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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/rich-people-just-care-less/?_r=0Modern social science: confirming the suspicions that many people have had about the powerful for centuries.
Seriously, though...this is one of the major reasons why social and economic inequality are self-perpetuating. Higher-status individuals can convince middle-status (or even many lower-status) people that the problems with society are not caused by the top of the social pyramid, but by the bottom (see: the 1970s and 1980s in countries like the US and the UK).
As inequality is increased by the resulting policies (cutting taxes and regulations for corporations and wealthy individuals, or cutting social assistance to disadvantaged groups, for example), the economic "winners" have a tendency to self-segregate away from the rest of society, while the lower-status people withdraw from the political process-which leads to political participation being more of an affluent middle-to-upper-class thing.
When policies that affect the poor and other lower-status groups are defined almost wholly by the concerns of society's elites...well, it's easy to see how inequality increases even more under those circumstances.
