The Spirit Level

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

In Piketty’s runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the chief proposals for fighting inequality are an annual global wealth tax of up to 10 percent a year, and a self-described “confiscatory” top marginal income tax rate as high as 80 percent.12 For some, even this doesn’t go far enough. There are critics of economic inequality who are largely indifferent to its impact on opportunity and want to level down society even if it means crippling economic progress. In their popular critique of economic inequality, The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett tell us that “we need to limit economic growth severely in rich countries,” because “[o]nce we have enough of the necessities of life, it is the relativities which matter.”13 Similarly, best-selling author Naomi Klein argues that to truly deal with the problem of inequality, we must reject capitalism altogether, give up on the idea of economic progress, and embrace a decentralized agrarian form of socialism.14 Left-wing radio host Thom Hartmann will settle merely for banning billionaires: “I say it’s time we outlaw billionaires by placing a 100% tax on any wealth over $999,999,999.

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In the race of life, according to the Rawlsian view, everyone should have a fair shot at success; just as a track meet would be unfair if some people started halfway to the finish line, so it’s critical that the government help even out the opportunities we encounter in life—to level the playing field by taking away advantages from the fortunate (e.g., huge inheritance taxes) and giving advantages to the less fortunate (e.g., government provision of health care and education).49 This idea of equality of opportunity is appealing to many people, even those untroubled by unequal economic outcomes. As the authors of The Spirit Level point out, “Unlike greater equality itself, equality of opportunity is valued across the political spectrum, at least in theory.”50 The reason it’s so appealing is that it taps in to our sense of fairness: in any game, we want everyone to play by the same rules. But life is not a game, and achieving equality of initial chances means forcing people to play by different rules.

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Is mobility alive and well in America today? That is not an easy thing to measure, and the approach taken by the inequality critics (and most everyone today) confuses more than it clarifies. There are basically two ways researchers try to measure mobility. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explain in their book The Spirit Level, “people can move up or down within their lifetime (intragenerational mobility) or offspring can move up and down relative to their parents (intergenerational mobility).” Note that when they say “move up and down relative to their parents,” Wilkinson and Pickett don’t mean simply that children make more money than their parents, so-called absolute mobility.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

We kept in touch despite going to different universities but lost contact when I went to the US for my Ph.D. Soon after returning to the UK, I became involved in policy discussions on executive pay. I shared some of my articles on social media, and Max took a very critical position on high CEO salaries. He referred to a book titled The Spirit Level to back up his arguments, but I said I hadn’t read it. A few days later, I received a copy in the post, thanks to Max. It bore the subtitle ‘Why Equality is Better for Everyone’. Everyone? Even the wealthy? That was a bold claim, and I wondered if it was preying on black-and-white thinking.

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Indeed, a study by Simone Rambotti does exactly this and finds that, when you control for poverty, the link between inequality and health becomes much weaker.11 Max was now a university lecturer in statistics – yet confirmation bias caused him to forget his schoolboy statistics when reading The Spirit Level. And it wasn’t just Max, David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Many other readers were deceived, since, like me, they may dislike inequality. The next person to bring up this book, in a discussion with me on CEO pay, was the then Executive Director of the Royal Statistical Society, who you’d hope should understand statistics yet thought the results were flawless.

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The Amazon fivestar review with the most likes, by ‘penpushing1’, is entitled ‘Timely, devastating confirmation of what we all, at bottom, knew anyway’. And that’s the problem – ‘penpushing1’ gave it full marks because it backed up what he/she thought to be true. The negative Amazon reviews mentioned a book that claimed to debunk it, The Spirit Level Delusion by Christopher Snowdon, so I looked at that book’s page also. The one-star review with the most likes, by ‘Griffo’ ended with ‘What you think of this book will largely depend upon which side you are on. No prizes for guessing where I stand.’ No prizes for guessing which bias this demonstrates.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
by Paul Gilding
Published 28 Mar 2011

Up until this point, I thought we were going to have to address poverty and inequality by a combination of moral persuasion and social imperative (to avoid local and global political instability). It appears there is another reason we should do so, one that is likely to be far more influential than moral persuasion. This new research was presented in the book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and was the result of comprehensive analysis by its authors over many years into the impact of inequality on a huge range of social indicators of progress. Its conclusions are startling. It turns out that the greatest predictor of social ills, across an incredible range of phenomena, is not the absolute level of poverty or disadvantage.

