Kwame Anthony Appiah's Reading List

"These novels aren’t exactly ‘about’ anything; that is to say, there are many subjects they’re about, not just one. Each evokes a world which prompts the reader to think about many things. That said, I think this is clearly a novel in some sense about divided societies. It’s a novel about how in any divided society, men can abuse their positions to take advantage of women. I think it’s also a novel about the terrifying power of gossip, and the way in which the circulation of stories about people—true or false—can shape their own options. “ Milkman is a novel about the terrifying power of gossip” Though it’s obvious that it grows out of Burns’ own society, Northern Ireland and the conflicts there, I felt very much that it was the sort of novel that would help you to think about any divided society. I suspect that people who lived in Lebanon or Syria or Sri Lanka would see echoes. It’s that mixture of the particular and the universal that is there in a lot of great writing. Yes. Obviously, it’s about things that #MeToo is addressing. But it’s very writerly in the sense that it evokes a world without really banging you over the head with what you’re supposed to think about anything. The world itself—the world that she’s created—is the interesting thing. The young woman at the heart of the novel is a surprising person in many ways. She reads a lot in a society that doesn’t seem very interested in literature. She’s learning French, for no obvious reason except that she wants to learn French. She has a young man she’s actually interested in, and then she’s chased by this other man who she’s not interested in. She’s quite smart: she realizes what she can and can’t do. She’s very conscious of the ways in which the circulation of gossip means that everything she does will be interpreted in a certain way—the wrong way, usually. When we announced the winner to the press at the dinner, a journalist said it was very challenging, and I said something about how it was challenging in the sort of way that a stroll up Snowdon is challenging. It’s challenging because it’s a little uphill, but it’s worth it for the view, you know. It wasn’t my choice to describe it as challenging—it was the journalist’s choice to ask me about that. I wouldn’t have used that term. We read it three times. We read it to put it on the longlist; we read it between the longlist and the shortlist; and then we read it again. It’s a novel for the ear as well as for the mind—I found myself reading it out loud to myself sometimes. She’s talking to us, in a very plausible (though peculiar) voice. I imagine the audiobook is going to do well, purely because her voice is so compelling. If you have any difficulty figuring out what a sentence is about, all you have to do is read it out loud and it’s perfectly clear. “You couldn’t mistake this novel for any other” Just as all interesting writing is unlike anything else, you couldn’t mistake this novel for any other. It’s not very much like anything else I’ve read; it’s very particular. But once you get into it, it just goes along. Partly because you want to know what’s going to happen. Obviously, I read it more than once, and interestingly I still found myself being pulled along. Even though I knew what was going to happen, I wanted to remember exactly how things happened."

"This is a very distinctive piece of writing. The main character, Washington Black, begins his life enslaved in the Caribbean under a very cruel master and cruel regime. We modern people know slavery was bad, but we forget just quite how bad it was. It very much evokes that. It’s quite painful to read that part, I think. He’s raised thinking he’s an orphan, but in fact—spoiler alert—it turns out the woman he’s looking after is actually his mother (though, for some reason, she doesn’t want him to know that.) She’s a very powerful character, because she was born in Africa and brings something of Africa with her. The other main character is the younger brother of the plantation owner. He’s a quiet abolitionist who doesn’t really approve of slavery. He’s also one of those aristocratic European amateur scientists. Part of what he’s doing on the island visiting his brother is finding a place where he can test out a balloon that he’s made which is supposed to carry people off into the air. After a series of complicated events, he takes Washington with him to escape from the island. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter From now on, it’s partly a picaresque adventure story. They’re going from the Caribbean to North America to the Arctic to London, and he ends up in Morocco. It’s an adventure story; it’s also a love story. It’s also a story about that 19th-century period when this man Titch, the brother of the plantation owner, experiences conflicted feelings about the fact that they’ve developed a rather intimate relationship. He pulls out of it at a certain point, and then most of the remaining novel is about life in London as a free man with a woman he loves and who loves him, despite the fact that he’s badly mutilated as the result of an accident. It’s written looking backwards. What you see is that the result of the education of this young man by an older Englishman is ultimately developing quite a sophisticated understanding of the world, one which he clearly didn’t have at the start. You might wonder how an illiterate slave could have an interesting point of view, and he starts out that way, but by the end he becomes a sophisticated person. He learns a lot of the science that Titch is doing. Titch also allows him to draw, and he discovers he has capacity as an artist. Its range is astonishing. It’s an adventure story, so it’s beautifully written, but a lot of the time—and this is why it was good to read it more than once—you rush through because it’s so exciting. You’re in the Arctic, and somebody’s disappeared into the snow and you’re wondering whether they’re going to survive. Or they’re in the balloon, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re being chased by someone who’s trying to recover him as a slave, who’s a slave-chaser—is he going to find him? What’s going to happen when they meet? There’s a lot of excitement. It’s a rather odd test, the Booker. To survive it, you have to be read by some fairly attentive readers several times over. Though I’m sure most writers would love to be read more than once, most books are meant to be read by most readers once . Part of the interest of a book like this is that you discover new things each time you read it. There’s so much in there. Washington Black has an enormous range: a geographical range, a range of emotions, a range of kinds of people. It has a Javert-like character trying to find him because there’s a huge bounty on his head. It’s fun. Yes. You might think it’s an odd way to evaluate things, but I’m extremely fond of the books that got that far, in part because we got to know them quite well."

