“The Spirit Level” : five years on
Five years ago, Professors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson wrote a seminal work called “The Spirit Level” which I reviewed here. What do the authors say now about the inequality they described then?
“When we published our book ‘The Spirit Level’, the Government of the day was still famously relaxed about people becoming ‘filthy rich’. They assumed that inequality only mattered if it increased poverty.
But the truth is that we have deep-seated psychological responses to inequality and social hierarchy. Inequality invokes feelings of superiority and inferiority, dominance and subordination – which affect the way we see, relate to, and treat each other.We wrote the book because policy makers seemed indifferent to inequality and unaware that at least 200 research papers had been published in peer-reviewed journals analysing the relation between inequality and overall levels of health or violence. However, as we looked at the data we saw that almost all the problems more common at the bottom of the social ladder are more common in more unequal societies – including mental illness, drug addiction, obesity, loss of community life, imprisonment, unequal opportunities and poorer wellbeing for children. But the effects of inequality are not confined to the poor.
A growing body of research shows that inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society affecting the vast majority of the population. When he found how far up the income scale the health effects of inequality went, Harvard Professor Ichiro Kawachi, one of the foremost researchers in this field, described inequality as a social pollutant. The health and social problems we looked at are between twice and ten times as common in more unequal societies. The differences are so large simply because inequality affects such a large proportion of the population.
Predictably, the supporters of the political and economic institutions supporting inequality sharpened the knives and accused us of conjuring up the evidence. But research confirming both the basic pattern and the social mechanisms has mushroomed.It’s not just rich countries where greater equality is beneficial; it is also true in poorer countries. Even the more equal provinces of China do better than the less equal ones. Although life expectancy continues to rise in most places, increases or decreases in inequality have now been shown to make these background improvements in health a bit slower or faster, with the full impact of changes in inequality taking up to 12 years to come through. Still other studies have shown that these links cannot be explained away, for instance by ethnic mix, by poverty, by public service provision, or by a country’s size.
Most important has been the rapid accumulation of evidence confirming the psychosocial processes through which inequality gets under the skin. When we were writing, evidence of causality often relied on psychological experiments that showed how extraordinarily sensitive people are to being looked down on and regarded as inferior. They demonstrated that social relationships, insecurities about social status and how others see us, have powerful effects on stress, cognitive performance and the emotions.
Almost absent were studies explicitly linking income inequality to these psychological states in whole societies. But that gap has now been filled by studies showing that people in more unequal societies feel more status anxiety, are less willing to help each other and are less agreeable. That inequality damages family life is shown by higher rates of child abuse, and increased status competition is likely to explain the higher rates of bullying confirmed in schools in more unequal countries.
We showed that mental illnesses are more prevalent in more unequal societies: that has now been confirmed by more specific studies of depression and schizophrenia as well as by evidence that people’s income ranking is a better predictor of developing mental illness than absolute income.
Community life is weakened by the difficulty of breaking the social ice between people, but greater inequality thickens that ice: because people are seen as if some are worth so much more than others, we become more anxious about how we are seen and judged. Those overcome by lack of confidence and social anxiety find social contact an ordeal. Others respond in contrast by trying to bolster self-presentation and how they appear to others. International research now confirms that both self-enhancement and status anxieties are more common in more unequal societies. And US data also show that narcissism increased in line with inequality.
Inequality is now also known to be economically damaging: it amplifies the business cycle and makes economies more vulnerable to crisis. Lastly, inequality is becoming an environmental issue because, by intensifying status competition, it increases consumerism and personal debt. The financial crash led to a resurgence of public interest in inequality. We’ve now given over 700 seminars and conference lectures on inequality, talking to academics, religious groups, think tanks of both right and left, civil servants, professional associations, charities, political parties, trade unions, business groups and to international agencies such as the UN, WHO, OECD, EU and ILO.
One of signs of real progress in Britain are the Fairness Commissions set up by local government in many cities to recommend ways of reducing local inequalities. Partly as a result, many local authorities and companies now pay the Living Wage. In many instances, TET’s local groups have been instrumental in the development of these Commissions.
Sadly, central government efforts have not been as effective, and the coalition government has so far failed to stop riches being hovered up by the wealthiest. At the same time we see just how hard the rest of society is being hit, with food banks opening all over the country, and many more struggling with household bills and basic necessities. If politicians want to build a happier and healthier society, they need to be serious about reducing inequality, and they need to start today.”
For further information, check out The Equality Trust.