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The problem is that the process of acquiring it, rather than actually satisfying our needs, drives a self-replicating cycle of dissatisfaction and greater want. We believe more wealth will satisfy us, but what actually happens is that the process actually drives inequality, which increases dissatisfaction, which we try to satisfy with more of the same! Research in The Spirit Level explains this with new data, confirming what has been argued by many others, like Professor Tim Kasser. It seems inequality is one of the greatest drivers to consume. Status competition drives consumption, and inequality exacerbates status competition as we try anxiously to keep up, driven by marketers who exploit our state of anxiety.

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In other words, much of our personal behavior and aspirations are driven by the desire to feel like a respectable and successful member of our community. It’s just that of late, we have come to define that by the possession of ever more material goods. This latter point is what creates the opportunity for marketers. While we cannot argue they are the cause of it, marketers exploit our tendency with very negative results, as argued in The Spirit Level, referring to Tim Kasser’s work: Young adults who focus on money, image and fame tend to be more depressed, have less enthusiasm for life and suffer more physical symptoms such as headaches and sore throats than others (The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press, 2002). Kasser believes that people tend to embrace material values when they are feeling insecure (retail therapy, anyone?).

398 DIY Tips, Tricks & Techniques: Practical Advice for New Home Improvement Enthusiasts
by Ian Anderson
Published 31 Mar 2019

This way any inaccuracy within the spirit level itself will even out. If you keep the spirit level the same way each time you move (and it’s 1mm inaccurate), your line could be several mm’s out of level by the time you get across the room. 143. Check the Level For Accuracy You can double-check a spirit level for accuracy by placing it on something horizontal and turning it around through 180° lengthways. The bubble should be in the middle both ways to be truly level. If it shows correct one-way but slightly out when turned around, there may be a problem with the spirit level. 144. It Looks All Right, But… Optical illusions sometimes make things look bad, so very occasionally it’s best to go with what looks right, regardless of what the spirit level bubble is saying.

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It Looks All Right, But… Optical illusions sometimes make things look bad, so very occasionally it’s best to go with what looks right, regardless of what the spirit level bubble is saying. For example, a bookcase close to a doorway might look better fitted an equal distance from the architrave, creating a parallel gap, even if it’s then slightly out of plumb. This is because stuff that tapers can draw the eye and look ‘wrong’. A mate of mine used to work the cruise liners, renovating a certain number of cabins each trip. He said you could always tell the new guys as they still had spirit levels… 145.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

In the U.S., a nationwide poll showed that most Americans want society to “move away from greed and excess toward a way of life more centred on values, community and family.” Quoted in: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2010) p. 4. 25. Paraphrased from the movie Fight Club, Professor of Sustainable Development Tim Jackson, and hundreds of other variations on this quote. 26. Quoted in: Don Peck, “How A New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” The Atlantic (March 2010). http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/307919/ 27. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, p. 34. 28. World Health Organization, “Health for the World’s Adolescents.

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.” – Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Blank Slate and The Better Angels of Our Nature “This book is brilliant. Everyone should read it. Bregman shows us we’ve been looking at the world inside out. Turned right way out we suddenly see fundamentally new ways forward. If we can get enough people to read this book, the world will start to become a better place.” – Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better “Rutger Bregman makes a compelling case for Universal Basic Income with a wealth of data and rooted in a keen understanding of the political and intellectual history of capitalism. He shows the many ways in which human progress has turned a Utopia into a Eutopia – a positive future that we can achieve with the right policies.” – Albert Wenger, entrepreneur and partner at Union Square Ventures, early backers of Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, and Kickstarter “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions.

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In the U.S., by contrast, people are less likely (as the World Values Survey shows) to consider their successes a product of luck or circumstance. 22. Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, “Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth,” IMF (April 2014). http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf 23. Wilkinson and Pickett’s findings caused quite a stir, but since the publication of The Spirit Level there have been dozens more studies confirming their thesis. In 2011, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conducted an independent analysis of their evidence, and concluded that there is indeed wide scientific consensus on the correlation between inequality and social problems. And, crucially, there is also a sizeable share of data to support causality.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

This masks the social and economic conditions that may have caused the problem. Mindfulness programs pay little attention to the complex dynamics of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives that shape capitalist culture. Yet as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level, evidence from social epidemiology shows that stress and psychosomatic illnesses are concentrated in highly unequal societies, with strongly materialist, competitive values.11 Although the focus of corporate mindfulness is on changing behavior at the level of individuals, mere “lifestyle choices” make little difference.

