Danny Dorling's Reading List

"The most common way to talk about inequality is in terms of money (either in terms of inequality of income, the amount you get every month, or the other much more important way which is wealth). However, when it comes to human happiness the inequalities which matter most aren’t financial. They are in terms of health or education. When it really comes down to it, what matters most is that are you well, that you are going to live a long life, that your children are going to live a long life, and so on. Personally, I am mostly interested in the way these inequalities show themselves geographically; differences which relate to where people were born. It’s common to look at inequalities in terms of men and women, or different ethnic groups, but there is a gap in the market in terms of looking at inequalities in terms of place. Not many people think that inequality is a good thing in its own right. Even Margaret Thatcher believed that her policies would reduce inequality: she set the target in 1985 that inequality would fall drastically by 2000. However, in countries that become very unequal beliefs form which underpin inequality and justify it, only not directly. These beliefs arise because human beings try to make sense of and validate the world around them. In my book, Why Social Inequality Persists, I argue that there are five main beliefs. The first is a belief in elitism; people now believe, much more than they used to, that it is worth investing a lot of money in the education of a very small number of young people. Another is that prejudice is natural. You often hear people saying that social mobility is unlikely because the middle class produce children who are naturally cleverer. The three other beliefs are that exclusion is necessary, that greed is good that and despair is inevitable. It becomes very hard to argue against inequality when, under the surface, arguments are beginning to be made that suggest that it’s rational to have inequality. This is a very complicated book so you have to be prepared for a big read: you can tell that the author, Avner Offer, spent years and years in libraries just piecing together this complex story. It is a sort of social history of the United States and British society, starting in the 1950s. It looks at the question of why there is this ‘addiction’ to material goods – what they make people feel about their social status, and why they make people feel like ‘the big man’. Avner Offer is actually a fellow at All Souls College in Oxford (‘the centre of the establishment’ as John Redwood’s presence there implied) and yet Offer is quietly and subtly arguing that much of the whole system is wrong. People expect their happiness to increase with money. If you hear that your salary is going to increase by 50 per cent, then it’s natural to think that you are going to be happier. But the reality is that you’ll feel happy for a very short amount of time, and then you’ll acclimatise to it. There has been a huge increase in material wealth over the last 150 years and this hasn’t been accompanied by an increase in well-being. If anything, the increase has been in things like anxiety and depression. Self-harming rates among young women, according to admissions into A&E, and similar severe indications, are now one in three. I think what Avner Offer is saying is that if you look at the way we use all this wealth, we could probably be happier on less wealth than we currently have, better shared out."

"Well, Oliver James’s most famous book is actually called Affluenza. The book which I have chosen, The Selfish Capitalist, is a compilation of all the academic evidence behind it; Affluenza itself is mostly a series of interviews done with people all around the world. He talks about the incredibly high rates of mental illness which tend to accompany affluence; according to the WHO, one in four Americans is mentally ill; one in ten people in Scotland is taking Prozac or a similar anti-depressant. Oliver James argues that these people are taking drugs and suffering these illnesses for good reasons: society provides them with good reasons for being anxious. Not really: it’s the inequality in wealthy societies which is the problem. Oliver James finds that it is the unequal affluent countries in the world that have the highest rates of depression. The most content countries, on the other hand, where people trust each other and crime rates are low and so on, are the more egalitarian countries; Japan, Korea and the Scandinavian countries, for example. One thing that creates unhappiness in unequal societies is that they are highly fragmented. There has been research done in the States scanning the brains of students as they see a homeless person: the evidence suggests that they don’t recognise them as human. It was only when they asked the question ‘Do you think that person is hungry?’ that suddenly all the emotions fire up. It’s a survival mechanism. If you live in a very unequal society, you barely even see people who are from different social classes."

"Super Rich is trying to illustrate how strange life is in such an unequal society. Because this state of social inequality is the only reality many of us have known, we can’t imagine how things might have been different. George Irvin argues that as recently as the 1970s the United States and Britain used to be far better at helping the less well off, in a way that we don’t any more. For example, there was a point during the Second World War when Roosevelt wanted people to have 100 per cent income tax when they were earning over the equivalent of £200,000. He thought that nobody needed more than that. Irvin’s book tries to explain why most other rich countries in the world still advocate higher rates of redistribution than the United States and Britain, and how we have got ourselves into this mess."

