The Spirit Level - Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett - Part 1

The Spirit Level
- Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 51

 February 20, 2017 

Book 16 - The Spirit Level:
Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett (2010)
 Part 1 - v-xv, 3-48
Reading Time - 1 hour

The authors of this book think they have cracked the nugget of truth... why are some countries, like the USA experiencing increasingly negative social effects (violence, mental illness, obesity, imprisonment rates)? Is it because the US is so rich? Nope. It's because there is such a great inequality. And the disparity between rich and poor is only growing greater, which means no end of social deterioration.

That's it in a nutshell... inequality undermines trust, solidarity and mutuality... the foundations of a democratic society. Kind of worrisome. The authors do say that it can be reversed... but I'm only in the first few chapters... so that will likely come with time.

They like to use a lot of graphs so here's one of them... Social inequality is worst at the far right of the graph. Health and Social problems are worst at the top of the graph...

Now a caveat, they are only looking at the richest countries in the world, where increasing wealth really doesn't increases happiness, health or well-being. They're not looking at the poorer countries in the world, where increased wealth has a measurable impact on happiness, longevity and health, etc. We're looking at ourselves here... and why, since we are so well off... we are increasingly unhappy. It's a good question...

The social problems that tend to show an increase with rising income inequality are: level of trust, mental illness (including addictions), life expectancy & infant mortality, obesity, children's educational performance, teenage births, homicides, imprisonment rates and social mobility. Essentially, the bigger the disparity between rich and poor in our countries, the more social problems there are. Scary stuff.

They also noted that we are way more anxious and depressed than we used to be. We are more insecure and more concerned with social esteem and status. They call it the social evaluative threat - we are always looking around us to see if we fit in, or how we can fit in. This seems to be a result of the breakdown of settled communities back in the mid 20th century. No longer are we surrounded by friends and family but rather strangers. And we are always looking to see how we fit in. This sort of thing then has an effect on the rising inequality gap. Greater inequality just makes our social anxieties worse. One example of this is how in the U.S., self-promotion is the name of the game, whereas in Japan, self-deprecation is still the name of the game.