[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Spirit Level

Wed Jun 3 18:45:11 MDT 2009

Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett

Penguin Books (2009)

Review by John Carey

The Sunday Times (March 08 2009)

This is a book with a big idea, big enough to change political thinking,
and bigger than its authors at first intended. The problem they
originally set out to solve was why health within a population gets
progressively worse further down the social scale; they estimate that
together they have clocked up more than fifty person-years gathering
information from research teams across the globe. Their eureka moment
came when they thought of putting the medical data alongside figures
showing the extent of economic inequality within each country. They say
modestly that since dependable statistics both on health and on income
distribution are internationally available, it was only a matter of time
before someone put the two together. All the same, they are the first to
have done so.

Their book charts the level of health and social problems - as many as
they could find reliable figures for - against the level of income
inequality in twenty of the world's richest nations, and in each of the
fifty United States. They allocate a brief chapter to each problem,
supplying graphs that display the evidence starkly and unarguably. What
they find is that, in states and countries where there is a big gap
between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol
abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate
is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children's educational
performance and literacy scores are worse. The Scandinavian countries
and Japan consistently come at the positive end of this spectrum. They
have the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes, and the
best record of psycho-social health. The countries with the widest gulf
between rich and poor, and the highest incidence of most health and
social problems, are Britain, America and Portugal.

Richard Wilkinson, a professor of medical epidemiology at Nottingham
University, and Kate Pickett, a lecturer in epidemiology at York
University, emphasise that it is not only the poor who suffer from the
effects of inequality, but the majority of the population. For example,
rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole
population in the most unequal than in the least unequal societies in
their survey. One explanation, they suggest, is that inequality
increases stress right across society, not just among the least
advantaged. Much research has been done on the stress hormone cortisol,
which can be measured in saliva or blood, and it emerges that chronic
stress affects the neural system and in turn the immune system. When
stressed, we are more prone to depression and anxiety, and more likely
to develop a host of bodily ills including heart disease, obesity, drug
addiction, liability to infection and rapid ageing.

Societies where incomes are relatively equal have low levels of stress
and high levels of trust, so that people feel secure and see others as
co-operative. In unequal societies, by contrast, the rich suffer from
fear of the poor, while those lower down the social order experience
status anxiety, looking upon those who are more successful with
bitterness and upon themselves with shame. In the 1980s and 1990s, when
inequality was rapidly rising in Britain and America, the rich bought
homesecurity systems, and started to drive 4x4s with names such as
Defender and Crossfire, reflecting a need to intimidate attackers.
Meanwhile the poor grew obese on comfort foods and took more legal and
illegal drugs. In 2005, doctors in England alone wrote 29 million
prescriptions for antidepressants, costing the NHS GBP 400 million .

Status anxiety and how we respond to it are basic, it seems, to our
animal natures. In an experiment with macaque monkeys, the animals were
housed in groups, and the social hierarchies that developed among them
were observed. Then the monkeys were taught to administer cocaine to
themselves by pressing a lever. The dominant monkeys in each group were
relatively abstemious, but the subordinate monkeys took a lot of cocaine
to medicate themselves against the pain of low social status. In a
similar experiment, high-status monkeys from different groups were
housed together, so that some of them became low status. The downwardly
mobile monkeys accumulated abdominal fat and developed a rapid build-up
of atherosclerosis in their arteries, just like humans.

The different social problems that stem from income inequality often,
Wilkinson and Pickett show, form circuits or spirals. Babies born to
teenage mothers are at greater risk, as they grow up, of educational
failure, juvenile crime, and becoming teenage parents themselves. In
societies with greater income inequality, more people are sent to
prison, and less is spent on education and welfare. In Britain the
prison population has doubled since 1990; in America it has quadrupled
since the late 1970s. American states with a wide gap between rich and
poor are likelier to retain the death penalty, and to hand out long
sentences for minor crimes. In California in 2004, there were 360 people
serving life sentences for shoplifting. California has built only one
new college since 1984, but 21 new prisons. Whereas societies with high
income differentials are exceptionally punitive, in Japan imprisonment
rates are low and offenders who confess their crimes and express a
desire to reform are generally trusted to do so by the judiciary and the
public.

The authors' method is objective and scientific, so that the human
distress behind their statistics mostly remains hidden. But when they
quote from interviews conducted by social researchers, passion and
resentment flood into their book. A working-class man in Rotherham tells
of the shame he felt having to sit next to a middle-class woman ("this
stuck-up cow, you know, slim, attractive"); how he felt overweight and
started sweating; how he imagined her thinking, "listen, low-life, don't
even come near me. We pay to get away from scum like you." In half a
page it tells you more about the pain of inequality than any play or
novel could.

It might be said that The Spirit Level merely formulates what everyone
has always felt. Western European utopias have almost all been
egalitarian. Polls in Britain over the past twenty years show that the
proportion of the population who think income differences too big is on
average eighty per cent. But what is new about their book, the authors
insist, is that it turns personal intuitions into publicly demonstrable
facts. With the evidence they have supplied, politicians now have a
chance to "do genuine good". By reducing income inequality, they can
improve the health and wellbeing of the whole population. How this
should be effected, Wilkinson and Pickett do not think it is their job
to say, but increasing top tax rates or legislating to limit maximum pay
are possibilities they suggest. They warn, though, that short-term
remedies like this could be reversed by a change of government, and that
we need to find ways of rooting greater equality more deeply in our
society. This is their book's mission, and they have set up a
not-for-profit trust (equalitytrust.org) to make the evidence they set
out better known. One illusion that, cheeringly, they hope to dispel is
that the super-rich are some kind of asset we should all cherish, rather
than, from the viewpoint of social health, the equivalent of the seven
plagues of Egypt.

The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Allen Lane GBP 20 416 pages

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