What I find so great about the findings in The Spirit Level is that they completely change the rules of the debate on income equality.
No longer does one need rely on grounds of fairness and justice, which fall on the deaf ears of a world succumbed to the fallacies of social Darwinism, or “survival of the fittest,” and the idea of “wealth creators.”
Now, given the deluge of data, it’s a practical question of whether you want to live in a society with low rates of social problems or high rates of social problems. A no-brainer as they say.
The Spirit Level has opened my eyes to a couple of things too. One is the importance of poor countries to get richer. Wealth has a huge role to play in raising living standards in poor countries. I used to think developing countries had something we didn’t and that they would lose this something as they became richer. What I now realise is that it’s not wealth that takes this something away but inequality.
The other thing it’s opened my eyes to is the different way in which some countries have acheived greater income equality. Sweden, for example, gets its greater equality through redistribution, through taxes and benefits, and public services provided by a big state. In contrast, Japan has a greater equality of incomes before redistribution. Differences in Japanese earnings are smaller even before taxes and benefits. Check out the Equality Trust’s ‘Remedies’ webpage for more.