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
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