The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

5 Responses to “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger”

1. Barry Milliken says:

   April 21, 2010 at 10:02 am

   The centuries long excellent fight for officially authorized equality (“equality before the law”) is closer to achievement in more countries than at any time in history. But especially over the last 150 years, the positive moral connotations linked with such equality has been hijacked by persons who wish to enforce “equality” in additional dimensions such as “income”. The authors of this book are among persons well intentioned intellectuals who (like Marx and Lenin) are blind to the illogical and immoral implications of such a view. (Ref: the glowing review at the socialist review website.) Allow me a few rhetorical questions to illustrate:

   * Is a primitive aboriginal tribe living in absolute poverty and equality to be preferred to a modern society with income disparities of 2 to 1…. or 100 to 1?
   
   * Imagine 2 countries A and B, each with 100 residents all having equal incomes. But in country B, a single individual discovers a cure for cancer, save millions of lives worldwide, becomes fabulously wealthy, and straight away plunges his country to the bottom of chart listing countries with the greatest income disparities. What should country B do to prevent it’s 99 additional residents from being plagued by the unhappiness of unbridled envy and all the additional terrible social consequences that are entailed? (And why do we measure these things by country anyway? Because the country is the political unit capable of social engineering? Why won’t the residents of country A also feel unequal? Why not solve all the world’s problems and have the UN enforce income equality world wide?)
   
   * If income equality is so fantastic, why not equality of wealth? Why not perfect absolute equality where everyone makes exactly the same? Or why not the ancient unequal approach of “to each according to need”? (The authors evade these issues because down deep they know the consequences would be very terrible.)
   
   * Why not enforce equality in the thousands of additional dimensions that human beings differ? If it’s not practical to give every hideous or homely person plastic surgery, we can permanently surgically add a few scars or warts to the gorgeous people. Reflect of all the money and grief we could save if everyone were just as (un)attractive as everyone else. Why not make all pro golfers wear wrist weights so that all us duffers won’t feel so terrible? Can you imagine the totalitarian horror of a society where everyone were compelled to be the same!!
   
   * But as a replacement for they pick only on “income”. Although some “income” is unearned (e.g. welfare checks, lottery booty, or (as a Marxist would argue) any income from capital) the vast majority is “earnings”. But they would never call it “earnings” because, heaven forbid, that might imply that some people really deserve to earn more than others. Take the example of J. K. Rowling, now one of the richest people in the world. Millions of people worldwide have freely chosen to give her money for her books. Yet the authors of the Spirit Level snub the basic justice of that process. As a replacement for they look at the result and deem it terrible. They judge that justice and a healthy society demands that the decisions of persons millions of reader should be reversed by redistributing Rowling’s earnings back to her readers who are too stupid to know the harm they have done to the cause of human equality!
   
   * Are the authors aware of the scandalous misuse of “income” statistics? The same people who championed favorable tax treatment of employee benefits, which caused massive shifts in money from paychecks to employee benefits over the past several decades, now cite income statistics from tax returns which exclude persons benefits to purportedly show that disparities have increased! The statistics have also been used to snub variations in an individual’s lifetime patterns of earnings and wrongly assume that income groups represent the same individuals over time. Similarly confused is the measure of income by households vs. by individual in an era where the trend is in the direction of lower household size. As terrible as the US statistics are, these authors presume to adopt lacking qualification the statistics from dozens of countries, all of which use equally questionable (but differently biased) measures of income? For more on this read Alan Reynolds book “Income and Wealth” of the article “The Truth About Income Inequality” by Diana Furchtgott-Roth on the real clear markets website.

   Thankfully mankind has generally stirred away from stagnant societies where all wealth was controlled and redistributed by political force (kings, dictators and socialist commissars), to societies where wealth went to persons who really made it. Historically the greatest creators of wealth (i.e. persons who most benefited mankind as measured by the money freely agreed to them) are a remarkably tiny number of entrepreneurs and inventors. That of course has led to “income disparity”. I’m all for it.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
2. southpaw68 says:

   April 21, 2010 at 11:41 am

   This is a very readable literary book with socialist thoughts about how income equality might make societies better. The authors avoid a lot of literary jargon and the reading sections are well-organized, brief, concise, and thorough. A layman can read through the book lacking too much distress. They have some amusing cartoons included that comment on our sick worldly society.