"Here, the writing is very distinctive, too. Most extraordinary is its evocation of a world that’s in a way contemporary, but pretty unfamiliar to most of us. It’s a world of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy of British society (it’s set in England), living on canals, often eating fish they’ve caught themselves or rabbits they’ve hunted. It’s also retelling of an Oedipus narrative. The main character is a trans person. If you think about the structure of the Oedipus story, you have to have someone who doesn’t know who their parents are causing the death of the father, and having sex with the mother. You might think that’s awfully difficult to pull off with a trans character, but somehow it works. It’s obviously recognisable at some points that you’re in an Oedipus story, but it somehow doesn’t feel at all that that’s an unnatural structure. It doesn’t feel like you’re being forced to go through the structure of an existing archetypical narrative. Many surprising things happen, but they don’t seem forced. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We’re living in a time when trans issues are front and centre in our social and political lives, but Everything Under is telling a story with an age-old structure—a structure of the child who doesn’t know who he or she is. The child who the Fates, as it were, have determined will do the very thing that everybody was trying to avoid. Johnson’s language, too, is beautiful. It evokes a world that’s extremely unfamiliar, but makes it feel like a natural world. It’s incredibly well done. You said she was the youngest person on the list. When putting it together, we didn’t really think about anything except the book. We didn’t think about how old or young anybody was; we didn’t think about whether anybody had ever been on the shortlist before. We didn’t think about whether they were white or not. We just ended up with six favourites. Though it was a quite diverse list in respect to things like age, first novels versus people who’ve been at it a while, that wasn’t really the point. It’s a sign of the vigour of the novel in English. An incredible range of people are doing an incredible range of things. Some of it is done by people who’ve been at it a long time, and some of it is by people who are just starting."

"This is a novel set in a part of modern life unfamiliar to most of us: a women’s prison. Of course, most of the characters in a women’s prison are going to be women. There are a few men important to the plot, including the one that the main character, 29 year-old single mother Romy Hall, is in prison for killing. Romy is an interesting character. She’s been a sex worker. She’s had problems (and pleasures) with drugs. She’s had abusive relations with men. But she’s quite thoughtful and intellectually sophisticated, though not in a way inconsistent with realism—with thinking that someone in her circumstances might actually think those thoughts. Sometimes, when a highly educated author writes about a character who, say, hasn’t been to college, the writer can put things in the character’s mouth that lead the reader to think, ‘Well, that’s you —that couldn’t be her.’ I didn’t ever feel that with this novel. She’s a well-made character who speaks in a plausible voice, who knows the sort of things that someone in her circumstances would know. “This novel is the one that made me feel I should go out and do something—that I should vote for prison reform” Like the other novels on the list, Kushner’s writing here is distinctive, stylish and well-executed. There are two important trans characters in this novel, too. That theme probably says something about our time: we’ve been thinking about these issues, and what we think about shows up in the novels we read. But, again, they’re not there in order to make a point, or to bludgeon us into thinking about an issue. Of all the books, this novel is the one that made me feel I should go out and do something—that I should vote for prison reform. Yes. But that only works if you don’t feel you’re being manipulated, and with Kushner, you don’t. The world itself has to work, and in The Mars Room , it does. I don’t know anything about women’s prisons, so I couldn’t speak to the reality of it, but it feels very plausible—and worrying—that that’s how it is. It is. In the novels we’ve talked about so far, there’s some element of facing up to pain and the dark side of life. To make people want to read a book like that, you have to pull something off, because it’s just unrelenting misery."

