetuated them.
More to the point: If you see math as an entry point into building and discovering things that help everyone, there’s no reason to panic over students who are ready for advanced math at a young age — and every reason to enroll them as soon as they’re ready. Research comparing mathematically precocious youth who were and were not allowed to take accelerated classes found that those with early access disproportionately earn STEM Ph.D.s, file patents, and publish more original research.
Of course we should try to equip every single student as best we possibly can for the world they’ll enter, and we should be actively excited about any intervention that improves results for many students. But if an intervention increases the gap between top students and average students, don’t despair: we’ll all benefit from what those top students go on to invent.
That’s not how Bay Area school districts saw it. They saw top students outpacing the rest as threatening, and wanted policies that made students less different. The “close the gap” attitude makes sense if you view the economy that we are preparing students for as a fundamentally zero-sum one, where any opportunity awarded to one student comes at the expense of another, where kids really are left worse off if their classmates are overachievers. To the extent we have built such a world, we should dismantle it, and then the rest follows.
The kids who benefit most from advanced math will become the engineers and inventors of tomorrow, and we’ll all be better off for having fostered their skills early. That’s harder to see if your worldview is zero-sum — if you think there are a discrete number of limited opportunities that will run out once we’ve distributed them. In that world, offering smart middle schoolers advanced math amounts to choosing an elite — and doing so at a very young age, on limited criteria. Surely, if we must choose an elite, we don’t have to do it when kids are 12?
But the world isn’t zero-sum. We do not have a tiny supply of good lives that we parcel out to only those with good test scores. People who are exceptionally good at math take jobs that I couldn’t handle myself, no matter how many handicaps you gave me — jobs from which I later benefit, when those people do things like invent new clean energy sources or improve shipping logistics. That makes it easier for me to live a better life than I otherwise would have.
I have to be willing to affirm that high-quality engineers will earn more money than me, and that they will do so because in some measurable sense they will achieve more than me. This inequality of outcomes doesn’t undermine political and moral equality. It just gives us a more healthy, efficient, and comfortable world in which we can pursue those things.
Civilization itself is a positive-sum project. This can be counterintuitive because the fragments of it that we interact with most directly are not themselves guaranteed to be positive-sum. Elections? Zero-sum. My candidates only win if your candidates lose. Applying for a job? Zero-sum. I only get the job if many other people don’t. Sports? Zero-sum. But these contests are embedded in a vast system of cooperation: the clean water I drink, the electricity I use, the streets I walk, the businesses I order from — all of these depend on strangers being good at things I cannot or don’t want to do myself.. It is easy to sincerely hope a new business in my community succeeds, or to hope that my neighbor’s roof doesn’t need expensive repairs. Other people being better makes me better off.
I’ve marveled for a while at the divergence between how AI is regarded in academia (where it’s broadly loathed) and in the tech industry, where most people are largely cheerful about it. This is surprising because many jobs that techies love (writing code) are being replaced by much worse jobs (telling AI agents what code to write). I think this divergence is explained by the fact that tech has historically been a thoroughly positive-sum corner of the world, where everyone’s success is mostly good news for everyone else. (Your friend’s company is doing way better than yours? Well, in that case they’re probably hiring.) In a zero-sum world like academia, however, productivity-increasing tools are grim news.
Academia is not only full of zero-sum contests — there are only so many tenure-track jobs and prestigious publication slots — but is also itself contracting. No wonder academics don’t feel delighted about productivity growth that they’re entirely right to believe won’t make them better off.
Even the techno-optimists in the Bay Area are not immune to zero-sum fears. Rents in San Francisco are up more than 20% this year. All of the new OpenAI and Anthropic millionaires are bidding up the city’s underbuilt housing stock. Ask about that, and you start to hear some real resentment. People being better than you? That’s great. People being richer than you and bidding for the same set of limited resources? That sucks.
It’s easier to change the world than to change human nature
One way to handle people being better than you is to cultivate personal virtue. There’s a reason envy has long been listed among the deadly sins. You should try to avoid it. Don’t follow people on Instagram whose sparkling kitchens and clean, neat lives fill you with misery and jealousy; practice admiration rather than resentment when you see someone effortlessly accomplish that which would’ve taken you weeks.
