[Peace-discuss] Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This is a review by David Runciman, who teaches politics at Cambridge, that 
appeared in a recent edition of the London Review of Books.  The book under 
review seems much better than the review suggests.  I include the whole thing 
because it's a bit hard to get to.  It's important that not just in the US --
"the most unequal society" among developed countries -- "income inequality, not 
income per se, appears to be the key ... 'The evidence shows that even small 
decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make 
a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases 
should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be 
confident that it works."  --CGE]

	"The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better"
	by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
	Allen Lane, 331 pp, £20.00, March 2009, ISBN 978 1 84614 039 6

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: 
among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every 
quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer 
overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for 
general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 
per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use).

The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is 
overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity 
levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets 
recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. 
In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that 
the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth 
between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian 
countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece 
and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so 
the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by 
Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is 
relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the 
Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as 
significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high 
levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It 
is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest 
(Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse 
there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly 
equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score 
well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to 
cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself 
alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do 
consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. 
As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence 
shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich 
market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ 
Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely 
because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, 
a ‘utopian dream’.

Why then, given all this – the concise argument, the weight of the evidence, the 
unmistakable practical purpose of the authors – does the book still feel oddly 
utopian? Part of the problem, I think, is that the argument is not as 
straightforward as its authors would like. Despite their obvious sense of 
conviction, and maybe even because of it, they fudge the central issue at 
crucial moments, whereas at others, perhaps in order to compensate, they 
overstate their case, which only makes things worse. To start with the fudge. Is 
the basic claim here that in more equal societies almost everyone does better, 
or is it simply that everyone does better on average? Most of the time, 
Wilkinson and Pickett want to insist that it’s the first. ‘Reducing inequality,’ 
they argue, ‘is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, 
and so the real quality of life, for all of us.’ They also contend that 
inequality takes its toll on almost everyone because of the increased stress of 
living in a society where rewards are unequally distributed, leading to constant 
worries about our place in the pecking order, even if we are quite high up it. 
So that’s why, in unequal societies, even many of the rich are getting fatter 
and dying younger than they might otherwise. However, most of the data they rely 
on doesn’t exactly say this. Instead, the graphs rank different countries’ 
performance according to life expectancy rates, incarceration rates, obesity 
rates, etc, which are simply average measures. What these graphs tell us is that 
overall there is a better chance of getting fat or dying young if you live in an 
unequal society. But it doesn’t follow that almost everyone is going to benefit 
from increased equality. That depends on whether the disadvantages of inequality 
are distributed across the social scale, or whether they cluster at the bottom. 
One possible explanation for the poor showing of unequal societies like the US 
might be that the bottom 20 per cent are hopelessly cut adrift from the benefits 
of prosperity, and this group does so badly in quality-of-life terms that it 
brings the average down for the society as a whole. If a significant minority of 
people are dying very young, or growing very fat, or learning very little, then 
the average scores will be worse, but it doesn’t follow that almost everyone is 
worse off.

Take rates of imprisonment. Here the US has the worst record of any rich country 
by far (the graph showing rates of imprisonment per 100,000 of population is the 
only one that has to be recorded on a log scale, because otherwise the US would 
be off the chart, even off the page). But, as Wilkinson and Pickett admit, 
‘there is a strong social gradient in imprisonment, with people of lower class, 
income and education much more likely to be sent to prison than people higher up 
the social scale.’ The US imprisons great swathes of its poor, black population. 
It doesn’t follow from this that almost everyone is worse off than they would be 
under a more equal system. To show that, we would need to know that even members 
of the white middle class are much more likely to be jailed in the US than they 
are in, say, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland (other 
countries on the graph). Now it is almost certainly true that white middle-class 
Americans are more likely to be jailed than they would be elsewhere, simply 
because a system that is so hooked on incarceration at the bottom end of the 
scale is bound to suffer from a kind of ‘trickle-up’ effect. From a European 
perspective, it is still shocking to see the spectacular prison terms sometimes 
handed down to those Wall Street miscreants unlucky enough to find themselves 
before the courts. But if there are figures to demonstrate that almost everyone 
is worse off in the US than elsewhere, Wilkinson and Pickett don’t provide them, 
even though this is what they need to support the case they want to make.

