Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality

The United States is an outlier. When compared to other rich democracies, the United States stands alone on almost every metric: life expectancy, health care spending, homicides, suicides, drug poisoning, incarceration, child care, parental leaves, and others. Poverty and inequality are no exception: the largest world economy is afflicted by levels of poverty that dwarf anything seen in other rich democracies. Why is the United States so different? In Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality, Lawrence Eppard, Mark Rank, and Heather Bullock provide an answer: Americans are individualistic. In the eyes of Americans, poverty is the result of individual choices instead of structural forces. Most Americans downplay environmental factors, residential and racial segregation, early childhood inequalities, cumulative disadvantages, and so forth. Even when they directly experience these forces, they tend to think that the United States is a meritocracy that will eventually reward deserving people. These individualistic beliefs, intimately intertwined with racist and sexist ideologies, relieve American politicians from the pressure of implementing robust social policies. Hence, the cycle of poverty and inequality continues. The evidence presented is abundant, diverse (surveys, interviews, international comparisons), and compelling. The book has, as the authors put it, a ‘‘somewhat unorthodox approach’’ (p. 47). In Chapter One, the authors lay out their main argument. Chapter Two extensively reviews the scholarship on the topic. Chapter Three provides psychosociological underpinnings for why people may be drawn to individualistic explanations, even when individualisminformed policies harm them. The tone changes in Chapter Four, when the authors assemble interviews with several experts spanning various disciplines. Chapters Five and Six mark another narrative shift, as the authors show how individualism influences the viewpoints of 20 non-Hispanic White custodial workers at several universities in Appalachia and 25 social work college students, mostly White women from middleand upper-middle class. Finally, in Chapter Seven, the authors present the strongest available evidence to support their main argument. In some ways, this unorthodox organization represents both a weakness and a strength of the book. The authors clearly state from the very beginning that the main argument will be proved in the last chapter. I wonder how many readers might be tempted to just skip to that section, as I admittedly was. Furthermore, reading this book almost feels like reading several books, which makes it a somewhat challenging reading experience. However, this is also a strength as the book can serve different purposes. Are you a faculty member who is designing a course at the intersection of ideology, inequality, and policy? This book is for you, as it provides a fantastic overview of extant knowledge in Chapters Two and Three. Are you searching for a conversational reading (free of numbers and jargon) to start class discussions? Chapter Four (the conversation with experts) is fantastic. Do you want to show qualitative evidence of how individualism permeates our ways of thinking about poverty and inequality? Chapters Five and Six do the job. An apparent limitation of this book is that the main argument is not exactly novel, as the authors certainly acknowledge. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of the evidence presented is also not original: the authors report a wealth of survey results and findings from previously published work, and their qualitative studies are also adapted or reprinted from their previous publications. However, maybe academics tend to overemphasize the importance of novelty. Despite the fact that many may be familiar with the major tenets of the main thesis proposed in the book, the work is still immensely valuable. The authors put forth tremendous effort Reviews 41