In 2009,Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett wrote the international bestseller,”The Spirit Level, Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.” In the first 5 years after publishing, they spoke at 700 seminars and conferences; they talked to the UN, the WHO, OECD, the EU, and ILO. Their work was corroborated both before and after they wrote the book. Irrelevant! They were attacked by some of “the usual suspects” from the right wing. The second edition contained a 25 page postscript; ‘Research Meets Politics.” They also set up a web site: www.equalitytrust.org.uk. Every person on earth should read this book.
To make their evaluation of the 23 “rich” states and the 50 American states, they used data for these metrics: level of trust in a society, mental illness [including drug and alcohol addiction]; life expectancy; infant mortality; obesity; children’s educational performance; teenage births; homicides; imprisonment rates; social mobility [not available for US states]. They spent over 50 “person years” research time on this project – why are some societies more healthy? Obviously, attacks occurred because some people don’t want various publics to know this information – might raise questions!
The following is a summary of their findings with little commentary.
“..the truth is that the major changes in income distribution in any country are almost never attributable simply to market forces influencing wage rates. What we see instead is the use of political power…”
Widening income differences, “with the exception of Canada..widened most rapidly in English speaking countries…accompanied in each case by a free-market ideology and by policies designed to create a more ‘flexible” labour force..English speaking countries caught the disease quickly from each other..”
For Britain, “the truth is that both the broken society and the broken economy [of post-2008] resulted from the growth of inequality.”
“as affluent societies have grown richer, there have been long-term rises in rates of anxiety, depression, and numerous other social problems.”
“..if a country wants higher average levels of educational achievement amoung its school children, it must address the underlying inequality which creates a steeper social gradient in educational achievement.”
“Increasingly, researchers are..recognizing that stress in early life, in the womb as well as infancy and early childhood..affects physical growth, emotional; social, and cognitive development.”
“More unequal countries and more unequal states have worse educational attainment – and these relationships are strong enough for us to be sure..they are not due to chance.”
A vivid contrast in trust following disasters can be seen in the American response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Chinese response following a 2008 earthquake. American “troops in New Orleans seemed to be used primarily to control the population [heavily armed & looking for looters], with the rapid deployment of unarmed soldiers in rescue and relief missions in China..”
“America in the 1950s and 1960s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century.. those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement.. the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital..Sometime around 1965-70 America reversed course and started becoming both less economically and less well connected socially and politically.”
“We also find that women’s status is significantly worse in more unequal states.: “In the USA..over their lifetime more than half will suffer from a mental illness.”
“Low position in..social status..is painful to most people..the use of illegal drugs, is more common in more unequal societies.”
“In more unequal societies children experience more bullying, fights and conflict.”
“..more unequal countries have higher rates of imprisonment…people of lower class, income and education much more likely to be sent to prison..”
“The harshness of the US prison systems at federal, state and county levels has led to repeated condemnations by..Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Committee against torture.”
In theory, imprisonment is for deterrence, retribution, incapacitation and rehabilitation; America’s prisons practice “three other purposes…class control…scapegoating…political gain.” The Dutch and Japanese have far different principles [pg. 151].
Knowledgeable Americans will recognize the basis for the “law and order” political campaigns of the last 50 years – and the massive irony of what those “law and order” governments did in office – in the 3 purposes listed above.
“Societies that imprison more people also spend less of their wealth on welfare for their citizens…since 1984…California built only one new college but 21 new prisons [to 1998].”
“If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police…in the USA during the period since 1980, when income inequality increased rapidly…public expenditure on prisons increased 6 times as fast as public expenditure on education…”
“…after slowly increasing from 1950 to 1980, social mobility in the USA declined rapidly, as income differences widened dramatically.”
“…increased income inequality is responsible for increasing the segregation of rich and poor…poor people in poor neighborhoods [are] the ‘truly disadvantaged.'”
“Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes.”
“The truth is that the vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality…BECAUSE THE EFFECTS OF INEQUALITY ARE NOT CONFINED JUST TO THE LEAST WELL-OFF.”
“even the children of parents with the very highest levels of education did better in Finland and Belgium than they did in the more unequal UK or USA.”
“…greater equality can be gained either by using taxes and benefits to redistribute very unequal incomes or by greater equality in gross incomes before taxes and benefits…”
“…government may spend either to PREVENT SOCIAL PROBLEMS or, where income differences have widened, TO DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES.”
“The scale of economic inequality which exists today is less an expression of freedom and democracy as of their DENIAL…THE TRUTH IS…modern inequality exists because DEMOCRACY IS EXCLUDED from the economic sphere.”
“Robert Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics, estimates that growing inequality meant in the years before the 2008 crash ABOUT 1.5 TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR WERE BEING SIPHONED FROM THE BOTTOM 90% OF THE US POPULATION TO THE TOP 10%.”
Warren Buffett: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
“The Spirit Level” provides the results of what Buffett is talking about; the consequences of unprecedented greed; the consequences of deliberately hurting millions of people just to make another million or two; the consequences of corrupting the political and judicial systems to enrich the already obscenely rich. Please read this book, and talk to your friends and neighbors.
With Justice For All 