Yet elsewhere in The Spirit Level, the authors do provide precisely this kind of 
data, and it immeasurably strengthens their argument. The single most compelling 
chart in the whole book comes near the end. It compares infant mortality rates 
for England and Wales as against Sweden, dividing the data up into six segments 
according to the father’s social class. This shows two remarkable things. First, 
whereas in England and Wales the chances of your child’s surviving rise with 
each step you take up the social ladder, in Sweden children from the lowest 
social class have a better chance of surviving than members of three of the five 
classes above them. Although the figures are fairly constant across Swedish 
society (around 4-7 per 1000, as compared to around 7-14 per 1000 in England and 
Wales), it remains the case that children from the highest social group are 
slightly more likely to die than children from the lowest. Second, even children 
from the highest social group in England and Wales, though significantly less 
likely to die than children from other social groups, are more likely to die 
than children from any class in Sweden; they are very nearly as likely to die as 
children of Swedish single mothers, who do worst of all in Sweden just as they 
do in England and Wales. Here, we have clear evidence that a more equal society 
does leave almost everyone better off. It is not simply the case that in England 
and Wales economic inequality means bad outcomes are shunted down the social 
scale; it is also true that inequality means bad outcomes are being distributed 
across the social scale, making even rich English parents more vulnerable than 
poor Swedish ones.

This sounds like a knock-down political argument: more equality would give rich 
people in unequal societies the kind of life chances that even poor people enjoy 
elsewhere. Who could object to that? It needs to hold for more than just infant 
mortality, however, and this is where the evidence is shakier. Another area 
where Wilkinson and Pickett present the data according to social class instead 
of simply the overall average is literacy scores. But here we find a slightly 
different story. Finland probably has the best educational system in the world, 
and disadvantaged Finnish children significantly outperform disadvantaged 
children in the UK, just as these do better than their counterparts in the US. 
But it is not the case that rich kids in the UK have worse literacy scores than 
poor kids in Finland; they simply have worse scores than rich kids in Finland. 
Moreover, rich kids in the UK have much better literacy scores than poor kids in 
the UK, because the social gradient is so steep, so the gap between the top and 
bottom is wider than it is in Finland. Education, unlike infant mortality, is a 
comparative as well as an absolute good. Parents want their kids to do better 
than other kids (whereas, one hopes, they don’t need to see other people’s 
children die in order to enjoy bringing their own safely home from hospital). 
Inequality in the UK means that rich parents can see their kids doing much 
better than other kids, even if they are not doing as well as they might if they 
lived in Finland. So the politics is considerably harder here: you can’t simply 
say that inequality means we are all suffering together. Instead, it may mean 
that the poor are doing so badly that the rich aren’t interested in looking at 
the wider picture. They are focused on making sure they don’t wind up poor.

This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ 
matters so much: politics. If it is almost everyone who would benefit from a 
more equal society, then this is an encouragement to solidarity across social 
boundaries, so that joint action to remedy the problem might be possible. But if 
it is everyone on average, then this can go along with an absence of solidarity 
and the hardening of divisions, because the disadvantages may be so unequally 
distributed. The practical political difficulties of bridging the gap between 
these two positions are clear from Obama’s recent speech on healthcare reform. 
He wants to be able to say to the American public that everyone will be better 
off under a reformed system – indeed, in an earlier, far wonkier speech he made 
to the American Medical Association in June he sounded pretty much like the 
authors of The Spirit Level: ‘Today, we are spending over $2 trillion a year on 
healthcare – almost 50 per cent more per person than the next most costly 
nation. And yet . . . for all this spending, more of our citizens are uninsured; 
the quality of our care is often lower; and we aren’t any healthier. In fact, 
citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually 
living longer than we do.’ But he knows that most Americans think that the 
problems of their system are heavily concentrated at the bottom end, among the 
uninsured. So, as the politics got more fractious over the summer, this is where 
he directed his argument: not at the idea that the present system leaves almost 
everyone worse off, but at the thought that almost anyone could suddenly fall 
through the hole at the bottom. ‘Everyone understands the extraordinary 
hardships that are placed on the uninsured,’ he said to Congress in September. 
‘We are the only wealthy nation that allows such hardship for millions of its 
people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get 
coverage. In just a two-year period, one in every three Americans goes without 
healthcare coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their 
coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone.’

