The Impact of Inequality by Richard G Wilkinson
(Routledge, £19.99)
Richard Wilkinson’s latest book tells us what we already know, and that is why we need it. We know that oppressive, unequal relationships are bad for us, and that broadly voluntary, roughly equal relationships are good for us; and if we think about it we recognise that this is true for societies as well as for personal relations.
Wilkinson’s project, pursued for over 25 years, is to show that these are scientific truths. The effects of inequality are counted above all in deaths. Easy to define, reliably reported and unarguably serious, deaths make for sound data. The foundations of the worldview presented by Wilkinson, who is professor of social epidemiology at Nottingham University’s medical school, are the correlations he finds between death rates and inequality, measured by income. There are other strong associations, between, for example, inequality and homicide—regarded, says Wilkinson, as “the most well-established relation between homicide and any environmental factor.”
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