"This is the novel whose theme is clearly our relation to the natural environment, in particular to trees as an element of the natural environment. It’s also a book by someone who clearly loves trees. He loves woods and forests, and trees in cities, and every conceivable kind of tree. He knows a great deal about them, but as you receive that information, you never feel like he found a fact and thought to himself, ‘Oh, I learned this, I can put it in my book.’ What it feels like at the beginning is a series of short stories, each of which has some important thing about a tree or a kind of tree in it, but also holds some human character. They’re all brought together in a marriage which in the end involves a crime and its consequences. The novel’s main sense is that you’re drawn to thinking that trees are wonderful, and we’re doing terrible things to them (and should pull back). As I said with regard to Kushner’s novel, novels that make you think about issues of public policy don’t work to achieve the effect of making you care if they feel didactic, manipulative or hectoring. And this one doesn’t either. You’d be a very strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees. “You’d be a strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees” You’ve also become engaged with a fantastically rich dramatis personae . There are so many characters in this novel, so many worlds. There are people who start out in China and so on, though the main activity goes on in the United States. It’s beautifully written. He’s a well-established writer, and everybody knows he can write. Like all of these books, it’s very distinctive. In some of the other books, sometimes there’s a spareness of language in certain moments—this is not like that. This is rich language. It’s also very long. You have to set aside time to read it. When we discussed the longlist with the press, we observed that we felt some of the novels had not been well served by their editors. People took us to be complaining about length—but that’s really not at all what we had in mind. A long book can be exactly the right length. (And this book is exactly the right length, even though it’s very long.) None of the books that we put on the final list was longer or shorter than it should have been. We are commending to people to read this very long book about trees, but again, there’s an exciting plot, eventually. These were the novels we thought were the best, but there were a lot of those. It wasn’t just a reflection of our taste—which it could have been. Many books were well-crafted; they had interesting characters; they had plots that made you want to keep reading and language you just wanted to savour. But they were also making you think about deep questions, often questions of the moment. There were quite a lot of dystopian novels in the 170: novels worried about what we were doing to the planet, about what we were doing to society, about inequality. Novels that address questions of racial division or questions of gender inequality and sexual harassment. It wasn’t just us picking novels that had messages, as it were. And as I say, having a message by itself can be annoying and tiresome."

"It is a poem, mostly. It’s not in rhymed verse; it’s in free verse. The Long Take has many layers through which it works. The protagonist is essentially somebody who grew up in Canada, goes to the Second World War and ends up first in New York, clearly with what we would now recognise as post-traumatic stress disorder. There are flashbacks to his time in the war. Ultimately, most of his life is a life in Los Angeles. He arrives in a post-war Los Angeles being torn apart by development. The movie industry is growing; parts of the old town being wiped out and replaced with new buildings. There’s a lot of street poverty, people living on the street, people like him, who have suffered from the war and haven’t really processed it in a way that means they’ve come through unscathed. The novel is interspersed with images and photographs of the city in this period. It’s about the rise of the movie industry in Hollywood and uses Hollywood techniques—or at least the techniques of sophisticated film-making and great cinema artists, not Blockbuster movies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter On one level, you’re following this man who’s been ruined by the war in some way. He’s a writer and journalist, so he’s also looking into what’s going on. You learn about the city; you learn about the destruction of the old world by the new, post-war world. You learn about how rapacious the business of a growing city is, and how indifferent it is to individuals. In that sense, it’s partly a novel about post-war capitalism. Because its central social problems are alcoholism, homelessness and poverty, the issues it raises haven’t gone away, even though it’s set in the past. The issue of veterans that haven’t recovered from the psychological trauma of war is very present in the United States. We’ve been at war since 9/11. We’ve had soldiers coming back wounded in part because modern technology, modern medicine, means the number of people who die goes down while the number of people who survive but are wounded goes up. We’re living in a society that doesn’t really want to face the fact it’s at war, despite having huge numbers of wounded warriors. The novel isn’t about that, but great novels make you think about things in an intense or new way. I admired this book very much. Again, you might say, ‘Oh, you just put a poem on there because you thought it would be edgy and different.’ But it’s on there because we all loved it and we admired it. If you choose verse, you’re operating with an extra formal constraint. It allows you to evoke strong emotions more naturally than prose, in a way. So there are things it makes possible, but it also just imposes constraint. Anybody who reads seriously admires writers who can make the constraints work—who can set themselves a challenge, a formal challenge, and solve it. That’s what makes Robertson a great poet and this a great poem, albeit one which has a long plot. Yes. As I said, I don’t normally read this many novels in a year. I’m an academic philosopher, so I usually have to read a lot of philosophy—though, on the other hand, it wasn’t odd to pick me; I do read quite a lot of contemporary fiction, and I enjoy reading and thinking about fiction. But I wasn’t sure what I’d feel at the end of this about the state of the novel. Even though 171 is a huge number, it’s a tiny proportion of the novels published in English in any given year. It’s likely also a small proportion of the good novels published in any year. That makes me feel good, too. These novels are sent to us mostly because their publishers think they’re among the best novels they’ve published. There’s a pre-selection by editors and publishing houses—people who know a lot about this, people who’ve thought deeply about what makes great fiction. It’s a deeply unrepresentative sample in some sense, but if this is what the best ones are looking like, the second-best ones are probably pretty good, too. I’m not sure there were any that we all hated. There were some I didn’t like very much, for one reason or another. But even the ones I didn’t like, I could see why they’d been sent to us. Every book sent to us—I think there’s literally one exception to this, and I can’t even remember the name of the author—set itself an interesting challenge, and set about solving it. There were no novels where we thought, ‘Okay, this person got up in the morning, wrote the first 300 words that came to their mind, and went about their business, and the next day wrote 300 more words.’ They were novels of ideas. And the best of them were also novels of character, plot and language."