This is not an altogether helpful argument in the light of what Obama said in 
June, because it directs attention at the frightening gap that exists between 
the haves and the have-nots, rather than at the problems which apply across the 
board (to be fair, Obama does touch on these later on in his speech, though 
mainly to reassure Americans that no one will end up paying more under the new 
system). By talking about the increased risks of finding yourself uninsured, he 
also ties the case for reform to the social insecurity caused by the recession, 
which might lead his audience to want him to concentrate on dealing with that. 
Still, it shows Obama’s awareness of the difference between the generalised 
social effects of inequality and the divisive political effects of inequality. 
Too often, Wilkinson and Pickett simply gloss over this problem. Early in the 
book, they publish a chart showing that mortality rates in the US improve with 
each step you take up the social ladder. ‘Higher incomes are related to lower 
death rates at every level in society. Note that this is not simply a matter of 
the poor having worse health than everyone else. What is so striking is how 
regular the health gradient is right across society – it is a gradient which 
affects us all.’ This makes clear that it is not simply a case of the bottom 20 
per cent having been cut adrift. Nevertheless, the idea that finding ourselves 
on a steep social gradient is something we all have in common is not going to 
have much political bite. What matters to most people is where they are on the 
slope, not the fact that those higher up and lower down are on the slope with 
them. Later in the book, Wilkinson and Pickett re-emphasise that ‘across whole 
populations, rates of mental illness are five times higher in the most unequal 
compared to the least unequal societies. Similarly, in more unequal societies 
people are five times as likely to be imprisoned, six times as likely to be 
clinically obese, and murder rates may be many times higher.’ But that ‘whole 
populations’ (their italics) is protesting too much. These are simply average 
figures, and they don’t show the unequal distribution of inequality’s ill-effects.

Occasionally, in pushing their case that inequality is bad news for the rich 
just as much as it is for the poor, Wilkinson and Pickett go too far. In their 
chapter on obesity, for example, they write: ‘It is clear that obesity and 
overweight are not problems confined to the poor. In the US, about 12 per cent 
of the population are poor, but more than 75 per cent are overweight.’ This 
seems incredible – I know that Europeans sometimes look around themselves in 
parts of the US and conclude that almost everyone is fat, but can more than 
three-quarters of all Americans really be overweight? Well, the answer is no – 
the correct figure is closer to 66 per cent (roughly a third of Americans are 
currently obese and a third are overweight, leaving a third at a healthy weight 
or even under it). If you type ‘75 per cent Americans overweight’ into Google, 
you immediately get directed to a widely publicised survey from 2007 which said 
that three-quarters of Americans will be overweight by 2015 if current trends 
continue. (Incidentally, according to its forecasting model, the same survey 
also pointed to every single person in America being overweight by some point in 
the 2040s – we’ll have to see about that.) Wilkinson and Pickett don’t give a 
source for their statistic, so perhaps they simply borrowed it from this 2007 
forecast. The current figures are bad enough, but there is still a big 
difference between two-thirds and three-quarters, and we’re not there yet.

