The Spirit Level

by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett Allen Lane, 320pp, £20, Week Bookshop £18 (incl. p&p). The Spirit Level provides “an intellectual manifesto on which the battle for a better society can be fought”, said Roy Hattersley in the New Statesman. It is well-known that in unequal societies, the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost all social ills. What this book does, is show that inequality adversely affects rich and poor alike, exposing them to higher levels of ill-health, violence, drugs, obesity, and stress. “All of us, irrespective of income, have much to gain from a more equal society.” The authors arrange 30 years’ worth of research data into a series of scatter-graphs, said Lynsey Hanley in the Guardian. These prove that, among developed economies, more equal societies such as Japan and the Scandinavian nations are at the favourable end on almost every index of quality of life; unequal societies like the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable end, and Canada and continental Europe are somewhere in between. Much as I would like to believe this argument, said John Kay in the Financial Times, I don’t. “Causal relationships are complex”; and from a statistician’s perspective, the data provided in no way supports the case.

FIRST POSTED APRIL 9, 2009