"It’s by this amazing woman, though it’s an ‘as told to’ book written by a French journalist working through an interpreter. She talked to her about how she became known around the world because of this episode where she was raped, essentially at the order of a village council in Pakistan because one of the local big families said her brother, who I don’t think was even a teenager, had allegedly assaulted one of their daughters. In fact, he had only been talking to her. But it escalated and at the end of the day, because that was an assault on the honour of this family, they insisted on getting their own back. Well, it’s difficult, because there are these village councils which are not empowered to do this, but they do… They sort of grow out of a tradition where they were the government, though they’re not any more. Anyway, what’s amazing is that it was horrible, obviously, and she spent a week locked away in her house, but then, instead of what normally happens in these circumstances, which is that the woman just retreats in shame, the village mullah, rather than letting them get away with it, said in Friday mosque that this was a wrong. So then the police felt they had to do something about it and they actually interviewed her. While they tried to get her to cover it up, it very swiftly snowballed and she was at the centre of this international incident and the people who did it were prosecuted, which doesn’t happen very often. Then it was appealed, and now it’s a mess and still hasn’t been decided by the supreme court of Pakistan, but the key thing is that in doing this she drew attention to the possibility that instead of retreating in shame you should shame the people who did it. Because it drew international attention she got support from around the world and she got money and won prizes and started a centre which has two schools, a girls school and a boys school, though she herself is not literate. She is an amazing woman, who, instead of doing what she was expected to do, resisted, and as a result women contacted her from all over Pakistan and she tries to support them. She argues against these honour killings and assaults but also for the human rights and the dignity of women in Pakistan. She is one of my heroes and this is a book about how someone who grasps dignity, which is a form of honour based in our humanity, can resist the world of the negative side of honour, where women are punished because they are pawns in a game of honour between men."

"This is a very different kind of book. Frank Henderson Stewart is a very distinguished scholar, now retired, an expert on the ancient Near East, but he thought deeply about honour. He read ancient texts and legal documents because, as you know, honour is a legal concept in German law and you can seek to have your honour protected in various ways – it’s sort of what they have instead of libel. Analysing and thinking deeply about it, he tries to understand how honour developed, and it was he who led me to see the core thought, which is that honour is an entitlement to respect, and that what honour codes do is say how you get to be entitled to respect. I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it’s a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis. Well, reform of honour… Because honour involves entitlement to respect created by codes, what reform you need depends on the code with which it’s associated. So, in terms of the honour-killing code, I think the obvious immediate reform is to get people to see that the honourable thing is to protect women in these circumstances and not to assault them and kill them, but to attach honour to protecting these women rather than to attach it to harming them. The reason why I think this can happen is because of the historical fact that over and over again it has happened. Nobody would have predicted in England in 1839 when the Duke of Wellington fought his duel that by 1850 that kind of thing would seem ridiculous. At the time, while the particular duel he engaged in was thought to be troublesome in various ways, it wasn’t ridiculous. He was fighting because someone else in the House of Lords had accused him of giving money to King’s College London in order to conceal the fact that he was sympathetic to Catholics. It was a scandalously irresponsible allegation but he felt his honour was at stake. But within a generation, if you challenged someone to a duel people mocked you and thought it was funny. Honour killings occurred in Italy well into the 20th century and they don’t occur there any more, so I do think it’s possible to reform these things because we have reformed them, and the honour-killing codes are in need of reform as fast as we can do it."

