Sorry for the drama, but word of this diary's subject really has to get out - it's potentially that important. I'd also like to ask people to rec this diary so it won't disappear too quickly. It's about trying to make the world a better place for everyone - and why what both the Left and the Right is doing doesn't quite hit the mark.
A book that has been making waves in England is going to be available starting this month in the U.S. The title of the U.S. edition is "The Spirit Level - Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger". It's written by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett who between them estimate they have put over 50 person-years of work into the research that is summarized in this book. It has been getting strong reviews in England.
I was able to get my hands on an advance copy through the Amazon Vine program. This book does for Public Policy and Politics what Germ Theory did for Medicine and Evolution did for Biology. It's that big a deal. (more)
BACKGROUND
Wilkinson and Pickett began this research by trying to answer some fundamental questions,
....the causes of the of the big differences in life expectancy - the 'health inequalities' - between people at different levels in the social hierarchy in modern societies. The focal problem initially was to understand why health gets worse at every step down the social ladder, so that the poor are less healthy than those in the middle, who in turn are less healthy than those further up.
Trained in epidemiology, their research methods are designed to trace out the roots of health problems in populations, to explain why there are differences in outcomes between groups. These methods also lend themselves to unraveling other problems, and Wilkinson and Pickett found that their work was leading them to understanding what appears to be a fundamental factor in a wide range of social ills that go beyond health questions alone.
It extends to such things as educational failure, a lack of social trust or personal happiness, decreasing social mobility, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy and violence, mental health, and more. It means that attempts to address these problems as separate issues are doomed to be less effective than desired because the root cause driving so much of them is not being addressed. It's like putting a new coat of paint on a house and insulating it - while ignoring termites in the foundation.
Along the way, Wilkinson and Pickett made use of a number of data sets that reach around the world across many different societies; this is information that has only become available in the last few years. They also began to find answers drawn from a broad range of scientific disciplines to explain what was at work, from fields as diverse as evolutionary psychology, physiology, neurology, history, anthropology, economics, sociology, and more. There are recent discoveries with direct implications for understanding the way humans act and interact which are only now beginning to be appreciated more widely.
The breadth of their scholarship is impressive. They also combine it with a degree of literacy and humor that is as refreshing as the subject matter is grim. Chapters in the book are graced by carefully chosen cartoons that illustrate the point at hand. This is not a dry academic work intended for some journal. It's written to be accessible by the general public. They spend a good amount of time explaining what they're measuring, how it's being interpreted, and what it means - and also what alternative explanations might apply. There's an appendix, an extensive list of references, and an index for those who want to dig deeper.
WHAT THEY FOUND
Wilkinson and Pickett have spent decades investigating these questions, and what they have put together overthrows many of the fundamental assumptions that underlie public policy discussions and the beliefs of the Right and the Left. Their conclusions - backed by a lot of evidence - appear to hold true across a range of cultures, governmental styles, different geographies, and ethnic groupings. They provide explanations for a number of social problems, and are testable. They note that they originally considered calling their book "Evidence-based Politics" and further state:
The research which underpins what we describe comes from a great many research teams in different universities and research organizations. Replicable methods have been used to study observable and objective outcomes, and peer-reviewed research reports have been published in academic, scientific journals.
Which is not to claim they have developed a universal theory of everything. They freely admit that a number of factors apply to every given problem which also need to be taken into account, that there is some room for discussion in interpreting what they've found, and that nothing rules out further research down the road which might call for rethinking some questions - but overall they believe they had made a very solid case for their conclusions. Without more ado (subject to my own limitations in summarizing their work), here is the gist of their conclusions.
- Material wealth alone does not guarantee the success of a country in ensuring its citizens have healthy, happy satisfactory lives; there are limits to how far economic growth can go in improving the quality of life or solving social problems. (Note: this refers to developed countries. Wilkinson and Pickett do not deny that economic growth is important for countries still working their way up the economic ladder.) What it means is that past a certain point, pursuing policies to keep growing an economy yield diminishing returns. This conclusion was arrived at by comparing a select list of developed countries and discovering that there were significant differences in the life outcomes of people living within them.
Wilkinson and Pickett arrived at this conclusion by comparing data for a number of countries around the world for which good numbers are available, and looked at ones which can be considered to be fully developed - rich. They came down to a list consisting of 23 rich countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark. Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States of America. They then calculated an Index of Health and Social Problems for all of the above where data sets were available. And, in many cases the same measures could be applied to the individual states of the United States, which as they note can be considered the equivalent of 50 different countries in their own right.
