RAISE YOUR SPIRIT, LEVEL YOUR SOCIETY!



Inequality is bad for us. That's the message of The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, a new book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two epidemiologists from northern English universities (Nottingham and York). This is a book which draws political conclusions from scientific observations, and as such it's full of fascinatingly counter-intuitive insights, such as the idea that inequality makes the lives of the rich worse as well as the lives of the poor. The authors take up and run with Oliver James's point that capitalism makes you mentally sick, saying that it's not just the poor who suffer from the effects of inequality, but the whole population; mental illness is five times higher across the whole population of the most unequal societies than it is in the most equal ones. It's not being poor per se that sucks, it's living amongst people with very different life outcomes. Mental illness and obesity, drug addiction and violence, teenage pregnancy and the weakening of community life - all increase in more unequal societies.



The most equal societies studied in the book turn out to be Scandinavia and Japan. The least equal - pyramided by thirty years of Thatcherite and Reaganomic "incentivization" - are Britain, the USA and Portugal. As Lynsey Hanley points out in her review of The Spirit Level, there is now a 30-year male life expectancy gap between central Glasgow and parts of southern England. (post completo aqui)

(2009)