Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

[LongTomH]

Two British academics are shaking up the UK with a book that started as an academic study of inequality and its consequences. Richard Wilkinson is a retired professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. His field of study for the last few decades has been the relationship between social inequality and public health problems.

Wilkinson's book, coauthored by Kate Pickett, lecturer at York University, is titled The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. The authors maintain that social inequality is at the root of, or exacerbates, many societal ills, including:

• poor physical health
  
• poor mental health
  
• drug Abuse
  
• poor education
  
• high rates of imprisonment
  
• lack of social mobility
  
• high rates of violence
  
• low levels of well-being for children
  

According to the Guardian UK article by John Grace:

"It became clear," Wilkinson says, "that countries such as the US, the UK and Portugal, where the top 20% earn seven, eight or nine times more than the lowest 20%, scored noticeably higher on all social problems at every level of society than in countries such as Sweden and Japan, where the differential is only two or three times higher at the top."

The statistics came from the World Bank's list of 50 richest countries, but Wilkinson suggests their conclusions apply more broadly. To ensure their findings weren't explainable by cultural differences, they analysed the data from all 50 US states and found the same pattern. In states where income differentials were greatest, so were the social problems and lack of cohesion.

The opening sentence of The Spirit Level cautions: "People usually exaggerate the importance of their own work and we worry about claiming too much." Indeed, they've made sweeping claims; but, they have backed them up with extensive scholarship, using statistics from the United Nations Development program and the World Bank. Their sources and methodology are listed on The Equality Trust Website, run by Kate Pickett. Like good scientists, they asked colleagues to review their work and methods.

One of the most startling conclusions from the book is that inequality affects everyone in more unequal societies. Not surprisingly, a person in the lower 20% percentile income-wise in an unequal society will have a lower life expectancy:

And, they say, it's not just the deprived underclass that loses out in an unequal society: everyone does, even the better off. Because it's not absolute levels of poverty that create the social problems, but the differentials in income between rich and poor. Just as someone from the lowest-earning 20% of a more equal society is more likely to live longer than their counterpart from a less equal society, so too someone from the highest-earning 20% has a longer life expectancy than their alter ego in a less equal society.

Take these random headline statistics. The US is wealthier and spends more on health care than any other country, yet a baby born in Greece, where average income levels are about half that of the US, has a lower risk of infant mortality and longer life expectancy than an American baby. Obesity is twice as common in the UK as the more equal societies of Sweden and Norway, and six times more common in the US than in Japan. Teenage birth rates are six times higher in the UK than in more equal societies; mental illness is three times as common in the US as in Japan; murder rates are three times higher in more unequal countries. The examples are almost endless.

One of the indexes of inequality that Wilkinson and Pickett used in their is the GINI Coefficient, a measure of inequality across the societal spectrum. Most developed industrial nations have a GINI coefficient between 24 and 36. The United States has a GINI coefficient of 40.8 using UN figures; the figure for the UK is 36. The US and UK, rank 45th and 37th respectively in terms of life expectancy - using figures from the CIA World Factbook for 2008. Japan, which has a much flatter income distribution, ranks 3rd with a life expectancy at birth of 82.07 years.
Life expectancy at birth in the US is 78.09 years.

Professor Wilkinson is retiring after his latest work; professor Pickett is continuing. She's running The Equality Trust website and campaigning for social reforms to lessen inequality in the UK. Their work is attracting a lot of attention in the UK. They're starting to get a little attention in the US. I got the link to the Guardian article from a 'futurist' the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies website.

This issue of societal inequality is going to be more important as new technologies come on line. Some of them have the potential for deepening the gap between rich and poor; indeed, the rich could become a separate species from the rest of us (They already think they are!). I promise to discuss this in more detail in future posts.

The book is available from Amazon UK; it hasn't reached Amazon.com in the US yet, and no, I haven't read it yet, just the reviews. I promise it will be on my must-read-list.

[Mythsaje]

1. Glad there's some scientific backing for something

many of us already knew instinctively.

[undergroundpanther]

2. Equality is vital,Off to greatest!

And bullies,sociopaths,elitists,rich people, and bigots are scared to death of social equality.Because it proves that no one deserves to be respected,or privileged at the expense of another's health,sanity,life,and well being, or societies' for that matter. Social domination and exploitation MUST be challenged.Pecking orders only cause suffering.We need to grow past our tolerance of ass-holiness and denounce the vain tendencies some have.

