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The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

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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.

Pickett and Wilkinson have put together a very interesting study of the results of income inequality on societies. They examined the wealthiest countries in the world, comparing the top and bottom 20 percent for income, as well as all 50 US states. What they found in their comparisons, which use data from WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and numerous other reputable scientific organizations, is that those societies where income inequality is greater have increased social problems across the board.

Among the wealthiest nations, Japan was found to have the least inequality between the wealthiest and poorest, and the US and the UK to have the highest. Rates of such problems as lack of trust between people, mental health issues, teenage pregnancy, school dropout rates and crime were found to be higher along the same continuum as the income inequality scale. The continuum was identical among the 50 US states.

Pickett and Wilkinson found that countries or states which expended more public funds on education and welfare also had lower rates of the problems they studied, which flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that using funds in this fashion creates social problems. They provided some interesting possibilities for relieving the inequality gap, including employee ownership of companies and increase taxation of the super-wealthy.

Overall, this is a fascinating look at the sociology of income equality. The problems in unequal societies were not limited to those at the lower end of the spectrum, as one might expect, but were found all the way across the board. Well worth reading for those with an interest in sociology.

(Review based on uncorrected advance proof.)

"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.

This book presents the thesis that many ills of today's society (obesity, mental illness, rates of drug abuse, ...) can be attributed to large income inequality. The authors make this point using two-dimensional scatter plots, with income inequality on the x-axis, the prevalence of some form of social ill on the y-axis, and dots in the plot representing individual countries. These plots generally show a positive correlation between income inequality and various social ills.

As a statistician, I would like to comment on the soundness such argumentation: unfortunately virtually all graphs are plagued be a confusion of correlation with causation. The authors typically argue that, since measurements A and B are correlated, either A is causing B, or B is causing A. However, in almost all cases it is easy to find a third factor C that is causing A and B, meaning that the conditional correlation of A and B given C is zero.
(A silly example: Men tend play more computer games than women. Men also tend to be physically stronger than women. Hence, across the population there is a positive correlation between A="the amount of time spent playing computer games", and B="physical strength". But surely nobody would proclaim that playing a lot of computer games makes you physically stronger, or vice versa. In fact, this correlation disappears when controlling for C="gender".)

Figure 7.2 is a prime example of the flawed argumentation in this book. It shows income inequality on the x-axis and obesity rates on the y-axes for various developed countries, together with a regression line that apparently indicates a positive relation between these two quantities.
First of all, the result is entirely driven by a single country, the US. In other words, excluding the US, the positive relationship completely disappears, and the result is therefore not robust.
Second, even if the positive relationship remained after removing the US, a positive correlation can still arise endogenously without any causal relation between income inequality and obesity rates. Specifically, for a given average income per person, larger income inequality implies a greater number of very poor and very wealthy people within a society. However, nowadays in developed countries, obesity is particularly prevalent among the poor, so that a greater number of very poor people implies a higher rate of obesity. Hence, a positive correlation between income inequality and obesity rates can arise even though no direct physical/medical mechanism links the two quantities (as opposed to the link between smoking and the risk of lung cancer). (In technical terms: even if the conditional correlation of A="income inequality" and B="obesity rate" given C="poverty rate" is zero, the unconditional correlation can be positive)

While the author's thesis may well be true, the statistical evidence presented in this book is not convincing. Instead of presenting two-dimensions scatter plots and regression lines that don't even have confidence intervals, a true multivariate analysis would have been necessary to answer the many interesting questions brought up in this book.

Afterthought: One interesting point in the book is that greater income inequality causes greater stress among people due to increased competition for social status. I wish the authors would have focused their argumentation more on this aspect, as well as on if reduced income inequality is even achievable given the large economic distortions (very high marginal tax rates, ...) required to achieve such an outcome.

The Spirit Level tries to show that much of the ills of modern society can be traced to income inequality. I admit to being somewhat hesitant in the beginning to believe that much of societies problems could be traced to inequality of income. However, the arguments of the authors, who have accumulated decades of evidence, left me convinced. The authors worked by comparing countries with a high degree of income inequality with countries with a low degree of income inequality and, in addition, they used the degree of income inequality in the states of the USA for comparison. When one group of people make significantly less than another, they tend to feel inferior and engage in a myriad of self destructive behavior to compensate for this feeling of inferiority including violence, used to gain respect, and drug use, used to escape the feeling of shame associated with this feeling of inferiority. I was initially skeptical of the idea that this feeling could be so widespread in countries with wide gaps in income such as the USA, where I live. However, the authors provided the results of many studies to back up their results which forced me to conclude that this feeling was not only widespread but also quite devastating to those who make little in comparison with others. One might think that the authors would recommend increased taxation as a remedy for this problem but, in actuality, they point out that there are at least two different approaches to reducing income inequality. One approach, used by countries with low income inequality, such as Sweden, is, indeed, to raise taxes and plow that revenue back into helping the poor to do better, but the other method, used by Japan, another country with low income inequality, is to simply reduce the pay of high level employees, such as executives, to be closer to that of low level employees, such as office workers. They also point out that a side effect of high income inequality is a decrease in the amount of trust that people in a society have for each other and they point out that this needs to be overcome for any change at all to occur. They state at the end of the book, where they write about potential solutions to the problem of income inequality, that, in addition to trust, there also needs to be a sustained effort to change this situation which not only requires people trusting each other but also that people be aware of the problem and committed to enacting a solution to the problem over a sustained period of time. I really hope that this happens.

