Selective Outrage

The United States has more billionaires, more Nobel laureates, and more medical breakthroughs than any nation in history. It also ranks near the bottom of the developed world in life expectancy, last among ten wealthy nations in health outcomes, and twenty-third in global happiness. It spends more fighting a drug war it has been losing for fifty years than treating the disease driving it and more defending a health system ranked worst among its peers than it would cost to lift 44 million Americans out of poverty. Why?
Selective Outrage argues that the answer isn't ignorance, and it isn't cruelty. It's psychology. Drawing on moral psychology, economics, and rigorously sourced current data, Gary R. Goldstein traces a single pattern across the defining fractures of American life, healthcare, addiction, war, immigration, slavery's unfinished reckoning, and the erosion of democratic trust, and finds the same mechanism at work in each. A nation that reserves its outrage selectively, moved to action by some suffering and numb to the rest. This is not a book that lets either side of the political divide off the hook. It is a demand that Americans ask a harder question than who is to blame. It asks what would it take for our outrage to finally match the scale of what we already know?