"Stuffed and Starved considers international inequality rather than how inequality is manifest amongst the billion richest, as in the other books. Raj Patel is looking at the role wealthy nations play in causing poverty in the developing world. The most dramatic example to have occurred recently is that in 2005 hedge funds predicted a crash in various commodities; speculations which later caused grain prices to hike. For the first time in recent decades, we saw an increase in the number of children starving. This happened not because the rich people got together and said, ‘How can we make poor people starve?’, but because hedge funds pursue profit and pay little attention to how their actions affect the rest of the world. I’m optimistic about the UN particularly because when the UN was formed in 1944 it didn’t even mention the poor – it was established purely to stop another world war. However, it has transformed so much in its 50 years that now its essential purpose is to try and end world poverty. These problems have to be solved collectively and so the UN is the right sort of institution to look towards, alongside acting locally."

"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!"

"Yes, it’s about the politics of obesity and fatness, but it also links that to our reliance on oil. There’s a lovely graph at the beginning of the book, which shows a really high correlation between how much petrol or gasoline people use in affluent countries per head and obesity. Essentially, the more petrol we use, the fatter we become – which is depressing. Although there’s a positive side to it as well, because it means that if we do wean ourselves off oil, we’re going to get thinner. I once spent a week in Santa Barbara walking, and I was frequently stopped by the police! They just assumed you must be up to no good if you were walking along the edge of the road. Ian Roberts’s background is medicine – trauma surgery, in particular. That’s how he got into this. The book is about road traffic accidents and the direct harm that cars cause us. Cars are the biggest killer of older children and young adults in Britain. But he’s managed to link our over-reliance on cars not just to the immediate effect on our health, but also its long-term effects. If we manage to survive and not be hit by a car or injured as a youngster, then, if we live in a country that has reliance on petrol, we’re all, on average, a bit larger. It isn’t just that there are more fat people – it’s that the whole weight distribution moves across. What it means to be thin is never quite as thin as it used to. That’s not good for our bodies. Ian Roberts is clearly a cycling advocate. Towards the end of the book, he gets into just how efficient travelling by bicycle is: it’s more efficient than walking. And the major problem for cycling is, of course, cars. He’s trying to work out a way in which we can move towards being healthier, thinner, and less reliant on petrol. Then there will be fewer wars around the world to get petrol. We are, yes. We are more obese than most people in Western Europe, although less than the average American, who does hit the obesity tops. The least obese country is Japan. People are a lot thinner in Japan, and that has to do with a lot less reliance on cars and a better public transport system. Also, a lot of walking and keeping fit, and a lot of cycling. Often people in Japan only have a single child. The mother will have a bike with a seat at the front, and the child goes in the seat. It’s normal in towns and cities not to have a car but to rely on your bike to get around. That leads to a much healthier population. Yes, but the two are circular. You eat a better diet if you lead a healthier life. If you live in a place where you’re driving a lot – say you’re in LA, and have a long commute – you might well pull into a burger bar, get some burgers and eat them in your car in a traffic jam. These things are all connected. The Japanese could easily be as fat as the Americans. We know this, because when you take Japanese people and move them to America, they become fatter. Mexicans as well. Also, obesity within Mexico increases the nearer you get to the border with the US."

"It’s a rude title but it does serve as a warning for what’s in the book. I put it in because there are a whole series of books by comics coming out now. These books are really insightful about life in Britain, and particularly the downsides of life, what’s unfair and unequal. They can get away with it, and they do it well, partly because they’re funny. If you’re telling lots of jokes, it’s easier to talk about what’s bad about a country without it becoming so depressing that you don’t want to read the book. Frankie Boyle’s book is about some particularly rough parts of Glasgow that he grew up in, and about the bad sides of the country. But it’s fun to read. If you want a book about the bottom end of British life that’s also fun to read, this is the one to get. It’s not the kind of heart-warming stereotype – like those books on Ireland: “We were poor but we were happy.” This is: “We were poor, we weren’t happy, but we could tell good jokes.” Pretty shit for him, yes. He was brought up on one of those estates that was built for slum clearance on the edge of Glasgow. It was pretty dire. It’s one of those places where there has to be something strange or unusual about you if you’re going to get out. Clearly, Frankie Boyle was very sarcastic and could tell jokes. I was talking to a vicar recently – actually from the other side of Glasgow to where Frankie grew up – and I asked him what advice he gives young people. He said: “Get a strange hobby like keeping reptiles. Because then you become the person with the reptile shop and you can get out.” It may sound like strange advice, but it’s probably easier than making it on the comedy circuit."