[eridani]

3. The poorest 20% of Brits are in many ways healthier than the richest 20% of Americans

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=3289

Universal health care helps, even though both the US and UK have high inequality.

[ejpoeta]

4. the problem is....

the people at the top and in the middle of an unequal society don't give a crap about the ones at the bottom. as long as i've got mine.

[Uncle Joe]

8. Apparently this dynamic effects those at the top as well, in a sense they're also Joe the Plumbers

trapped by their own pre-conceived demons.

"And, they say, it's not just the deprived underclass that loses out in an unequal society: everyone does, even the better off. Because it's not absolute levels of poverty that create the social problems, but the differentials in income between rich and poor. Just as someone from the lowest-earning 20% of a more equal society is more likely to live longer than their counterpart from a less equal society, so too someone from the highest-earning 20% has a longer life expectancy than their alter ego in a less equal society."

[whyverne]

5. But most people "believe" we have equality,

and there's the problem. That's how you end up with 'Joe the Plumber". He can't understand why he can't get ahead so he blames it on the liberals. When actually the odds of working your way out of poverty are about the same as your odds of winning the lottery. (Which is why I bought a Power Ball ticket yesterday.) We all know people who have worked their gonads off all their lives and have little to show for it.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme. The liberals like FDR figured out that it can be made more palatable and effective by taking money from the top and pumping it back in at the bottom. But that's called "income redistribution" and too many people think that isn't fair. They don't care that to a certain degree, it works.

We can't all have our own businesses. Someone has to be an employee and a consumer. We can't all make money in the stock market, there couldn't be enough growth to go around. We can't all make big money selling stuff on eBay. We can't all be the boss. Like it or not, it is the governments job to make sure that the people at the bottom of the pyramid are getting a fair shake.

Otherwise you are sitting down in a no-limit poker game where one player has a million bucks to bet with and everyone else has a few thousand. You have a slight chance of winning the big money if you are smart and lucky. But usually Mister Big Bucks is going to take you all to the cleaners, because he can outbid you and he can afford to lose a few.

[The2ndWheel]

6. So equal societies have an unfair advantage?

When will we be getting rid of the the few hundred regional governments around the world then? More than anything, that is what is holding everything back.

Follow me down the road a bit. We all complain about the health insurance companies. The solution is to get rid of them, and set up a universal/single payer/whatever system, where everyone pays into the same pool, and so everyone is covered equally. Well, imagine the various governments around the world as health insurance companies. They all have their own rules, and will pay for this, but not that, etc, etc. How is that fair? Hell, it doesn't even seem very equal to have less than 5% of the human population elect one person to the most powerful office on the planet.

If we really want global equality, then we should have global equality. Play time is over. No more screwing around.

[Igel]

12. Advantage at what?

They looked at some metrics and found that equal societies were better.

However, for other metrics they might not be. They also looked at money and health.

Consider a place like India or China. To render the population 'equal', or nearly so, in terms of income would mean stripping out most of the people at the cutting end of innovation. Many of the most highly educated would move to less equal countries. It's likely that health would actually decline over all because those receiving great health care now would see their quality of care diminish, while the benefit of spreading around the wealth to the additional billion people would barely nudge their health care level upwards. Note that the researchers essentially stipulated that there had to be a certain level of prosperity--they just looked at *industrialized* countries, and so their conclusions only hold for industrialized countries. It was mostly the well-off in very unequal societies that yielded the Renaissance, after all.

Consider also that a lot of the inequality is between repub and dem areas. We've heard recently that California exports federal tax dollars. That's helping to equalize the wealth, since areas like San Fran an LA tend to have higher pay scales while rural Nebraska and Texas have lower pay scales. Of course, that's looking at $, not purchasing power, but then again this research looks at $, not purchasing power.

In other words, there are caveats that make global application of this invalid. After all, if it were valid they'd have to conclude that it's having the West be so properous--including the poor among us--that accounts for a lot of health ailments elsewhere. Then we'd have to conclude that the only progressive thing would be to export jobs and prosperity willy-nilly, and most of us wouldn't go for that.

