There are books that can give a reader great insight into the world around us. For me, "The Spirit Level," is such a book. It helps to explain why so many in the U.S. say that we are "on the wrong path."
The premise or thesis of the book is quite simple: The disparity of wealth within countries, for the most part, explains why all kinds of things go wrong, or, more importantly, appear to be going wrong. The more the inequality, the more distrust there is among residents; thus, we have our perceived problems with health care, education, the number of people in prisons, immigration policies and more. The book includes charts to emphasize, if not prove, its thesis and advice.
The authors are a married couple from England. Both are professors associated with medicine and health care. A forward to the book is by American author Robert Reich.
An important part of the book comes in the form of its many graphs, which show how countries and/or states within countries compare on an X/Y graph of related statistics. For example, one chart compares the national per capita income vs. life expectancy amongst countries. Per the graph, Cuba, Chile and Costa Rica are amongst the countries with a relatively low per capita income and relatively high life-expectancy numbers. But despite being the country with the highest per capita income in the world, the U.S., on this same chart, is shown to be behind dozens of other countries for life expectancy. The beauty of the graphic presentations is to show statistics visually. It is a very effective technique, and an important contribution of the book.
Much less used, but still of importance are some cartoons. My favorite shows a guy in the back seat of a car being driven through what looks like a dilapidated part of a large city. Says the guy to his driver in the front seat,"I just got a $200,000 tax cut...I love this country!...But why is it such a DUMP?!"
The thesis of the book is stated several times, but none is better than the following: "The relationship between inequality and the prevalence of health and social problems...suggest that if the United States were to reduce its income inequality to something like the average of the four most equal of the rich countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland), the proportion of the population feeling they could trust others might rise by 75 per cent - presumably with matching improvements in the quality of community life; and of mental illness and obesity might similarly each be cut by almost two-thirds, teenage birth rates could be more than halved, prison populations might be reduced by 75 percent, and people could live longer, while working the equivalent of two months less per year."
While that is a mouthful, and it may seem, at first blush, simplistic, the book, I think, does an excellent job in convincing the reader that there is logic behind the thesis - and that progress in the quest for reduced inequality benefits everyone, from top to bottom.
Similar to the ideas of author Francis Fukuyama in his book, "The End of History, and The Last Man," the authors of this book say that "The populations of rich countries have gotten to the end of a long historical journey." Per the authors, "....as countries get richer, further increases in average living standards do less and less for health." And as great infectious diseases are eliminated, "we are left with the so-called diseases of affluence."
So which are the countries -- measured by how much richer are the top 20 percent vs. the bottom 20 percent -- are the most unequal? They are Singapore, the USA, Portugal and the UK, in that order. And the least unequal: Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden. And how do these countries look on a graph of per capita income vs. an index of health and social problems? Japan is at the bottom left, with its combination of low income inequality and low rating on the index of health and social problems. At the top right is the USA, easily ahead of Portugal and the UK. (For some reason, Singapore is not on this graph.) The authors tell us that only the developed countries of the world were included in these graphs, for the most part, and that countries of less than about five million people were not included. (China and Russia are not included for reasons I did not find explained.)
When looking at a graph of U.S. states, income inequality and the index of health and social problems, the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana come out the worst both in income inequality and in health and social problems. Tucked into all this is the finding that the likelihood of breast cancer in women is not related to inequality. Also mentioned is that the issue of health inequality became a popular public health issue in the 1880s.
There are really three themes in this book. The first is to make the case of inequality of wealth and the related problems it creates. The second is to look at some of the details of the problems created. The third is to convince us that reducing inequality is worth the effort.
There is a chapter on rising anxiety and its effects brought about by inequality that introduces the part of the book called, "The Costs of Inequality." In this section, Hurricane Katrina is brought up as an example of the exposure of inequality in the New Orleans area. It is here that the authors introduce the essential element of trust: The more inequality there is in a country or state, the less trust there is amongst its residents. A chart shows that Singapore, Portugal and the U.S. rank highest in inequality and lowest in trust, while the opposite is true for Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden. In the first group, Portugal is the worst, with 90% of its residents saying that "most people cannot be trusted." The U.S. comes in at a bit more than 60% with this view.
The authors point out some important benefits to trust:
* People with high levels of trust live longer
* They see others as co-operative rather than competitive
* They tend to believe in a common culture
* They tend to give more in charity in their country and in foreign aid
But as we move on in the book to the topic of mental illness, we're told that "one in four of (American) adults have been mentally ill in the past year." Huh? That would seem a bit high to me. But in a chart comparing income inequality and incidents of mental illness, the U.S. is out in the negative lead by far, with Japan on the other end, correlated with low numbers of incidences of mental illness coupled with a relatively low income inequality. A good point made in this section is that low social "status" is related to poor physical health.
An easy area to criticize the U.S. is in the area of health care spending vs. outcomes. The U.S., of course, spends far more than any other country, per capita, on health care. Yet, it ranks well behind most developed countries for the age of life-expectancy. In contrast, Japan comes in relatively low in its per capita spending, but it is the best in the world for life expectancy. In short, "more egalitarian societies tend to be healthier." As for U.S. states, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana have the most extreme correlations between income inequalities and life expectancies, while the state of Hawaii is the clear winner on the other end. The state of Minnesota comes in second to Hawaii in this regard. Both have relatively high life-expectancy numbers, while being relatively low in income inequality.