At other points, the authors rely on evidence that is now out of date. They want 
to claim that more equality doesn’t simply improve individuals’ life-chances, it 
also improves their performance. ‘Although a baseball team is not a microcosm of 
society,’ they write, ‘a well-controlled study of over 1,600 players in 29 teams 
over a nine-year period found that major league baseball teams with smaller 
income differences among players do significantly better than the more unequal 
ones.’ Again, this doesn’t sound right, and it isn’t, or at least it isn’t any 
longer. Like much of the source material for the book, the research was done in 
the late 1980s and early 1990s, before baseball became the money monster it is 
today. A more recent study has shown that the really rich teams, which have a 
high measure of income inequality because of the vastly disproportionate 
salaries they pay their top stars, do better than teams with a more equal pay 
structure. From 2001-5 the two most unequal teams (the New York Yankees and 
Boston Red Sox) won the greatest number of games; the two most equal teams (the 
Colorado Rockies and Kansas City Royals) won the fewest. You can see the same 
thing happening in English football: very rich, inegalitarian Chelsea do better 
than relatively rich, more egalitarian Arsenal, and a lot better than poor, more 
egalitarian Hull. At a certain point, once all the money starts to flow towards 
the top teams, equality just can’t compete, and inequality wins.

Maybe that’s just sport. What about other areas of human endeavour? The authors 
quote George Bernard Shaw (never a good sign) to counter the view that in a more 
egalitarian society there will be a general levelling down of achievement and a 
lowering of standards. ‘Only where there is pecuniary equality,’ Shaw said, ‘can 
the distinction of merit stand out.’ Wilkinson and Pickett then go on to remark: 
‘Perhaps that makes Sweden a particularly suitable home for the system of Nobel 
prizes.’ Yet having the Nobel prizes in Sweden doesn’t stop them from going year 
after year to scientists from the really rich, unequal countries, starting with 
the US. In fact, a graph that would point in exactly the opposite direction to 
all the others in the book is one that ranks countries by Nobel prizes won over 
the past generation or so. The US comes way out in front with 189 in the past 35 
years, the UK is second (39), then we get Germany (27), France (15), Japan (11), 
Sweden (6), Norway (2), Finland (1). Even if you rank by prize per head of 
population, the US remains on top (though Sweden, with home advantage, comes a 
close second), while Japan, which tends to come first on most of the other 
quality of life indicators, is bottom. Of course, all sorts of cultural and 
other factors might go into explaining this, including the readiness of top 
scientists (like top footballers) to move where the money is. Still, on this 
measure at least, inequality does not look like the enemy of excellence.

In their preface, Wilkinson and Pickett say that they wanted to call their book 
‘Evidence-Based Politics’. But what this book indicates is how elusive 
evidence-based politics can be. It’s not just that the evidence is always going 
to be stretched and tweaked to suit various political purposes, even by 
otherwise scrupulous researchers like Wilkinson and Pickett. It is also that the 
evidence as it is presented here often seems to point away from conventional 
politics altogether. On the one hand, the authors’ emphasis on how much 
difference little, incremental changes can make suggests a stealth approach. The 
book reads as if it is directed to civil servants as much as politicians, 
encouraging them to slip a little equality in with their ministers’ tea in the 
hope they won’t notice. The authors tell us that the public has its part to play 
too in what will be ‘not one big revolution but a continuous stream of small 
changes in a consistent direction’. Nonetheless, this remains a highly 
technocratic conception of politics, in which what matters is the gradual 
permeation of the public mind by enlightened expert opinion. On the other hand, 
when Wilkinson and Pickett discuss the historical reasons why some countries 
have gone down the equality path while others have not, they emphasise the role 
of outside help and external shocks. ‘Japan owes its status as the most equal of 
the developed countries partly to the fact that the whole establishment had been 
humiliated by defeat in the Second World War, and partly to the support for 
political and economic reconstruction . . . provided by disinterested and 
remarkably far-sighted American advisers working under General MacArthur.’ The 
Scandinavian countries opted for egalitarian policies in the 1930s when they 
were faced by the dual threat of Stalinism and Fascism. South Korea is partly a 
more egalitarian society because of the existential threat posed by North Korea. 
Britain briefly became a more egalitarian society in the 1940s when faced with a 
war of national survival.