[Shireling]

7. The reason that equal societies do better

is because they are reflecting the TRUTH that WE ARE EQUAL!

But, there are some people who can only feel good about themselves by looking down on those who have less. This sick value is promoted in our media.

[libertynotsecurity]

9. Logical fallacy.

This is a perfect example of the Questionable cause logical fallacy. This study does not take into account many other potential catalysts for their findings. There are way too many social and cultural differences between these study groups to found any serious argument.

I could just as easily claim that Japanese have a higher life expectancy because they tend to consume less tobacco and alcohol products, a cultural difference nothing more. This argument has been made before and it cannot consistently be backed by science.

[uberllama42]

10. I don't think we can made the judgment without reading their whole study

There are a huge number of factors which determine inequality, and I don't think we can tell from this snippet whether they have really been able to isolate the effect that equality has on other factors. It might be unlikely, but I don't think we can write this off without reading deeper into it.

Welcome to DU.

[bemildred]

11. Correlation is not causation . But it can be a useful indicator.

Why not try the experiment of becoming more like these "fairer" societies and seeing how it goes? What have we got to lose?

[LongTomH]

13. I think you missed something....................

Read this paragraph from the Guardian UK article:

For a while, Wilkinson and Pickett wondered if the correlations were too good to be true. The links were so strong, they almost couldn't believe no one had spotted them before, so they asked colleagues to come up with any other explanations. They looked at the religiosity of a society, multiculturalism, anything they could think of. They even looked at the possibility they had got it the wrong way round and it was the social problems that were causing the inequality. But nothing else stood up to statistical analysis.

Also, check out this report in the British science Journal Nature: Why inequality is fatal:

How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem. This triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure and blood sugar levels, from which myriad health and social problems unfold. This seemingly hard-wired response has been well studied in social hierarchies of monkeys; low-status animals become predisposed to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Humans experiencing chronic stress exhibit similar symptoms, accumulating abdominal fat under the influence of a part of the brain associated with addiction.

Cortisol overrides 'feel-good hormones' such as oxytocin, involved in establishing trust, and dopamine, the reward signal that reinforces memory, attention and problem-solving ability. Cortisol-induced stress predisposes some individuals to mental illness or violent behaviour. It can hasten the arrival of puberty, which may prompt premature sexual adventures, providing a plausible explanation of the high prevalence of teenage pregnancies in the most unequal societies. Cortisol also transmits stress to a fetus, with lasting consequences for physical and emotional development.

If you read the entire article, you'll see that the reviewer had some criticisms; but, did not question the conclusions of Wilkinson and Pickett.

[libertynotsecurity]

14. No, i got it...

Wilkinson openly admits The Spirit Level is his swan-song. He feels that as an academic he has fulfilled his side of the bargain by identifying the problem; it's up to activists and politicians to work out the solutions. Pickett doesn't see things quite that way, and is largely the driving force behind the creation of the Equality Trust website to campaign for change. "There must be a possibility of change," she says. "Everything stacks up. Reducing inequality fits in with the environmental agenda; it benefits the developing world, as more equal societies give more in overseas aid; and most significantly, everyone is fed up with the corporate greed and bonus culture that have caused the current financial crisis, so if ever a government had the electorate's goodwill to act, it's now."
Wilkinson is fairly blunt about where government should start. "It has got to limit pay at the top end," he says. "It's the rich that got us into this mess and the rich who should get us out of it." Whether Labour has the nerve to upset those whom it has most assiduously courted is another matter. But he can always dream, and in the meantime he is off home to watch TV.

Almost makes you think they had their conclusions before they began doesn't it?

The idea that income inequality within a society is more unsettling to health and welfare than income differences between societies has been hotly debated for more than two decades. In the past year alone, six academic analyses have been published in peer-reviewed journals, four of which contradict the hypothesis on statistical grounds. Yet Wilkinson and Pickett do not address these criticisms in their book. They might also have explained the occasional notable deviation from their theory, such as the unexpectedly high murder rates in egalitarian Finland and the unexpectedly low rates in very unequal Singapore.

Simply stating, "nothing else stood up to statistical analysis", doesn't refute the argument.