Defending The Spirit Level

5th August 2010

Matthew Sinclair from the Taxpayers’ Alliance (August) imagines he has spotted statistical sleight of hand in our book The Spirit Level, about the damaging consequences of inequality, that hundreds of our fellow academics have failed to detect.

We took our data from the best sources, including the World Health Organisation, the UN and the World Bank. To double-check our findings, we repeated our analyses for the 50 US states, to see if more unequal states showed the same tendency to have worse health and social problems. In almost 30 different cross-national analyses, we showed the same tendency for problems to be significantly worse in societies with bigger income differences.

The choice of problems we examined was partly decided by the availability of internationally comparable data. But to safeguard against the criticism that we picked problems to suit our argument, we showed (in a