All this makes it hard to see how a gradualist approach is going to work. 
Wilkinson and Pickett insist that societies can change of their own volition, 
and they cite as evidence the rapidity with which inequality grew in Britain and 
the US following the Thatcher and Reagan reforms of the early 1980s. ‘If things 
can change so rapidly,’ they write, ‘then there are good reasons to feel 
confident that we can create a society in which the real quality of life and of 
human relationships is far higher than it is now.’ But it seems more likely that 
the shift since the 1980s, and the readiness with which it has been embraced by 
voters, is evidence of how hard it will be to change things back, certainly 
without some significant external shock. There is a faint hope (including among 
the technocrats around Obama) that the current recession might be the 
opportunity to force through otherwise unpalatable reforms that will create a 
more egalitarian society. But the public response so far doesn’t bode well; if 
anything, the current crisis seems to show how set in their ways both 
inegalitarian and egalitarian societies can become. In Britain and the US, the 
mood seems suspicious, hostile to government action and worried about the debt. 
In Japan, where the present economic difficulties stretch back twenty years, the 
public has learned to be more accepting of the idea that low growth and high 
public debt are the price of keeping people in their jobs. If anything, the 
experience of recession has served to make Japan a more equal society; it 
threatens to make Britain and the US less equal ones.

Yet despite all this, The Spirit Level does contain a powerful political 
message. It is impossible to read it and not to be impressed by how often 
greater equality appears to be the answer, whatever happens to be the question. 
It provides a connection between what otherwise look like disparate social 
problems. Wilkinson and Pickett make this point clearly:

     The health and social problems which we have found to be related to 
inequality tend to be treated by policy makers as if they were quite separate 
from one another, each needing separate services and remedies. We pay doctors 
and nurses to treat ill-health, police and prisons to deal with crime, remedial 
teachers and educational psychologists to tackle educational problems, and 
social workers, drug rehabilitation units, psychiatric services and health 
promotion experts to deal with a host of other problems. These services are all 
expensive, and none of them is more than partially effective. For instance, 
differences in the quality of medical care have less effect on people’s life 
expectancy than social differences in their risks of getting some 
life-threatening disease in the first place. And even when the various services 
are successful in stopping someone reoffending, in curing a cancer, getting 
someone off drugs or dealing with educational failure, we know that our 
societies are endlessly re-creating these problems in each new generation. 
Meanwhile, all these problems are most common in the most deprived areas of our 
society and are many times more common in more unequal societies.

The usual remedy for this disjointed approach is known as ‘joined-up thinking’, 
which means trying to track the knock-on effects of different government 
policies and follow the money to make sure it is not being wasted or duplicated. 
In many ways, this is the pure form of ‘evidence-based politics’, since it 
always stops to ask whether the evidence adds up. What The Spirit Level invites 
us to do is something different. There is enough evidence here about the impact 
that more equality can make that it ought to be possible to stop trying to join 
everything up and seeing how it all fits together. Indeed, it’s when you try to 
join up all the material in this book that the problems start, because it’s only 
then that it becomes clear how messy it all is. Sometimes inequality is bad for 
almost everyone, and sometimes only for certain people; sometimes it is worst 
for the people at the bottom, and sometimes it is just as bad for the people at 
the top. Different societies are equal or unequal for different reasons, 
sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice. The evidence points in all these 
different directions, and if you try to fit it all together then it’s easy to 
get lost.

There is enough evidence here that equality is a good thing to be able to take 
it on faith, and to move away from evidence-based politics towards a politics 
that is, for want of a better word, more ideological. Wilkinson and Pickett are 
committed to evidence-based politics because they seem to feel that ideology has 
had its day. ‘Political differences are more a reflection of different beliefs 
about the solution to problems than of disagreements about what the problems 
are,’ they write. ‘Almost everyone, regardless of their politics, would prefer 
to live in a safer and more friendly society.’ But they also reveal a hankering 
for something more. ‘For several decades progressive politics have been 
seriously weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society. People have 
argued for piecemeal improvements in different areas of life . . . But nowhere 
is there a popular movement capable of inspiring people with a vision of how to 
make society a substantially better place to live for the vast majority. Without 
that vision, politics will rarely provoke more than a yawn.’ More equality is a 
good thing and it’s an idea that’s worth defending. It would be nice if there 
were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit. 
That may be wishful thinking. But so too is the idea of an evidence-based 
politics, which just opens the door to all the prevarications of joined-up thinking.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/david-runciman/how-messy-it-all-is