The Spirit Level

[sleigh]

This article by Jenna Russell is a review of a new book called The Spirit Level by two British social scientists. In their book, they come to the conclusion that I've been coming to myself: that the problem in many countries -- the United States high among them -- is that "...it is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown... by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering."

The article contains an interview with Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, the authors of The Spirit Level, which I found very interesting. A couple excerpts:

WILKINSON: What we write in the book is that our findings fit the intuition of centuries, that inequality is divisive, and that’s what we’ve shown....We realized that this pattern applied to almost all the more common problems, to health and teenage births, to mental illness and obesity. The media is full of stuff about what’s going wrong in society, and what we’ve done is finally put the bits together, collate the evidence and put it out there.

IDEAS: How did you come to link inequality to social ills?

PICKETT: We considered a whole range of alternative explanations - the size of the countries, the racial mix, the proportion of poor people - and it’s clearly not those things. It’s telling us it’s something about the structure of whole societies that really matters.

And the scale of the differences we find between more and less equal societies are very, very large - teenage birth rates might be 6 or 8 times as high in a more unequal society. Again, that tells us that we’re looking at something that affects the whole of society.

I think I need to pick up this book...

Comments

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

My boss really likes that book. We recommended it in our newsletter this month (<a href="http://www.allthingshuman.net/newsletters/allthingshumannewsletterv1.4.html</a>)

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I think Karl Marx already wrote that book...

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

That's not really a fair comparison, as far as I can tell without having read the book. They're not, like Marx, arguing for a classless society, only that societies when the gap between rich and poor becomes too large, we start to see declines in the standard of living and with the contentedness of the people in that society.

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that book, but it seems to be arguing for more egalitarian societies.