In an interview on Inequality

Returning to a domestic context, tell me about your last book, Spirit Level.

Spirit Level is an incredible book. It provides the evidence that inequality is bad for us all including the best-off. The book is similar in many ways to the case made by scientists in the 1950s that smoking probably causes lung cancer. These scientists presented a whole series of graphs and diagrams which showed that doctors who smoked had an increased risk of lung cancer: the point of using doctors was that this allowed them to control for other factors. The evidence was decisive and, although tobacco companies tried to argue against it for years, they were unsuccessful to the point that now you can’t find a single building to smoke inside. Now that’s an incredible change. The evidence provided in Spirit Level is as strong as the initial evidence that smoking is bad for you. The correlation between inequality and divorce, inequality and drug addiction, inequality and teenage pregnancy is shown graph after graph. All three main political parties have accepted it now: Labour have said, we accept the thesis of Spirit Level, and we’ve already done a lot (which is wrong, inequality rose under Labour). The Liberals say, we accept the book, but we haven’t really got a policy for those on benefits. And the Conservatives say, we accept the book and we want to stop people knowing about other people’s income so that the psychological effects are less!

In an interview on Fairness and Inequality

Let’s continue to explore these questions with The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, subtitled “Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger”.

What I liked especially about The Spirit Level is the way it builds a case that inequality is phenomenally dysfunctional. Different states in the US, with different levels of equality, have different levels of teenage pregnancy or homicide. It all comes back to inequality, and the book shows that high levels of inequality are completely dysfunctional.

I wanted to position this book in a family of five books because what was absent, I felt, from Wilkinson and Pickett’s work – which is hugely impressive in the data they’ve martialled and the correlations they’ve assembled, despite criticisms from some quarters – is that it needed to nest itself in the work of David Miller and Amartya Sen. Inequality is driving these dysfunctional behaviours, but it raises the question of why, and what’s the remedy? There I felt that the book was less well thought through.

One of the reasons why I think inequality has these toxic outcomes that they describe is its interrelationship with felt fairness. I would have liked to see them push on, and cross-reference their numbers with societies which have displayed a better relationship between desert and outcome than others. I would also have liked to see the book open up to the debate that Amartya Sen, another author I’ve identified here, puts on the table.