Picture by Julia Manzerova
Read a response from the authors of The Spirit Level to the criticisms made in this article
Speaking on the Today programme recently to promote his Labour leadership bid, Ed Miliband said: “If you look round the world—at the countries that are healthier, happier, more secure—they are the more equal countries.” He was making explicit reference to Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Penguin), a book that has been hugely influential on leftist politicians and activists since it was published in 2009. In a recent lecture entitled “In praise of equality,” Roy Hattersley said that “anybody who’s not read The Spirit Level ought not to be wasting their time listening to me this afternoon, but should be rushing out to buy a copy.” Its influence has even extended into parts of the right. David Willetts, now minister for universities and science, wrote (Prospect, May 2009) that Wilkinson was one of the authors who had “persuaded me that inequality matters.”
Yet there is growing evidence that the book’s claims about the link between a range of social maladies and the level of inequality in a society are simply untrue.
One of the first to sound the alarm was LSE professor of social policy Julian Le Grand. Reviewing the book for Prospect last May, he set out how the authors could be ascribing problems to inequality that are really the result of cultural differences between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian societies, or of out-and-out poverty. Now, new research suggests that the problem with the book could run deeper and that some of the statistics are unreliable.
A Swedish report by three economists—Nima Sanandaji, Arvid Malm and Tino Sanandaji—translated into English and published by the Taxpayers’ Alliance in July, focuses on the claimed link between health and equality. First, it finds that there is no statistically significant correlation between life expectancy and equality. This is in line with the existing academic literature. Research for the World Health Organisation, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in May 2001, concluded that there is “no direct link from income inequality to ill-health; individuals are no more likely to die [earlier] if they live in more unequal places.”
Second, it points out that the authors of The Spirit Level have come up with their own index of health and social outcomes, which allows them to choose a set of numbers that suit their case. But when you look at a range of health outcomes—from the prevalence of mental illness to heart attack deaths—there is no significant correlation. In a report for Policy Exchange released on 8th July, Peter Saunders, professor emeritus of sociology at Sussex University, created a “social misery index” of variables like the suicide rate, racist bigotry and alcohol consumption to show how The Spirit Level’s approach can produce any result researchers go looking for. His work suggested more equal societies in fact fared much worse if you looked at his set of variables instead of those cherry-picked for The Spirit Level.
Indeed, in order to substantiate a claim that more equal societies are more innovative, Wilkinson and Pickett have even argued that the US—home to Silicon Valley and most of the world’s top research universities—is about as innovative as Portugal. World Intellectual Property Organisation figures confirm this is nonsense.
Meanwhile Christopher Snowdon’s new book, The Spirit Level Delusion (Democracy Institute) takes Wilkinson and Pickett’s claims apart in areas ranging from crime to educational achievement. Snowdon, a public health researcher, shows how, if you don’t cherry-pick countries in the way The Spirit Level does, you can come up with a better correlation between educational achievement and the first letter of a country’s name than you can between educational achievement and equality. Distance from the north pole is an even more powerful predictor.
While actual, absolute poverty clearly has huge consequences, income inequality is a much more complex phenomenon than the all-purpose bogeyman The Spirit Level paints it as. Inequality can provide an incentive for people to learn new skills and move to better careers. There can certainly be problems if people are prevented from responding to that incentive by a lack of decent education and training, or social dysfunctions like family breakdown. However the answer then is not to try and treat the symptom (inequality) but the cause, and reform education and benefit systems that trap people in poverty.
The crucial question now is how all those enthusiastic evangelists for The Spirit Level will respond as many of its empirical claims fall apart like an ageing Trabant. Will they accept that the book is deeply flawed, and fall back on the older debate over whether inequality is simply unjust? Or will they ignore the evidence and go on citing it regardless?
Once ideas like the supposed link between social health and equality are out there among politicians and commentators, they can become extremely hard to dislodge. Another example is the idea that we live in a closed-shop society in which people’s chances are fixed by the class into which they are born. Peter Saunders has also recently written a devastating book, Social Mobility Myths, reprising his earlier work which showed this isn’t the case; people who are talented and committed generally do get ahead in Britain.