The index of health and social problems was selected by limiting it to those for which - again - good data was available. Here's what they looked at:
• Level of trust (between individuals and their society as a whole)
• mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction)
• life expectancy and infant mortality
• obesity
• children's educational performance
• teenage births
• homicides
• imprisonment rates
• social mobility (not available for US states)
- There was only one common factor that correlated with performance differences across the index of health and social problems for all of the countries being evaluated: the greater the degree of inequality within a given country, the worse that country performed on all of the measures above.
It will probably not come as a surprise to those who are regulars here to find that the U.S. is to be found consistently toward the outer limit on the plot for poor performance by these measures. Wilkinson and Pickett found that almost uniformly, a country or state's performance on any one of these measures is a good predictor on how they do on the others - which by itself is a strong indication that the correlation between inequality and performance means that inequality is a strong causal factor in the mechanisms that produce these results. And, for each individual measure, the correlation between inequality and performance was generally too strong to be dismissed as coincidence. Further, they also found the negative affects of inequality reach across the spectrum of the poor all the way up to the rich; it's not a problem for the poor alone.
By inequality, they were very careful to define how it could be calculated, using standard measures. One is to compare incomes of the top 10% or 20% versus the bottom, adjusting for household income on the basis of taxes, benefits, and household size. Another is the Gini coefficient which measures inequality across an entire society rather than the extremes. Where all income goes to one individual (maximum inequality) the Gini coefficient would be one; where it is divided equally, it would be zero. The lower its value, the more equal a society is. Another is the Robin Hood Index, which tells how much income would have to be taken from the rich and given to the poor to achieve equality.
- The reason why inequality seems to be the decisive factor in these outcomes is because it has recently been made clear by research that the way humans experience inequality has direct effects on their health, their behavior, and their interactions with other people. Attempts to solve the problems arising from this which ignore inequality are going be of only limited success at best - and a waste of time and money otherwise. Trying to solve them in isolation is not effective either - but addressing the underlying problem for any one of them by addressing inequality should also improve the rest of them simultaneously..
The negative effects of inequality appear to be linked to pride, shame, and status. The larger the differences in equality within a society, the greater the effects of those factors will be in that society. Anxiety has well documented effects on health, and questions of status within a group also can greatly affect behavior. They combine to reduce the quality of life across the board. In a rich society, the problem is no longer about acquiring enough material goods to survive, it's about acquiring enough status to feel and be perceived as successful. The greater the degree of inequality, the harder that task becomes. To quote Wilkinson and Pickett again,
Having come to the end of what higher material living standards can offer us, we are the first generation to have to find other ways of improving the real quality of life. The evidence shows that reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us. As we shall see in Chapter 13, this includes the better off.
FOR THE MOMENT
I'm going to break this off here now - this diary is already long enough. Let me make a few additional points. I'm largely summarizing just the first three chapters of the book. Wilkinson and Pickett go on to examine each of the indexed criteria to explore how inequality underlies what is being observed. The amount of detail is amazing, almost exhausting. They also go on to discuss some of the evolutionary trends at work - AND how human behavior has alternative social mechanisms besides those driven by group status which could be put to good effect once we understand what's at stake. They look at how we got where we are today, and speculate on ways to change for the better.
As they point out problems like Global Warming are not going to be solved if attempts to do so increase inequality instead of reducing it. Humans also possess capabilities of empathy and a sense of fairness which should be part of any solution that is going to be widely accepted.
If you want to get your own copy of "The Spirit Level - Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger" you can find it at Amazon or have your local bookstore get it from Bloomsbury Press. (ISBN-10: 1-60819-036-6, ISBN-13: 978-1-60819-036-2)
Wilkinson and Pickett have put together a website for The Spirit Level with many resources. If you want to see the evidence they've amassed and many other resources, it's the place to go. They are also on Facebook, and should be somewhere in a tour to promote the book and their findings.
Depending on how this diary goes over, I may follow it up with another post to explore in more depth their findings and discuss the implications. Once more, I ask that this diary get on the rec list so that more people will become aware of this book. It has huge implications for progressive politics and our future.
Woot! Rescued. My thanks - and hopes that the word about this book will spread. It's that important, IMHO.