Obesity is another area for USA bashing. Per the book, three-quarters of us are now "overweight," with about one-third being technically "obese." In a chart on the subject, the U.S. is the clear winner in the correlation between the percentage of those obese and income equality. Japan is the clear winner on the other end. As for our states, Texas tops Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama in the percentage of those obese, with Colorado and Montana at the other end. Both charts show definite correlations between inequality and obesity. There are about a dozen pages in the book explaining the reasons that inequality causes people to be overweight and/or obese.
One of the interesting attributes of the charts is to not only show the highs and the lows, but to show the tendencies of correlation. The more plots there are on the graph along the resulting line, the more the correlation, and vice versa. Among all the charts in the book, which must be about 50, the one chart that seems to show the highest correlation, for whatever reason, appears to be with income inequality and the dropout rate in high schools. The higher the inequality, the higher the percentage of drop outs, pure and simple. Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and Louisiana come out at the one end with the highest percentage and the most inequality, while Arkansas and Utah are at the other end.
Probably the most interesting chart to me is the one that compares inequality with the percentage of 15-year-olds who aspire to and/or are expecting low-skilled jobs. Here, the U.S. shows less than 15% of its youth with this aspiration, coupled with the highest income equality, and Japan on the other end with about 50% of its youth expecting to work in low-skilled labor. Japan, of course, has the lowest income inequality of the developed countries. Kids in France and Switzerland come in at about 40% with these expectations. Greece and Portugal come closest to the U.S., down at about 18%.
But I'm only about half way through the book at this point, so I'd better add some summary points:
* The U.S. has the highest percentage of teenage mothers, by far, with, you've got it, Japan on the other end, with Sweden, Denmark and Finland also in that area.
* The U.S. has the highest percentage of homicides, by far, with Japan on the other end. For some reason(s), Finland, with a very low income inequality has a relatively high percentage of homicides.
* Another chart with a relatively tight correlation line compares income inequality with prisoners per 100,000. The U.S. and Singapore are the clear winners at one end, with Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden at the other. For U.S. states, it is Texas and Louisiana on top, with Minnesota and North Dakota at the other end.
The concluding section, entitled, "A Better Society," is where the authors make the pitch that reducing inequality is worth the effort, saying, "...the differences between more and less equal societies are large - problems are anything between three times to ten times as common in the more unequal societies." And the authors stress that the data clearly shows that "greater equality brings substantial gains even in the top occupational class and among the richest or best-educated quarter or third of the population...."
But any changes to be made clearly have to take into considerations the contradictions in human nature. We can be best friends or we can be highly competitive. Thomas Hobbes talked about this, once saying that the most important task of government is simply to keep the peace. Not mentioned in the book, as such, are the arguments about "equality" vs. "freedom." And there are those who believe in a "zero-sum game." But the authors point out that for more than 90% of our existence, we humans have lived in highly egalitarian societies. They say, without further explanation, that "Modern inequality arose and spread with the development of agriculture." Seems like a topic, in itself, for another book or two.
But the authors are not through. They make a case against consumerism run amuck. The say, "Greater equality gives us the crucial key to reducing the cultural pressure to consume....Growth is a substitute for equality of income....(but) greater equality makes growth much less necessary." The flip side of this is that "inequality ratchets up the competitive pressure to consume..., leading people to save less and consume more."
Per the authors, "We need to create more equal societies more able to meet our real social needs." And, per the authors, this effort is more likely to be a grass-roots movement than one via government. Maybe that is, in part, what the Occupy Movement is all about. But the authors point out that reducing inequality is not always a tax policy issue. They point out that Japan maintains low inequality without a highly progressive tax policy. And the argument for reduced inequality is not necessarily about larger governments. Nor is it necessarily about democratic vs. centralized, one-party governments.
The book points out and gives credit to advances that have been made in the past: the abolition of slavery, the development of public education and other public services, the enactments of Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, laws for women's rights and protections against discriminations because of sexual orientation, religion, race or culture.
But there is obviously more to be done. In the midst of inequality that has risen over the past 40 years, in the U.S., the U.K. and many other developed countries, the authors tell us that "The initial task is to gain a widespread public understanding of what is at stake....We know that more egalitarian countries live well, with high living standards and much better social environments." The final sentence of the book reads, "The role of this book is to point out that greater equality is the material foundation on which better social relations are built."
But before we conclude, I'd like to point out one of the great discrepancies in the comparisons with income inequalities that is covered in the book. It comes in the area of recycling. On top of the heap for recycling are the countries with the most inequality: The U.S., Portugal and the U.K. At the other end is our friend Japan, with Sweden right alongside. Figure that one out.
And back to my premise that this is a very important book, I feel that this is a book that complements other very good books I have read and reviewed: "The End of Poverty," "The End of History and The Last Man," "Supercapitalism," "Screwed," "The World is Flat", "The End of Work" and others.
Finally, if you want more about the movement to reduce inequality, take a look at the website suggested by the book: [...]
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David Gifford
Most important book you will ever read
Reviewed in Australia on April 21, 2021