Last year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported focus-group evidence that there was a “widespread belief in the availability of opportunity.” Its report, however, argued that “providing more information about the barriers to opportunity” would be a good way of “building public support for tackling economic inequality.” The logic of such a conclusion is this: convincing people that the talented and hardworking can’t get ahead—which they can—is a good way of building support for a fight against inequality, a cause justified on the basis of dodgy statistics and non-existent correlations. Someone needs to tell the British people they’re right, and the liberal elite that they’re wrong.
Brendan_O039donovan
In case anybody thinks from this rather one-sided article that the thesis proposed in the Spirit Level has been conclusively debunked, I should point out for the sake of balance that the authors have responded in detail to the critical publications mentioned here on the Equality Trust website. Go to http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/response-to-questions to read about the weaknesses of the rebuttals which Matthew has glossed over here.
Tomas Hirst
I don’t see the distinction in this debate between the effects of “inequality” and the effects of poverty.
Are the authors of Spirit Level really positing the idea that the relative inequality of individual incomes within a society have a greater impact on the health of a society than the absolute poverty levels?
To suggest that because the average life expectancy in Cuba is 0.1 years higher than in the US displays some kind of argument against the US’s approach to capitalism is more than disingenuous. More interesting would be to look at the net benefit of wealth creation in the US to average global life expectancy.
Furthermore the sharp drop in infant mortality rates in a number of developing countries might not, in fact, reflect their relative lack of income inequality. Instead it could be more the result of a combination of scientific development, philanthropy and global cooperation all made possible by increases in global wealth and education.
The debate on inequality in undermined by defining it as a state of being rather than a paucity of opportunity. With the former there is surely a risk of focusing on dragging the wealthy down rather than trying to deal with lingering structural rigidities in the system that deny people from poorer backgrounds the opportunity to access good schools, universities, jobs.
It should be much less about debunking the thesis proposed by the Spirit Level, but much more about questioning why we still require studies like this telling us that inequality, poverty and society’s failure to look after the vulnerable is a bad thing.
Tom
Good work! You manage to regurgitate a couple of reports whilst failing to look at the responses Wilkinson and Pickett have posted on their website.
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/response-to-questions
Major Tom
27% of the US citizens don’t fall for cooked-up liberal conspiracies, which as we know are everywhere on the extremely abundant liberal media, and don’t believe Obama was born in the USA. I’m sure Prospect Magazine doesn’t believe either.
(comment via facebook)
Betty Lo
Tom: Really? What about your cooked-up conspiracy that Obama wasn’t born in the US even though he has presented his American birth certificate?
(comment via facebook)
BenB
The main body of the article says, essentially, that the writers of the book have used statistics that favour their viewpoint. I haven’t read the book and am subsequently loath to comment on it, but it tends to be the case that theoreticians provide evidence to support their claims, much as the critics specifically looked for and published statistics that backed up their own contrary opinions. This is how it works.
My main gripe is with the flawed argument that ‘the talented and hardworking [can] get ahead’. The ability of people to ‘get ahead’ exists only because there is a ‘behind’ to leave: a social grouping composed of people in a worse environment. A ‘lower class’ if you will. The only reason class is self-maintained is because too few people challenge it. If an alien gas cloud hit the Earth and everyone was suddenly highly motivated, committed to their talent and free from demoralisation, do you think everyone would be able to ‘get ahead’?
Matthew Sinclair
Those accusing me of ignoring the Equality Trust response miss the fact this article was published in Prospect before their article came out.
But the TPA has published a response to that response, here:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/research/splvl.html
And I think it makes clear that the Equality Trust response was deeply misleading. So I wouldn’t retract a word of what I’ve written.
TIMOTHY_ROBERTS
Good stuff! I look forward to the rebuttal to the rebuttal to the rebuttal. Meanwhile:
a) arguments based on differences in patenting propensity between different countries make me extremely sceptical (given widely differing laws and practices);
b) can any neutral Swede report on the checking or non-checking of travel tickets in Stockholm?