"Joe Moran is absolutely brilliant. He can take a subject that seems like the most boring subject (he wrote a book about queuing before, Queuing for Beginners ) and make it fascinating. You’ve got to know Britain, otherwise it’s a bit meaningless, but if I had to recommend just one of these books, I’d say please read Joe Moran’s On Roads . The other reason for picking Joe’s book is slightly personal, in that he begins with the A57. I actually live on the A57: it’s the road that goes all the way from Liverpool across to the Yorkshire coast. It’s a very strange road. It’s one of the hidden trunk roads of Britain. This sounds very geeky. I’m not into roads. No. I’m not at all interested in roads – I don’t even drive a car. But Joe’s book actually makes them interesting. He is able to explain the nature of social change across the country, and the quirks of Englishness, from the point of view of what’s happened to our roads. There are strange parts of our motorway system, for instance within spaghetti junctions, that you can’t actually get to. There are parts of defunct flyovers still there, apparently. Lots of things like that. It sounds odd – but Joe makes fascinating a subject that sounds more boring than watching paint dry. It revealed that there are lots of people who have tried very hard to make things work better from a technical point of view. For instance, the exact way in which our road signs are designed is a saga in itself. The font, the height of the lettering, how long a word you’re allowed to put on a road sign. There was a big battle by two sets of people to try to get different fonts on the British road signs, which in a way have become a model for the European road signs. The road sign font designers ended up driving cars very fast, while trying to read signs. Obviously the whole point of a road sign is that you should be able to read it in a very short amount of time while travelling at speed. But dozens and dozens of (almost all) men – quite geeky men – have done a lot of work, to get all the curves of roads worked out, and everything else about them that we take for granted. You just think it’s obvious, that’s how a road should be, until you read about the history and the battles that there were over these roads. I don’t like cars and I don’t like petrol, but it made even someone like me warm to the roads and to the transport engineers. He does it in a very human way. He’s interested in the people, he’s not really that interested in the technology of the road. Yes, well Joe tells you why it’s called the M3, the real story behind that. No. He’s not into that at all, Joe Moran. He doesn’t appear to have an agenda, or if he has an agenda it’s so subtle I couldn’t notice it. He just wants us to appreciate our roads. He’s into appreciating everyday objects. I can imagine him writing a book about alarm clocks, and telling us things we never knew about alarm clocks. It makes you realise that these things have quite an incredible history behind them. There is no reason for our road system to be like it is. The British could easily have had a more American road system, with far fewer pavements etc, if things had gone a different way."

