The Spirit Level (book)
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The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better is a book by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published in 2009. The book is published in the US by Bloomsbury Press (December, 2009) with the new sub-title: "why greater equality makes societies stronger". It was then published in a paperback second edition(UK) in November 2010 with the subtitle, “Why Equality is Better for Everyone”.
The book argues that there are "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption". It claims that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries. The book contains graphs that are available online.
In 2010 the authors published responses to questions about their analysis on the Equality Trust website. As of December 2010, the book had sold more than 100,000 copies.
Contents |
Contents
Part I
Material Success, Social Failure
- The end of an era
- Poverty or inequality?
- How inequality gets under the skin
Part II
The Costs of Inequality
- Community life and social relations
- Mental health and drug use
- Physical health and life expectancy
- Obesity: wider income gaps, wider waists
- Educational performance
- Teenage births: recycling deprivation
- Violence: gaining respect
- Imprisonment and punishment
- Social mobility: unequal opportunities
Part III
A Better Society
- Dysfunctional societies
- Our social inheritance
- Equality and sustainability
- Building the future
Reception
In a review for Nature, Michael Sargent said that The Spirit Level used "statistics from reputable independent sources" and was "a brave and imaginative effort to understand the intractable social problems that face rich democratic countries". He also noted that “The idea that income inequality within a society is more unsettling to health and welfare than income differences between societies has been hotly debated for more than two decades. In the past year alone [2009], six academic analyses have been published in peer-reviewed journals, four of which contradict the hypothesis on statistical grounds. Yet Wilkinson and Pickett do not address these criticisms in their book”. He went on to say, "How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem".
In the London Review of Books University of Cambridge lecturer David Runciman said that the book fudged the issue of its subtitle thesis of its UK first edition, and asked whether it is that “in more equal societies almost everyone does better, or is it simply that everyone does better on average?" Richard Wilkinson responded to the review in a letter, claiming that "while pointing out that we do not have evidence on the fraction of one percent who are very rich, we show that people at all other levels of the social hierarchy do better in more equal societies".
In the European Sociological Review, sociologist John Goldthorpe argued that the book relied too heavily on income inequality over other forms of inequality (including broader economic inequality), and demonstrated a one-dimensional understanding of social stratification, with social class being in effect treated as merely a marker for income. He concluded that much more research was needed to support either the Wilkinson and Pickett "account of the psychosocial generation of the contextual effects of inequality on health or the rival neo-materialist account".
Richard Reeves in The Guardian called the book "a thorough-going attempt to demonstrate scientifically the benefits of a smaller gap between rich and poor", but said there were problems with the book's approach. "Drawing a line through a series of data points signals nothing concrete about statistical significance [...] since they do not provide any statistical analyses, this can't be verified." He later noted that, "The Spirit Level is strongest on Wilkinson's home turf: health. The links between average health outcomes and income inequality do appear strong, and disturbing".
John Kay in The Financial Times said that "the evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams, with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests". Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, described it as "an intellectual flagship of post-crisis compassion, this reader-friendly fusion of number-crunching and moral uplift has helped steer a debate about the route to a kinder, fairer nation. Will Hutton in The Observer described it as "A remarkable new book ...the implications are profound." Roy Hattersley in the New Statesman called it "a crucial contribution to the ideological argument", and the New Statesman listed it as one of their top ten books of the decade.
Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph declared it to be "more a socialist tract than an objective analysis of poverty". Gerry Hassan in "The Scotsman" said that Wilkinson and Pickett's claim that "more equal societies almost always do better" was "a universal, sweeping statement - which cannot be substantiated by most of their data."
In 2010 Tino Sanandaji and others wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they said, "when we attempted to duplicate their findings with data from the U.N. and the OECD, we found no such correlation". The same group of researchers published a report for the Taxpayer's Alliance providing details of their data analysis and coming to the conclusion that "the most straightforward measure of health simply has no robust correlation to income inequality when comparing industrialized countries using standard OECD and UN statistics". Pickett and Wilkinson addressed the Wall Street Journal article in a letter to the Journal
Peter Saunders, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Sussex University, published a report for the think tank Policy Exchange questioning the statistics in The Spirit Level. He claimed that only one of the correlations in the book - that between infant mortality and income inequality - stood up to scrutiny, and that the rest were either false or ambiguous. Wilkinson and Pickett published a response defending each of the claims in the book and accusing Saunders in turn of flawed methodology.
Christopher Snowdon, an independent researcher and adjunct scholar at the Democracy Institute, published a book largely devoted to a critique of The Spirit Level, entitled, The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything. One of its central claims is that Wilkinson excludes certain countries from his data without justification, such as South Korea and the Czech Republic. It also argues that Wilkinson and Pickett falsely claim the existence of a scientific consensus when much of the literature disagrees with their findings. Wilkinson and Pickett released a response to questions from Snowdon and responded to similar criticisms in the Wall Street Journal. Snowdon has in turn responded to their criticisms on his blog.
In July 2010, a debate hosted by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), took place between Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson, Peter Saunders and Christopher Snowdon and was subsequently uploaded to YouTube. Wilkinson and Pickett have since declined further discourse with critics after requesting that "all future debate should take place in peer-reviewed publications."
Impact
75 MPs signed the Equality Trust's 'Equality Pledge' prior to the UK's 2010 general election. Signatories promised to "actively support the case for policies designed to narrow the gap between rich and poor". His first speech as leader to the party conference contained several allusions to the book.
In 2010, Richard Wilkinson was appointed the chair of Islington's Fairness Commission to look at ways of reducing income inequality in the London borough.
See also