"This is another beautiful piece of scholarship by an eminent historian, but you don’t have to be an academic to read it. It’s about a really interesting subject that I think would interest anybody. It’s about the abolitionist movement in England in the late 18th century and at the turn of the 19th century, with people like Wilberforce, and it tries to explain why so many Englishmen got involved in anti-slavery. There were no slaves in England so contact with slavery wasn’t something most people would have had. So, how, starting with the Quakers in the 1880s, did huge numbers, in the end millions, of Englishmen end up signing petitions against slavery in the colonies? He argues that part of the reason was that in the debates about American independence, British politicians kept pointing to the great tension in the American case, which was that they were the ones talking about freedom but they were the ones who had slaves, and this was a stain on the beginning of the national honour of the Americans. The reply from the Americans was: ‘Well, we do have slaves, true, but you are the ones who do the nastiest part of the work. You are the ones packing people into boats like sardines.’ So there was a sort of trade-off, with the Americas saying: ‘Shame on you, British, for the slave trade.’ And the British said to them: ‘Shame on you for having slaves.’ The question of British honour then got tied up with the slave trade and people like Wilberforce could appeal to national honour when they said we have to stop the trade. So it’s a book about those debates. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The great question in the historiography of the abolition and the end of the slave trade is why Britain gave up the slave trade at the point at which it was the most profitable. Nations and businesses don’t normally give up profitable trade for moral reasons. What this book shows is that it was indeed clear to people that what they were going to do would cost, but that it was more important to do the right thing. The reason they thought it was important to do the right thing was that British honour demanded it. There were other things going on, of course. Wilberforce was an evangelical Christian and part of the rise of evangelical Christianity with its moral seriousness. So, like all historical stories, it’s complicated but at the heart of it is the concern for British honour. My own discussion of abolitionism is concerned with why working-class people got involved in anti-slavery. The short answer is that the form of slavery that developed in the New World equated manual labour with dishonour and if you’re developing a working-class consciousness of a positive kind, which was happening in England in the first half of the 19th century, you cannot accept a system that equates manual labour with dishonour. So they didn’t do it because they cared about the slaves, because they didn’t know any slaves. The paradox was that some of these workers were in the cotton industry and it was in their interest for slavery to survive in the Americas because the cotton that they were processing was made by slaves, but even they refused to ally themselves with the American South. It’s arguable that if there hadn’t been a strong working-class sentiment against slavery the British government would have sided with the South against the North in the Civil War . If they had, then slavery might well not have ended in America until much later. They got involved, in fact, before most working-class people in England had the vote. So here’s a place where honour and dishonour are very important in the history of moral change."

