{"id":3322,"date":"2010-08-17T17:35:44","date_gmt":"2010-08-17T16:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3322"},"modified":"2010-08-17T17:40:14","modified_gmt":"2010-08-17T16:40:14","slug":"still-battling-over-the-spirit-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3322","title":{"rendered":"Still battling over &#8220;The Spirit Level&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the 10th time that I&#8217;ve blogged about the book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Spirit-Level-Societies-Almost-Always\/dp\/0141032367\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1275601660&amp;sr=8-1\">&#8220;The Spirit Level&#8221;<\/a> by Richard Wilkinson &amp; Kate Pickett [see my review of the work <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/currentaffairs.html#TSL\">here<\/a>], but I make no apology for this because it is one of the most important books that I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Since I returned home from an weekend in the Isle of Wight, I&#8217;ve been catching up on the weekend&#8217;s newspapers and came across<a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2010\/aug\/14\/the-spirit-level-equality-thinktanks\"> this feature<\/a> on the battle raging over the ideas in &#8220;The Spirit Level&#8221;. The authors had hoped that their &#8220;evidence-based politics&#8221; would have wide appeal across the political spectrum and at first this looked likely.<\/p>\n<p>However, recently several Right-wing sources have savaged the methodology and conclusions of the book. Of course, if you accept the arguments of Wilkinson &amp; 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the 10th time that I&#8217;ve blogged about the book &#8220;The Spirit Level&#8221; by Richard Wilkinson &amp; 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&#8217;ve ever read. The core message is that, on a whole [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3330,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions\/3330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}