Still battling over “The Spirit Level”
This is the 10th time that I’ve blogged about the book “The Spirit Level” by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett [see my review of the work here], but I make no apology for this because it is one of the most important books that I’ve ever read. The core message is that, on a whole range of significant social indicators, countries with less inequality do markedly better than those with greater inequality.
Since I returned home from an weekend in the Isle of Wight, I’ve been catching up on the weekend’s newspapers and came across this feature on the battle raging over the ideas in “The Spirit Level”. The authors had hoped that their “evidence-based politics” would have wide appeal across the political spectrum and at first this looked likely.
However, recently several Right-wing sources have savaged the methodology and conclusions of the book. Of course, if you accept the arguments of Wilkinson & Pickett and if you believe that the cuts in public expenditure promoted by the Coalition Government in Britain will increase inequality in this country (both positions which I hold), you will be concerned that the serious social problems in Britain are set to worsen.