"Bauman churns out more than a book a year at the moment, and he’s very emeritus, he’s been retired for some time. I’m a fan of his books in general, though sometimes he does go on a bit. This one is nice. It’s 44 letters about a wide range of issues, so you can pick and choose. The reason I picked it is that he makes a comment early on about the nature of the current crash and economic recession in Britain. He says how different it is in the North of England compared with London. In effect, London has been bailed out now: the crash came and the crash went. But it’s still being felt deeply in the North. There’s a sense of bitterness in that the origins of the crash had nothing to do with the North of England, but the North of England is being left with more and more of the repercussions. It’s interesting to read a description written by a man whose origins were partly Polish – he was a refugee from Germany – for Italians, talking about the place you happen to be living in. Also, he’s talking from the point of view of someone who is now very old. It’s reading about your life as if someone is talking about it incidentally, and it feels slightly uncomfortable. When Frankie Boyle was writing about Glasgow I got exactly the same uncomfortable feeling, of having the present being described very analytically. It’s not always a very happy picture that is being painted. Well, I’m in Sheffield now. Sheffield has probably been the most cut city in Britain for various reasons. There’s quite a competition between various cities at the moment, to claim that they’ve had the most cuts. All the cuts kicked in in April, that’s when the money stopped. People have been sacked, we’ve lost lots of people working in local authorities. The book is about many other things – this is just one letter of the 44 – but it’s the way he describes our modern times, it’s almost like somebody from another planet is describing life on earth. He’s detached enough so that he describes it as it is, and you read it and you go, “Yes, it is pretty awful.” But again, not much of an agenda. He’s not writing it specifically for people in Britain, he’s writing about the general situation we find ourselves in. But he’s been emeritus professor at Leeds for ages, so he’s not ignorant of the situation. I think he still lives near Leeds or in Leeds. A bit angry, a bit miserable, but also a sense of denial among a lot of people. People think that if they haven’t been cut, they’ll be OK, but there are four more years of cuts to come. The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, plans that the United Kingdom will soon spend less through its government as a percentage of GDP than anywhere else in Western Europe, and less than the US plans to spend by 2015. George Osborne can only do this with the support of the prime minister, David Cameron, and the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg . There’s a huge hatred here for Nick Clegg, which is largely, but not entirely, his fault. He is the local MP for the bit of Sheffield I’m in. We did have 12 sets of cuts, including £112m in cuts announced in one week, last summer. That may have been because he was deputy prime minister, to show he was loyal to the government. The saddest thing is watching young people not getting jobs, including our graduates and our postgraduate students. It appears as if almost no one is being hired under the age of 35. That’s by far the biggest cut, the lack of hirings. The other thing is the way we now accept things that we wouldn’t have accepted a year ago, like university fees of £9,000. And that’s just your fees! The Daily Mail worked out that along with the other debts that students have, to buy food and so on, you’re looking at a £70,000 debt for students. You couldn’t have imposed this on the population a year ago. Bauman has been writing about dystopias for years. His books are about how bad things are, and in a sense reality has caught up with him. It may have been this bad, but it didn’t feel this bad in Britain, particularly in the boom years. Whereas now it actually is as bad economically, and it’s beginning to feel as bad psychologically. Reality is moving towards what Bauman has been writing about for some time. No, just one of the letters is. He generally talks about advanced capitalism and what’s wrong with it, how it can’t carry on like it is etc. But in an interesting way, it’s more nuanced than is the work of some younger writers. It means you can’t get hold of it, it’s very hard to understand what’s happening, it’s moving around. I think he means almost like mercury, a liquid metal. It’s very hard to get a sense of reality at the moment: you think things are a certain way, and then suddenly the banks have crashed and the money has run out. It’s about insecurity."

"Again, this is a bit indulgent because it’s set in Crosspool which is the suburb I live in. It’s very much about what this part of suburban Sheffield was like in the 1980s, and all the secrets behind people’s front doors. It’s a bit uncanny to read when it’s that close to home, and it also rings quite true. This is the affluent side of Sheffield, so in The Northern Clemency it’s the part of Sheffield where the man who is keeping the power station running during the miners’ strike lives. His son is one of the demonstrators who protested with the miners, though they didn’t want his help because he was a posh boy. It’s about middle-class insecurity and duplicity really. It’s about people lying to each other. It’s a little bit depressing, the reality behind the front doors of what life in Britain is like. In the middle of Britain there is the middle class. The middle of Britain isn’t the very rich people, it isn’t the very poor people, it is the middle class. The book shows that the middle class put a lot of effort into making it appear that their lives are well sorted out and they’re comfortable. The neat little rows of suburban houses are all about looking organised and being organised. In fact, often, behind the front doors, their households are full of arguments and pretence and upsets. The book is a bit uncomfortable, but it is fiction, it’s a novel, so it’s less uncomfortable to read than some of the more factual books I’ve chosen. Also, it works for people of a particular age: you have to have been a teenager or a bit older in the 1980s for the book to really work for you. But all these books, taken together, help create an image of what I think a lot of life in Britain is about today. It’s about people driving too much and getting too fat; it’s about life being shit in the poorest parts and that getting worse; it’s about the mundane reality of a motorway system and a set of trunk roads that holds it all physically together; it’s about a sense of great insecurity as to just how firm the concrete supporting our social system really is; and it is about how we act and live our lives as if everything is OK, when so very often we are only just managing to hold it all together and keep up appearances, while slowly sinking into debt and despondency. There is a huge amount of humour in all these books and quite a lot of sarcasm, but there is also an underlying sense that this is not how we should be living right now."