David Jardine-Smith
This is a very disappointing piece and I am surprised that Prospect published it. It is the work of a right-wing pressure group with a vested interest in inequality. It is part of a concerted rubbishing of Wilkinson & Pickett, designed to swamp their argument rather than engage with it. It lacks any intellectual rigour: Sinclair cites a few opponents of Wilkinson & Pickett, seeking to count the bare fact of opposition as evidence that their arguments are “simply untrue”, and deliberately – at least, for his sake, I hope it was deliberate – confusing inequality with social immobility. Inequality is OK, he suggests, because it urges people to better themselves. Dogs can eat dogs, in other words; which is fine for the top dogs only. “Someone needs to tell the British people they’re right,” he concludes, “And the liberal elite that they’re wrong.” Well, no, Mr Sinclair: someone needs to tell you that many decent British people are disgusted by your position and incensed by the utterly arrogant suggestion that we might share it.
Jean-Marc Vanderloo
How weak. Two paragraphs to explain, in no detail, how a book is flawed, hypocritically culminating in an unsubstantiated claim that despite what we may think, people “can” get ahead.
This sort of stuff flows out of the think tanks and policy meeting every week, what meakes it more true of convincing this time? Meanwhile in the real world, the “imaginary” class system prevails.
Kiran
I absolutely loved and was so greftaul for this lecture! Thank heavens someone is teaching this to people today.As a young black woman I have experienced both many of the things that impoverished people of all colors have had to endure, as well as many opportunities that more affluent members of society have the had the luxury of participating in. These opportunities don t even necessarily have to be things like expensive trips, material possessions, etc. We can discuss it from a mostly educational standpoint, as did Professor Richards in the lecture, or lavish lifestyles in general. I say this interestingly enough because my personal experiences have caused me to have this debate of free will versus determinism on many occasions.Given my complicated personal background of basically raising myself since the age of 12 and experiencing a host of emotional hardship, I had any number of excuses available to me to lean on and cry victim at any point in my life. And sometimes I did. Yet in the end, I accepted responsibility for my life and made choices, some personal and most academic, that afforded me the opportunity to see a potential way out that many in my same shoes have not been able to envision. And this is not to say that I my struggles were in some regards not in vain because at the age of 28 I still haven t graduated college, I am a single mother who lives pay check to pay check, and has to work full time on top of taking six courses a semester so as to be able to afford (with a mountain of debt) a basic college education, etc, etc. Nonetheless, I gave myself a fighting chance by making some of the individual choices that I made despite the socio-structural constraints that I was surrounded by. So I know that a way out of one s circumstance can be found; and if one is able to have the discipline to make even better personal and academic decisions than myself, it can be done very well. So I have always understood the argument that sometimes people just need to pick themselves up by the bootstraps , or just have a little discipline because like the achievement ideal logy of the socio-psycho cognitive perspective dictates, in America, work hard and you can make it!However, conversely, it has always brought me great pain and a host of long-winded and heated debates to try to impart upon others that consideration of the socio-structural component in one s life is an equally important factor. I mean c mon, how can people not give this perspective equal weight in their daily arrogant and uninformed judgments of others?! Perhaps it can be difficult to understand at first if you have come from one background (say of vast privilege) as opposed to another (extreme poverty), but people have to understand two vital things in this regard. One, as our Professor so profoundly pointed out, this perspective carries just as much weight as the other equally. The fact is that the world is not an equal place for all, and yes some people are dealt cards out of their control that they have to play, but all of us that play poker know that sometimes a 7 deuce just won t cut it and you have to work extra hard to stay in the game at that point! And two, that even when people do try, there can sometimes be such an insurmountable number and never-ending wave of continual obstacles in one s path that as emotional beings, sometimes people, spent, just eventually crack under the pressure. Thus, it is imperative to always when tempted to only want to debate the right foot, try walking in both shoes of the person or people that you re judging because as Professor Richards pointed out until you live that life and have to trudge through it yourself, you can never guarantee that you would end up with the same hand that you are currently lucky enough to be playing.