   The basic thought is that societies with high income inequality have more social and health problems than societies that don’t. Even the rich benefit from more equal income distribution. Japan and Scandinavian countries are agreed as excellent examples of societies that are foremost in income equality and quality of life. The US, Portugal, and UK are shown to be societies with high income inequality and all the detriments that come with it–privileged levels of violence, anxiety, mental illness, obesity, lower educational standards, privileged consumption, drug usage, weaker communities, lower life expectancy, less social mobility, privileged prison excise, and more health problems. The US is by far the most unequal in income of the first world countries. This book examines first world countries mostly.

   It is not enough just to have a rich country for the inhabitants to have a better quality of life; we should focus more on attaining income equality. As a replacement for of having the CEO building 300 times the average worker, he should only be building three times the average worker, for instance. This can be done by either setting wages or salaries with income equality in mind or by redistributing wealth through taxes. Japan is agreed as example of the ex- and Sweden is agreed as example of the latter. In the US, states with less social and health problems and more income equality are generally the northern Midwestern states, the New England states, and Western states such as Idaho and Utah. States with high income inequality and the most health and social problems are Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Sometimes there does not seem to be much difference between a terrible state and excellent one. For instance, the top state for endurance has an average life span of 77 for people living in the state. The bottom state has a life span of 74.

   Some sociologists have used race and intelligence as determiner of quality of societies in their books such as Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, and H. J. Eysenck. Wilkinson and Pickett dismiss such reasoning based on race as racist and then go on with their socialist solutions for society. For instance, companies should be employee owned and controlled in perpetuity to give workers more control over their work and incomes. They attribute racial and class differences in performance to how society perceives different races, castes, and classes. They give some experimental evidence that shows that if people look down on a group then that group will not perform well. If they don’t look down on them, then they will perform better.

   Indeed, it sometimes seems that these socialists judge that society and a detrimental environment are to blame for any individual failing and the individual is reliable for nothing. But they do mention that the effective class in Britain is blasé about whether their children perform well in school. It is not one of their cultural values to place emphasis on doing homework, for instance. Here in the US, it is still generally believed that you deserve the place you get, although minorities and women are agreed affirmative privileges and white men are expected to prove their worth according to meritocracy.

   If you like socialism, you will like this book. The authors like Cuba because it has a high quality of life and has an environmentally sustainable carbon trace. After living through the robber baron capitalism from the 1980’s onwards, I reflect the US and UK are due for a socialist revival. As the authors state, you can’t have right freedom if you have a high level of income equality. They are against our to some extent sadistic pecking order society. Rich people will have to be convinced or forced into believing that they not only make money for themselves, but for all, no matter how indifferent or hostile they might be toward whom or what they are forced to give their money away for. Getting politicians to apply real reform is another problem. They use an issue to get elected and then never follow through on their promises. In the US, another hurdle is convincing the public about socialist thoughts, which would require a huge propaganda battle and an overcoming of detractors. Although you can equalize incomes to some extent, you still can’t equalize people in additional categories, such as looks, manners, and intelligence.

   These socialist countries with high quality of life such as Sweden and Japan are still rather homogeneous. Robert Putnam has open data about how diversity destroys community. So would it not be better to attempt socialism in an ethno-state, rather than a diverse society? I suppose academics want to have another “make work” job in which they attempt mend race relations in socialist society. Or they could just raise babies from bottles in a lab and then have a name with a PHD in Socialist Child Raising to make the perfect socialist androgynous person, unprejudiced, sharing, caring, and permanently social. The authors mention early child and birth experiences predispose people to taking anti-social paths of failure and inferiority. It takes a lot of government intrusion to get rid of socialist sin of being anti-social. Early hunting tribes may have been egalitarian, but also tribalist at the same time.
   