This book's basic idea is that social inequality is associated with all sorts of social pathologies, including drug use, poor mental health, lower life expectancy, poor health, greater obesity, violence, higher rates of imprisonment, and teenage pregnancy, among others. They study the set of wealthy countries and the set of US states.

The authors present a lot of data in a reader-friendly visual format. Those of you looking for confidence intervals will be disappointed but you can look up the studies they cite. They make a very strong prima facie case that the above associations are strong.

The book falls short in demonstrating an adequate causal relationship. Most of the data suffer from ecological fallacy problems in attributing differences in the outcomes of collectives with differences in the characteristics of the collectives. (This is different than showing that one person's characteristics affect that person's behavior, which would provide a much more satisfying causal account.) The sheer volume of these ecological correlations suggest that *something* must be going on here, however.

That problem leads to the challenges of policy response. The obvious response is to make a society more equal, in expectation that many of its social problems will go away. If that were easy, however, it would already have been done. It's therefore a good idea to think of other (halfway?) measures that would help. The authors prefer to advocate the all-or-nothing approach of remaking whole societies, adding an unconvincing connection to climate change for good measure.

Despite these limitations, you won't think of social inequality the same after you read this book.

In The Spirit Level, authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett claim that economic inequality among members of a society leads to many problems including poorer health and shorter life expectancy, more crime and imprisonment, higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse, and obesity, as well as a host of other problems. Inequality negatively impacts all levels of society - the poor, the wealthy and the middle class.
The authors include substantial data to support their assertions. In Part One, "Material Success, Social Failure" they address the current condition of the developed world. In Part Two, "The Costs of Inequality", separate chapters are devoted to each problem area. In Part Three, "A Better Society", the authors outline strategies that could be used to promote greater economic equality. They emphasize that how a society becomes more equal is less important than the fact that it actually does become more equal.
The Spirit Level is an interesting and convincing book. Readers will be hard pressed to deny the correlation between economic inequality and negative social outcomes. One of the most satisfying aspects of the book is that it offers solutions rather than merely highlight problems. The authors are optimistic that the problems can be solved. They encourage us to take action.

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.

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.

"The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is a revelation. At a time when humanity is literally at a turning point between a better future or one of potentially disastrous decline, "The Spirit Level" provides the theoretical and scientific basis needed to start making policy decisions that will work to make this a better world for everyone - if understood and adopted.

Correlating vast amounts of data from around the world and combining it with new insights gained from a variety of scientific fields, Wilkinson and Pickett have put together a new understanding of the way human nature and society interact that both Left and Right need to absorb and understand. The old answers of market forces, big government, tax cuts, social spending, etc. have been placed in a new context that does much to explain why they so often fail to work as expected. Here's what they found.

1) Continued economic growth is not enough to ensure happiness, health, quality of life or social satisfaction. Studies that look at a broad cross section of developed economies find that while all of them may be relatively wealthy compared to the developing world, there are distinct differences in the quality of life their members enjoy. The material wealth of a society by itself is not a guarantee of success for that society.

2) Looking at such measures as community social life and trust, life expectancy, health, drug and alcohol abuse, teen age pregnancy, violence, crime, obesity, educational performance, and social mobility, they find one factor that is strongly correlated with outcomes in ALL of these measures. The greater the degree of relative inequality within a particular group, the worse the outcome. Further, the effects reach across the spectrum from poor all the way up to rich; it's not merely an effect on people at the bottom of a society who suffer. The effect is strongly linked in all of the measures; bad or good results by one measure are generally matched by all the others.

3) The underlying mechanism is this: the degree of inequality experienced by individuals translates into measurable effects on health and behavior which in turn affect everyone within that group. The effects can be seen in comparisons between countries and even between the 50 states within America. The greater the inequality, the worse people and societies do, from the bottom to the top.

"The Spirit Level" is a summary of a combined 40 years of work by the authors. It is designed to present the ideas and insights of the authors in an accessible form. The book is filled with graphs laying out the data for each measure they've studied, there is a clear discussion of exactly what they mean by the criteria they've picked and how each works, such as how they measure inequality, social mobility, etc. There is a long bibliography citing the various academic works and other materials they draw on. The book is also filled with well chosen cartoons to illustrate the concepts they are trying to put across. It's an astounding tour de force; the authors draw on everything from international surveys, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, economics, history, clinical epidemiology, and more.

The world is tossed and turned by the struggles between competing political philosophies that are all too often little more than belief systems whose followers ignore what happens when they are actually put into practice. What Wilkinson and Pickett offer here is something completely different: evidence-based explanations for why the world works the way it does. Belief may be powerful, but belief combined with knowledge and understanding is a lot more effective in solving the problems of the world.

Note: Wilkinson and Pickett do NOT claim to have developed a universal theory of everything. What they have done is uncover and describe fundamental processes at work within human society in a way that both provides answers for long standing problems and offers new lines of investigation to pursue. It's comparable in importance to such things as Medicine and the germ theory of disease, Biology and the theory of evolution, Physics and the concept of Relativity. The insights Wilkinson and Pickett have shared here have a similar potential to reshape the world, and they conclude by speculating on how to put them into practice. (They've also put together a website to further spread word of their work and to stimulate discussion and development of their findings.)

This book should be required reading for all who would venture into politics, public service, punditry, religious leadership, teaching, and business - and anyone else who wants to live in a better world. It should ignite a firestorm of debate and a long-overdue examination of political and social 'truths' that have gone unchallenged for far too long.

Highly recommended.