The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Political creatures - which includes most of us, I guess! - tend to base our preferences on a few principles. Coherent or not, rational or not, self-serving or altruistic, we come up with a few "oughts" - government ought to take care of the weak, people ought to be self-reliant, taxes ought to be cut, - and argue for laws, actions and policies that express them. But what about the "is"? What about the actual consequences of those policies, those principles? What if policy X had consequence Y? Would Y affect your preference for X? Should it? The thesis of this book, supported by an overwhelming and irrefutable volume of data, is that policies have consequences. Social inequality is clearly correlated with many forms of social weakness, not just for those at the bottom of the heap but for everyone. This applies to different countries, but also to different states within the same (US) country. Violence, health, education, economic well-being, mental illness: the greater the inequality, the more the problems. But, you may reply, correlation isn't causation. Perhaps those societies that are more equal are that way because of the shard values - the "oughts" of the people living there. Perhaps both equality/inequality and social strength/weakness are simply the consequences of those values. My reply: so what? Whether it's correlation with something else or direct causation, the net result is correlation. If we want to make society healthier - reduce crime, improve education - it doesn't really matter whether greater equality is explicit in the "oughts" or not. The big challenge here is for the "compassionate conservatives": those who believe in economic laissez faire as a central principle of freedom and justice. Are they really willing to accept the negative consequences of their values? Denial is a powerful thing.

The author's main thesis is that the income and other inequalities that exist in our country (and many others) is correlated with a wide variety of social and other ills. Each chapter examines a different societal problem (mental health, obesity, violence, etc), and examines the possible relationship between inequality and the subject at hand. Scatter plots fill the book, and illustrate some interesting trends (the authors do carefully control for extraneous variables). While it's hard to prove causation from a scatter plot, the text contains plenty of commentary and possible explanations, including research summaries, etc. I came away from this book with a renewed recognition of the problems potentially associated with inequality. What I would have liked more of is discussion of what I can do to help assuage the problem. While there is a chapter at the end of the book on "what can be done", the focus is on large-scale solutions (changing government policy, etc), and not on actions individuals can take that might make a difference.

"The Spirit Level" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is a groundbreaking piece of social science research and analysis. In this assiduously researched book, the two British academics demonstrate a powerful link between income inequality and a host of social ills including obesity, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse and crime. This compelling book should give every thinking person pause to reconsider how we might be able to do much better as individuals and as a society. This is a story that could not have been told five years ago. New data available from the World Bank has allowed the authors to make comparisons between market economies from around the world, as well as comparisons within the 50 U.S. states. Mr. Wilkinson and Ms. Pickett painstakingly show how the degree of income differential within and between states is highly correlated with social dysfunction. For example, the U.S., U.K. and Portugal -- where income is highly concentrated at the top -- consistently score worse in nearly every social problem when compared with Sweden and Japan, where income is much more evenly distributed. Crucially, Mr. Wilkinson and Ms. Pickett explain that reducing income differentials at the low and high ends decreases the stress and anxiety that comes from status competition, therefore improving life outcomes for everyone (not just the poor). This is an important insight because it sweeps away the commonly held notion that social dysfunction is someone else's problem; by showing that life expectancies level off and actually decrease at a certain income level, the authors argue convincingly that we are all in it together. Indeed, the authors contend that greater emphasis on non-material pursuits such as education, family and recreation can improve the quality of life for everyone while lessening the impulse to acquire material goods, with beneficial effects on the environment that we all depend upon. Economist Robert B. Reich's superb Introduction to the U.S. edition of this book, which has already made a big splash in the U.K., draws attention to the significant economic-political implications of the author's research. Mr. Reich suggests that in a nation of exploding levels of inequality, the promise of opportunity through economic growth rings false; fundamental changes in how the market economy distributes income is needed to restore social justice. I highly recommend this exceptional book to everyone.

Based on thirty years of research by both Wilkinson and Pickett, "The Spirit Level" is a distillation of their findings and includes a somewhat obvious, yet shocking and sobering conclusion: societies marked by greater economic disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest tend to be the unhappiest, and those with lesser disparity tend to be the happiest. "CBS Sunday Morning" had run a piece some time back about Denmark, which has little economic disparity and which is frequently ranked by her people as one of the happiest places on earth. I cannot recall if Wilkinson or Pickett were cited in that report, but that certainly seems to be one example that backs them up. Overall the book is quite scholarly, yet accessible for the lay reader, although Part One "Material Success, Social Failure" will have readers scrambling to recall how to interpret scatterplots and graphs from their Statistics course in college. But rather than focusing on just economic disparity, Wilkinson and Pickett look at how that disparity impacts all aspects of one's life, including health, culture, diet, spending, longevity, happiness, violence, crime, mental health, and a range of other issues. Their conclusion is that the greater the economic disparity the greater the range of problems it creates. The authors lay the blame for much of America's social and societal ills at the feet of economic disparity. Before reading the book I scoffed at the notion as it seemed too removed from the micro-decisions each individual makes each day, and yet by the end of the book I found their argument to be quite compelling. Their references alone run a staggering 26 pages! The problem ultimately is "The Spirit Level" lies in its final chapter "Building the Future" which lays out a number of actionable reforms societies can undertake to make themselves more economically equitable. As a result the book will alternately fall on deaf ears or preach to the choir. Conservatives will dismiss Wilkinson and Pickett as liberal intellectuals and socialists arguing for a redistribution of the wealth. Progressives will latch on to "The Spirit Level" as further proof of what they've been saying all along, but the vast American Middle will likely never pick it up or find what Wilkinson and Pickett advocate to be too much change. Ultimately the problem is that what Wilkinson and Pickett propose is too radical a change for a society based on incrementalism and in which moneyed interests hold too much political clout for genuine reform to happen. The only thing that spurs sudden and quick reform in America is an immediate crisis. Short of that, the ideas here sound great, but are nothing more than an academic exercise.

I welcome this book. It is a superb summary of the problems that inequality actually creates. Inequality issues are often presented as being about the poor, but this book shows that we are all poorer for living in more unequal societies. Inequality is as bad for the rich as it is for the poor. Society is poorer as inequality becomes greater. The impacts of inequality show up in poorer health, lower educational attainment, higher crime rates, lower social capital, lower trust, lower co-operation the more unequal the society becomes. Wilkinson and Pickett give us clear evidence for these statements. For the last twelve years we have endured in the UK a Labour government that preaches equality (then wonders "equality of what?") whilst actually presiding over increasing inequality and reducing social mobility. Wilkinson and Pickett present their evidence well, in summary and clearly. I have the benefit of having been reading the research work on inequalities over several years so I recognised their evidence. If you need further evidence then you could follow the references, or read some of Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier earlier works, or Michael Marmot's useful book, "The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity." Their presentation of evidence is strong, and it is difficult after seeing their evidence to argue in favour of greater inequality at all. Inequality is clearly a bad thing for a society, and its constituent individuals. The question comes about what to do about it, and how best to reduce it. Sadly these questions are usually posed and answered from the political left, usually in terms of state action and redistribution. It is clear after 12 years of a hyperactive state under Gordon Brown that state action is a blunt instrument at best, and can often make things worse, and lock inequality in. Wilkinson and Pickett have written this book well and have made an accurate diagnosis of the problems inequality is causing in unequal societies such as UK and USA. I am less sure about their suggested remedies, but I support their work, and hope that political and economic thinkers both on the left and on the right will come to recognise the problem of inequality, and come up with solutions for it. Meanwhile as a medical doctor I will continue to try to patch up the casualties of inequality I meet in my consulting room.