The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

"Spirit Level is an incredible book. It provides the evidence that inequality is bad for us all including the best-off. The book is similar in many ways to the case made by scientists in the 1950s that smoking probably causes lung cancer. These scientists presented a whole series of graphs and diagrams which showed that doctors who smoked had an increased risk of lung cancer: the point of using doctors was that this allowed them to control for other factors. The evidence was decisive and, although tobacco companies tried to argue against it for years, they were unsuccessful to the point that now you can’t find a single building to smoke inside. Now that’s an incredible change. The evidence provided in Spirit Level is as strong as the initial evidence that smoking is bad for you. The correlation between inequality and divorce, inequality and drug addiction, inequality and teenage pregnancy is shown graph after graph. All three main political parties have accepted it now: Labour have said, we accept the thesis of Spirit Level, and we’ve already done a lot (which is wrong, inequality rose under Labour). The Liberals say, we accept the book, but we haven’t really got a policy for those on benefits. And the Conservatives say, we accept the book and we want to stop people knowing about other people’s income so that the psychological effects are less!"

"This is a big ideas book — probably one of the biggest ideas for the 21st century. I’d be very surprised if other people haven’t recommended it on Five Books before. It had the most amazing impact. It was published in 2009 but the number of citations is already well into the thousands. It’s not about children, but from my perspective, it’s important for anybody studying children and childhood, because it’s about the kind of society you want your children to grow up in, how you ensure their future and their wellbeing. What the book documents is a process of unbelievable, uncontrolled inequality on a global scale. I don’t know a country in the world which isn’t becoming more unequal. In the short life of the Young Lives study—we went into the field in 2002—the levels of inequality in the four countries we’re studying have grown astronomically. This book focuses on industrial countries, where the data is better, but the arguments apply increasingly across the board. The focus of the international community is very much on absolute poverty. Many of the ills of modern society are more prevalent amongst the world’s poorest populations — whether it’s mental health, suicide rates, violence, poor education outcomes. The mechanism for lifting the poor out of poverty is assumed to be economic growth. It’s the obsession in this country, with this current government, for example. If you have growth, then so long as you have a good fiscal regime that ensures the rich pay their taxes, you will be able to provide a safety net for people living in absolute poverty. “Inequality is damaging for everyone, and not just the poorest” What the authors are arguing is very different. They say that within society, inequality—in other words, relative poverty—is far more damaging for everyone, and not just the poorest. The rich people also fare less well than those in more equal societies. There’s more anxiety, more stress, there are more social problems generally. In other words, we’re all impacted adversely by inequality. It’s devastating and damaging for everybody. It produces societies that are dysfunctional. This one single phenomenon underlies many of the problems we’re trying to tackle in society today. We’re tackling them all individually, but they’re all, in effect, outcomes of the fundamental problem of inequality. They also make it clear that growth is finite, because of the environment. To continue to encourage growth to lift people out of poverty is not the way forward. Rather, you have to be much more serious about addressing inequality. It’s really disturbing that this argument, which has impacted a lot of people’s thinking, is not being translated into political action in many countries. They’re not focusing the attention where it needs to go. The processes of accumulation that are experienced by a tiny minority of people within countries or even globally are rampant and out of control, because they’re not being legislated for in most countries. That’s why four members of the family that control Walmart own the equivalent wealth to 40% of the American population. Yes, it’s using big statistical datasets to make comparisons. They’re saying, ‘Let’s stop just focusing on safety nets and growth, let’s actually look at how we can deal with redistribution in a much more fundamental way.’ And it provides the data, the evidence, at the macro level. All the books I’ve chosen are very data driven, but with very different kinds of data and operating at very different levels. But often adding up to very similar conclusions, about everyday human processes of learning and development, what’s good for our well being, what’s bad for our wellbeing, how we grow strong, how we become vulnerable — the kind of values we’re living in in society. But The Spirit Level book is very much at the national level — comparing Scandinavian countries, countries considered to be enlightened, with countries that have much bigger social problems. Yes, the US data is good because you can differentiate between the states. That tells you about specific impacts of inequality within a particular country, and the inequalities in the US are really dramatic. They’re dramatic here too, but slightly less so, because you do have a welfare state, such as a free health service. We do have certain safety nets that are a consequence of redistribution. There isn’t that level of redistribution in the US because, ultimately, the government is not so pervasive in people’s lives. Even, as in the case of Obamacare, when there have been attempts to create a redistributive safety net effect, there’s been resistance, including from the very people who would most benefit. That’s a really perverse context, America. That’s, in large part, because many Americans have a historical resistance to intervention by the state. That’s to do with the fact that many left Europe, where they faced religious persecution, in search of individual autonomy and freedom from interference by outsiders."

"What I liked especially about The Spirit Level is the way it builds a case that inequality is phenomenally dysfunctional. Different states in the US, with different levels of equality, have different levels of teenage pregnancy or homicide. It all comes back to inequality, and the book shows that high levels of inequality are completely dysfunctional. I wanted to position this book in a family of five books because what was absent, I felt, from Wilkinson and Pickett’s work – which is hugely impressive in the data they’ve marshalled and the correlations they’ve assembled, despite criticisms from some quarters – is that it needed to nest itself in the work of David Miller and Amartya Sen. Inequality is driving these dysfunctional behaviours, but it raises the question of why, and what’s the remedy? There I felt that the book was less well thought through. One of the reasons why I think inequality has these toxic outcomes that they describe is its interrelationship with felt fairness. I would have liked to see them push on, and cross-reference their numbers with societies which have displayed a better relationship between desert and outcome than others. I would also have liked to see the book open up to the debate that Amartya Sen, another author I’ve identified here, puts on the table."