Last Straw

It’s been a long time com­ing but two people, Richard Wilkin­son and Kate Pick­ett, have finally put the num­bers together and con­clus­ively shown that mod­ern social prob­lems are sub­stan­tially worse in those soci­et­ies with wider gaps between rich and poor.

Any curs­ory look at the world tells you this but these are the first people to show it sci­en­tific­ally. This, I would sug­gest, is going to be huge. The implic­a­tions are profound.

Will Hut­ton, writ­ing for The Guard­ian:

Income inequal­ity, they show bey­ond any doubt, is not just bad for those at the bot­tom but for every­one. More unequal soci­et­ies are socially dys­func­tional across the board. There is more teen­age preg­nancy, men­tal ill­ness, higher prison pop­u­la­tions, more murders, higher obesity and less numer­acy and lit­er­acy in more unequal soci­et­ies. Even the rich report more men­tal ill health and have lower life expect­an­cies than their peers in less unequal societies.

They have pro­duced a book on their find­ings called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Soci­et­ies Almost Always Do Bet­ter. And they’ve also cre­ated web­site, equalitytrust.org, to make the evid­ence they set out bet­ter known.

As John Carey points out in his review of their book in the Times: “It might be said that The Spirit Level merely for­mu­lates what every­one has always felt.”

Now maybe we can get on with chan­ging a few things around here.

External links:

• equalitytrust.org
• The Guardian’s rep­res­ent­a­tion of the data (PDF)
• Audio of inter­view with Richard Wilkin­son and Kate Pick­ett who explain their findings
• Look no fur­ther than inequal­ity for the source of all our ills | 15 March
• The the­ory of everything | 12 march 2009
• The Spirit Level | 8 March 2009
• An empir­ical argu­ment for the left, No Right Turn | 9 April 2009