"Well, like much of Chekhov, it’s powerful in part because, although there is a moral undertone, no moral arguments are made, he’s not a moraliser. It’s about this guy who gets drawn into a duel so ridiculous that it’s impossible, even if you’ve just read the story, to remember exactly what it was they were duelling about. It’s often true of duels that people are prickly and they think their honour is being abused and they end up fighting. What happens is this man who is leading a rather meaningless life, fights a duel and doesn’t get killed and that turns him around and he pulls himself together. It’s just so marvellous, the description of these professional-class Russians, far, far away from Moscow in the provinces, and their preoccupation with status and all that, and these two guys in a completely pointless duel. It’s not just Chekhov creating an interesting narrative moment; it really was so common with these duels that it was extremely difficult to say in a short paragraph exactly what they were about. I think that’s certainly one of the things involved in historical honour. That’s what’s involved when Achilles is worried about his honour or Prince Hal is worried about his honour, and that’s the part of honour that’s rather unattractive. If you think about what’s unattractive about historical honour codes there are three things: one is that they are hierarchical, including subordinating women to men and subordinating ordinary people to upper-class people; two, they tend to involve an awful lot of violence; three, they often lead people to do exactly the opposite of what morality suggests you should do. They are anti-moral, hierarchical, undemocratic and violent. So, if you’re going to say there’s a place for honour, you have to face up to that and wonder whether reform is possible that deals with those problems. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to stop testosterone-fuelled fights and so on, but we can, I think, make them seem ridiculous and shameful rather than being a source of respect. That can be a response and this relates to how one should use national honour and the honour of groups, Muslim groups and so on, carefully, in terms of how to push people ahead on the moral front. If you shame people too much they just get angry so you have to be careful with that. But I think it’s one thing to say, ‘Shame on you’, to somebody who is already pissed off and in a high state of adrenalin, but at least we are not going to say, ‘Three cheers for you’, so we can stop cheering people on when people do this. Cardinal Newman said that the essence of being a gentleman is that you don’t do anybody harm. That meant that by the mid-19th century gentlemanliness, which was very much associated with violence and feudal knights and all that, at least for a significant part of the educated population, had come to be seen as the opposite of that. We don’t have good numbers on that but we do have good numbers on the role of this kind of thing explaining the murder rate in the United States. It turns out that one of the biggest things that explain the different murder rates in different parts of the American South is whether you’re in a region that was significantly settled by Scots-Irish. If you are from a region that was significantly settled by Scots-Irish who brought with them the kind of honour code that comes from a rural society that kept cattle, in those regions the rate of honour-related reasons (you flirted with my wife and such) are much higher than in other parts of the United States. These data would be from the 60s, 70s, 80s. In fact, attitudes to honour in the South are very different from attitudes to honour in the North. Someone did a nice survey recently where they sent imaginary CVs applying for jobs, and in these CVs there were people who had been in prison. If the CV showed that the reason they were in prison was that they had reacted violently to a threat to their honour, then in the South they could get a job but in the North they couldn’t. The point is that there is plenty of evidence of the pervasiveness of these issues of honour today, including in such things as the murder rates and the rates of assault. You have to face up to that and look for the possibilities for reform – unless you think you can get rid of it, and I don’t think you can. So, as I say, it can be and has been reformed and been moralised. It has changed from motivating people to do what’s bad to motivating them to do what’s good. Hard as it is to imagine when you’re stuck in the middle, we have historical evidence to show that it can be changed."

"This is a book by a philosopher and an economist about a topic that was neglected for a very long time in social analysis. So there’s lots about it in the 18th century – Adam Smith and people like that – and it’s about how esteem, which is their word for the respect that you give to people who have achieved things against a certain standard, can be used to motivate people to do good things. How people can be mobilised. What they do is build models about how they actually work and there are graphs of the kind you see in economists’ books , and it’s about how, if you set the rules out right, you can use esteem, the economy of esteem, the system of assigning esteem to people, to do things much more efficiently than money. It’s better than the real economy, that of money, and it’s better than using the fear of punishment. Examples are things like: if you have an up-and-running economy of esteem, then when people do the right thing they get the respect of their friends and neighbours and if they do the wrong thing they get their contempt and disrespect. The great virtue of this is that if people have these attitudes, then the thing is cheap to run because people spontaneously respond in these ways. You don’t have to have courts, which is what you have to have in order to use punishment. You don’t have to have chequebooks and credit cards in order to pay people to do things. Because the thing that they want, the respect of their neighbours, is the natural response of people who are in a social system together. That means we can use esteem to sustain things like philanthropy. It would be self-contradictory to pay someone to give money away and it would be weird to punish someone for not giving their own money away. So, you get the esteem of your neighbours if it is known that that’s what you’ve done. Nobody has to run the system. No, it’s just New York City . In New York City a lot of rich people give away a lot of money and, if you ask why, the natural explanation is that they get the reward of being esteemed. People think better of them, and it’s a striking fact that in New York where the richest people are a thousand times richer than the poorest people there is not a lot of resentment. That is because there is a tradition of the rich supporting the public good. That is the hope, but the best social science studies show that America is much more stratified than everyone thinks and especially now because the gateways to success tend to pass through education, and well-off people can give their kids huge advantages of the sort that are familiar in England but have historically been underplayed here. There is very good evidence that we are much more stratified than we like to think. Nevertheless, because people don’t recognise that, there is a huge amount of optimism among people who in fact have almost no chance of making it. Well, we’ll see."