This book, the groundbreaking culmination of over fifty person-years of statistical study and research into social issues and inequality by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, was worth all the hype it threw up in political discussion when it came out a couple of years ago. I'd intended to acquire and read it for a while until, back in my first year of uni, a friend from the flat above had finished reading it and bequeathed his copy unto me (thanks Mike), but somehow it took me over fifteen months to even start reading it, which I did over summer, and have been progressing through it slowly since. I finished it today, which was rather foolish given that I am halfway through exam season, and with apologies to readers for the unthought-out nature of this post as this evening holds other excellent plans and I don't want to risk delay by putting too much time into this blog. However it's an excellent and important book so prepare yourself to read the output of a rushed burst of mental effort.
Anyway. The gist: they seek to set out a comprehensive spread of evidence for better income equality being conclusively better for the social, psychological, physical and communal wellbeing of all citizens in an economy. Using indisputably reliable data on OECD countries and US states and testing them in fair, accurate regressions,* they demonstrate significant correlations between worse income inequality and worse rates of community social relations, mental health, drug abuse, physical health, obesity, life expectancy, educational performance, teenage pregnancies, violence, crime, imprisonment, social mobility and developmental opportunities. In each case, other variables that may affect the data are accounted for, so they are clearly showing relationships between inequality and these other undesirable societal phenomena.
This forms the main bulk of the book; cold, hard evidence that egalitarian economies are simply better for human societies in a plethora of meaningful ways. Linking each correlation to causation, enormous task though it is, they also undertake to some extent. One key explanatory factor for most of the problems they find can be put down to insufficient resources at the lower end of the income distribution to keep up (e.g. McDonald's is cheaper than Waitrose, working class people get fat). Another one, grounded in social psychology and with huge implications for the way our modern world is structured, is that of status anxiety. Humans are relational beings, and if large disparities open up between individuals within the same anthropological structure, the delicate web of trust is skewed. Those with the advantage will start acting more selfishly and those at the bottom in a variety of ways, broadly characterised by defensiveness and hopelessness.** This second aspect, deeply ingrained in and by norms, is exacerbated by a hyper-competitive consumer culture and the pervasive 'everything is for sale including you' philosophy of neoliberalism.
This second aspect I found engrossing: how humanity's sociobiological nature, our unobserved philosophical groundworks and politico-economic structures all interweave to drop us in a world in which we see entire nations powered by discontent, with ensuing problems left largely among the poor. The last four chapters are a marvellously insightful overview of how these fields overlap and give each other meaning for what we should do with the knowledge that inequality is bad - going on to discuss how global environmental sustainability must entail moves towards much better intra-national and international equality. But this is not the main point of the book, as I will explain.
Wilkinson and Pickett's main aim in this book is not to push specific policies, as they do not give much discussion to this; nor is it even to stimulate an enthusiasm or agreement with equality, because (they assume this, perhaps wrongly) most people generally have an ethical preference for economic equality anyway. What this book primarily is, rather than a manifesto, a critique, a diagnosis, a call to mobilisation, is a compilation of statistical evidence. The boringness of that is superb - even though large parts of the book are more typically argumentative explorations of equality's betterness, the core chunk is explanations of data analysis. They say in the introduction that they want to spark political discussion into becoming 'evidence-based' - an endeavour that would be far better, were it to take hold, than any one ideological pursuit.
I love the idea of evidence-based policy. I also love abstract argument, but that's because so much of what is important is normative or not quantifiable or testable; in these (many) cases argument is a rational process of uncovering and understanding truth. Empirical discovery is also an excellent means of uncovering and understanding truth, and arguably a much more reliable one; if we can delegate large portions of political decision-making to doing what best fits the evidence for any value judgements we want to make, that cannot be a bad thing in my thought. Climate scientists unequivocally say global warming is bad? Policies are reshaped accordingly. Psychoactive drugs found to be less harmful than tobacco? Reconsider policy accordingly. Income inequality found to be a key determinant in worsening crime, underachievement, teenage pregnancies, obesity, life expectancy, mental illness, job mobility, community trust, and various other factors which we're going to presume you think are bad because we presume you don't have sociopathic tendencies? Work to reduce income inequality.
That's my main take-home from this book: we need to start making politics evidence-based where it can be, which, as the authors expertly show, includes socioeconomic trends in health and wellbeing. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with a political opinion; if you're a lefty it will provide vast ammunition in arguing for egalitarianism, if you're further to the right it will challenge your economic assumptions considerably but in a way that you would be dumb to ignore.*** Income inequality was already something I was well-convinced of as a thing to be tackled and overcome, but evidence-based politics is an exciting and huge idea and I hope that this book helps make it a more serious current of influence in policymaking. Now, if you'll excuse me, without proofreading back through this, I am off to a joyously dingy warehouse to listen to a church pastor play some incredible techno.
* Given that their book is, for the most part, a presentation of statistical evidence, not a polemic, they back this up admirably, with extensive appendices of their data sources (all very objective and reputable), as well as an explanation of their regression compilation methods and how they interpret the results. There's even an intro chapter about how to read diagrams. It made the econometrician within me, tiny and weak though he is, sing.
** It's hard to summarise. Read the book.
*** What? You would. If you feel like complaining then do a better statistical study proving Wilkinson and Pickett wrong. Take huge data samples and test specified regressions and show that income inequality is actually not all that bad and isn't causally linked to any of these social problems, and then you can dispute the book without just being thick. Or you could dispute that they're problems at all and that thus we shouldn't worry about inequality, but that would make you a bit of an arse.