I admit that this may be more difficult than it used to be: We know about far more people than we used to. It is more difficult than it used to be to find a small pond in which you can be a right-sized fish; it is easy to give yourself the experience of a peer group of people entirely richer and prettier and smarter and cooler than you.
But I have often found it helpful to try to appreciate the interior lives of people I think of as cooler and better and smarter than me. Usually, when I get a peek into their souls, they too are frustrated and dissatisfied, full of the nagging sense that they could’ve done better and achieved more, full of anxiety about mistakes they’ve made and time they’ve wasted. You have to get past envy in order to see this, and this is one reason among many to try to be virtuous.
But the personal cultivation of virtue can’t accomplish anywhere near as much as a policy solution. In a positive-sum context, my lack of resentment for people who are better than me isn’t a hard-won accomplishment; it’s effortless. If you built enough housing in San Francisco, and if academia were somehow structured so that high-achieving researchers brought the whole discipline more money, renown, and opportunity, then our authentic joy for one another would follow more easily, rather than through clenched teeth and chanted internal mantras.
A recent study in the American Economic Review looked at the origins of zero-sum thinking and found that people’s views are strongly associated with the environments in which they — or even their parents — grew up. They found that people whose parents and grandparents lived around more immigrants are more inclined toward positive-sum thinking. Having lived in areas with a history of slavery, on the other hand, predicts a more zero-sum mindset.
In other words, the more we build a world that promotes positive-sum cooperation, the easier it becomes to tolerate the inevitable kinds of inequality. We shouldn’t be trying to build a society in which everyone’s life outcomes are the same, but a society in which we wouldn’t even want that, because it is sufficiently evident that when our neighbors are stronger, so are we.
More in the How do we live with each other? series:
I don’t need you to believe I’m a woman
Cassie Pritchard opens the series by confronting the painful reality that many of the people with whom she shares a country will never believe she is a woman. Rather than seek their affirmation, Pritchard demands something less intimate and more important: That they defend her freedom and security anyway.
Hillbilly economics
Economic historian Phil Magness turns his sights on Vice President JD Vance and the postliberal right. Postliberals, he argues, are willing to dismiss evidence that their policies make people poorer and impose their vision of the common good anyway.
It's tricky to balance acknowledging that differences in ability are real and not having that recognition turn into bigotry or antidemocratic attitudes. I agree the Bay Area went too far in the direction of fearing exclusion or inequality, but the opposite failure mode is also a live threat and historically has been very real. On the fringe you get people who want to have tests for voting or even want to dispense with democracy entirely. But a more mainstream version is simply a culture among elites that ignores or dismisses the views and experiences of ordinary people. One recent example is Jasmine Sun's reporting about how the concerns rural people have about data centers are much more nuanced and reasonable than the stereotypes of anti-data center activists by Silicon Valley elites.
Part of the equal worth and rights that the Declaration talks about is equal voice, especially in the political system. I'm not saying you don't agree with that, but rather that people have a reasonable worry that their ability to speak and have input will be stripped from them if our worldviews focus too much on differences in ability.
“I’ve marveled for a while at the divergence between how AI is regarded in academia (where it’s broadly loathed) and in the tech industry, where most people are largely cheerful about it. This is surprising because many jobs that techies love (writing code) are being replaced by much worse jobs (telling AI agents what code to write).”
Perhaps you’re surprised because you’ve mistaken a personal anecdote for a general trend. I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years, and AI has been one of the most controversial changes I’ve seen. Go scroll through the comments on Hacker News.
AI has taken a job I loved and made it mind-numbingly boring. Hating it is pointless. The universe doesn’t owe me an interesting job. Mostly I’m worried that my job will be completely automated away before I can retire. But cheerful? Yeah, not so much.
That doesn’t mean you should generalize from my experience either. Maybe there’s statistical evidence that backs up your claim, but show your work beyond “I know some guys and they totally love AI.” Those guys certainly exist. They also tend to be people who think they’re going to get filthy rich and don’t particularly care about software engineering or AI’s negative externalities.