Original source: SimoleonSense.com .
Click Here To Read: New Book: It’s money that matters-understanding economic inequality
Introduction (via Boston.com)
If you like to think of America as The Greatest Country on Earth, and you’d rather not examine its claim to that title too closely, “The Spirit Level” will not be your favorite new book. On nearly every one of its 250-plus pages, a stark, unflattering graph shows the USA topping the charts among developed countries for some social ailment: drug use, obesity, violence, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy. But authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, a pair of British social scientists, have another, more enlightening point to make. With striking consistency, they say, the severity of social decay in different countries reflects a key difference among them: not the number of poor people or the depth of their poverty, but the size of the gap between the poorest and the richest.
It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, they argue, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering. Though Sweden and Japan have low levels of economic inequality for different reasons – the former redistributes wealth, while in the latter case, the playing field is more level from the start, with a smaller range of incomes – both have relatively low crime rates and happier, healthier citizens.
The idea at the heart of the book is not new; human beings through the ages have intuitively understood as much. What is groundbreaking is Pickett and Wilkinson’s compilation of data, much of it only recently available, allowing sweeping comparisons across dozens of nations and areas of well-being, and showing, for the first time, the breadth and strength of the statistical link. Between the two of them, the authors say, they have devoted some 50 years to conducting and collecting the research. Their efforts have been hailed by left-leaning thinkers and critics as a compass for righting the nation’s current course; the book – its title refers to the tool known in America as a carpenter’s level, which measures slopes – is being translated into 13 languages, including Arabic, Korean, and Norwegian. The authors spoke to Ideas from a friend’s home in Washington, D.C., where they were wrapping up a three-week, cross-country book tour.
Excerpt (via Boston.com)
Wilkinson: I think people are extremely sensitive to status differentiation and to being looked down on, or disrespected, and those often seem to be the triggers to violence. We quote an American prison psychiatrist who goes so far as to say he’s never seen a serious act of violence that wasn’t provoked by loss of face or humiliation, and so on. And in more unequal societies, status matters even more. People judge each other more by status. There’s more insecurity. And people at the bottom are more often excluded from the markers of status, the jobs and housing and cars, so they become even more touchy about how they’re seen.
Click Here To Read: New Book: It’s money that matters-understanding economic inequality
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