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
3. Alyssa A. Lappen says:

   April 21, 2010 at 1:16 pm

   This book has been gloriously haled and saluted for its profusion of social data. Most of these graphs correlate lack of economic equality in 23 rich nations with increased health risk and social ills. It appears to me, but, that the copiousness of the authors’ data tends to blind readers to their potential problems and oversights — which are significant.

   Firstly, as others have noted, correlation does not offer scientific proof of cause — far from it. The authors eliminated certain nations with tiny populations, and others missing sufficient data. But this is not a scientific control. It’s nothing like the double blind scientific control groups required, say, to test drugs or medical implants to be used on individuals.

   Secondly, an “ecological fallacy,” as dubbed by statisticians, plagues all this data: “inferences about the scenery of point individuals are based only upon aggregate statistics collected for the group….” As with negative stereotypes, one cannot assume individuals in any group to have the same average characteristics as the whole group. A common Eastern European stereotype assumes all Roma people to be dirty, liars and thieves — a discriminatory tale. Similarly, it would be incorrect, and downright racist to infer that all African Americans have a not more than average IQ based on individual results for a tiny group that each tested with not more than average IQ.

   In 1950, sociologist William S. Robinson examined literacy excise based on the 1930 US. In all 48 states, he computed literacy excise and proportions of the foreign-born populace. Both facts had a positive correlation of 0.53 — suggesting that the privileged a state’s proportion of immigrants, the greater its average literacy. But Robinson establish the correlation of individuals substantially lower — negative 0.11. Average immigrants were less literate than U.S.-born citizens. Positive correlation at the state level derived from the trend of immigrants to settle among more literate citizens. Robinson warned statisticians NOT to deduce anything about individuals based upon “ecological” data for whole populations.

   Yet it is based on exactly this kind of ecological fallacy — a mass of them, in fact — that these authors propose a host of “cures” for the alleged ills they see in “unequal” society. This is not scientific in any way shape or form.

   I am impressed by the amount of data these researchers collected.

   But, we should no more prescribe health and social cures for entire societies of individuals based on mass population data than renovate drugs or medical implants lacking double blind tests. That is especially right, moreover, when persons proposing the cures hold up Cuba (p. 217) — one of the world’s most repressive totalitarian regimes, with an extremely miserable, on the breadline and oppressed populace — as offering any policy whatever worthy of consideration.

   — Alyssa A. Lappen
   
   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
4. Tom Carpenter says:

   April 21, 2010 at 3:26 pm

   The authors of The Spirit Level clearly place a lot of work into this book. They also clearly despise America, but that’s OK becuase most educated elite who have a large carbon trace (like these authors) like to attack America while they print books that result in a greater carbon mark than my Dodge car will for an entire year of driving. That said, they have a point – equality is an vital value in our modern world. But, it is clear, when reading the later chapters, that these authors see only governmental solutions and impositions on the populace in order to achieve equality. To me, it will only come when the values and beliefs of the populace change. This comes, in part, through education, but also through religious movements that are enlightened.

   Enlightened religious movements are widespread today and teach equality and tolerance as high values. Not the kind of tolerance that says anything is OK, but the kind of tolerance that says no single person is more valuable than another. This book acts as if these movements are not even happening. When you look at world history, governements rarely – if ever – made lasting changes; but, religions have made changes that lasted for thousands of years. Why snub their power completely?

   Ultimately, the book open the case – lacking question – that inequality is a problem. For this, I give it five stars. But, the narrow focus on governmental solutions results in three stars. I’ll go with an average of four because I reflect the 14, maybe 15, chapters are must read chapters. The suggestions for improvement, but, are better establish in books like Making a World lacking Poverty. I would recommend using this book for the science and Making a World lacking Poverty for a path toward a solution.
   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
5. t.g. randini says:

   April 21, 2010 at 5:03 pm

   Well written and concise effort expressing why more equality makes most people better off in any society.
   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5