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Stress is demonstrably linked to social hierarchies, and researchers such as Nancy Adler at the University of California San Francisco have shown that perceived socioeconomic status is a robust predictor of a range of ailments, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, stress and depression.12 Meanwhile, the quality of social relations depends on adequate material foundations. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett observe that “the scale of inequality provides a powerful policy lever on the psychological wellbeing of all of us.”13 None of this is mentioned in A Mindful Nation. Instead, Ryan claims that the issues afflicting society are caused by our distraction from our authentic inner selves.

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HarperOne, 2014. p.134 5 https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2267-workplace-stress-health-epidemic-perventable-employee-assistance-programs.html 6 https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/162953/tackle-employees-stagnating-engagement.aspx 7 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240240954_Stress-management_interventions_in_the_workplace_Stress_counselling_and_stress_audits 8 Tim Newton, Managing Stress: Emotion and Power at Work. Sage Publications, 1995. p. 244 9 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 10 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html 11 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2011. 12 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-your-work-place-might-be-killing-you 13 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. p.97 14 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd
Published 9 Apr 2014

Skeggs, ‘Haunted by the Spectre of Judgement: Respectability, Value and Affect in Class Relations’, in K.P. Sveinsson (ed.) and Runnymede Trust, Who Cares about the White Working Class? (London, 2009), pp. 36–44; Walkerdine, ‘Reclassifying Upward Mobility’. 58. ‘The Spirit Level’, Guardian (14 August 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk​/books/2010/aug/14/the-spirit​-level-equality-thinktanks​?intcmp=239, (consulted 21 January 2013). 59. British Future, State of the Nation (London, 2013), p. 3. 60. BritainThinks, Middle English, p. 37. 61. ‘What is Working Class?’, BBC Magazine, http://news.bbc.co.uk​/1/hi/magazine/6295743​.stm (consulted 20 September 2013). 62.

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Meanwhile, the least wealthy half of society – millions of pensioners, manual workers, call centre and care home staff, nurses, teaching assistants, cleaners and office workers, as well as those who couldn’t find work or were sick – lived on less than one-quarter of the national income.2 Rising inequality made people unhealthy and unhappy. In their meticulously researched The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett reveal that as economic inequality increased, so too did anxiety disorders and depression. These rose most among the poorest, but thousands of other people, including professional, salaried workers and their children, were also suffering.

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As the sociologists Bev Skeggs and Valerie Walkerdine have revealed, these attitudes aren’t confined to north-east England: women from working-class backgrounds whom they interviewed in southern England similarly saw their appearance and personality as determining their lives, and any failure led to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression.57 Yet as my classmates prepared to turn forty, attitudes towards class and inequality did appear to be changing in Britain. The success of The Spirit Level provided a clue: this academic study of ‘why inequality is bad for all of us’, written by two social scientists, became a surprise bestseller when it was published in 2010.58 Owen Jones’s Chavs achieved similar success a year later. Increasing numbers of people described themselves as working class.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Research from Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels has found that, while manufacturing employment has fallen in most developed countries between 1996 and 2012, it has fallen less sharply where investment in robotics has been greatest. 4 ‘Automation and anxiety’, The Economist, 25 June 2016. 5 According to Martin Ford, futurist and author of the award winning book Rise of the Robots it won’t happen immediately but within a decade or so. 6 Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work, March 2017, Centre for Global Policy Solutions. 7 Mark Fahey, ‘Driverless cars will kill the most jobs in select US states’, www.cnbc.com, 2 September 2016. 8 ‘Real wages have been falling for longest period for at least 50 years, ONS says’, Guardian, 31 January 2014. ‘The World’s 8 Richest Men Are Now as Wealthy as Half the World’s Population’, www.fortune.com, 16 January 2017. 9 David Madland, ‘Growth and the Middle Class’ (Spring 2011), Democracy Journal, 20. 10 Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2009). 11 Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level, pp.272-273. 12 Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay. 13 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (Bodley Head, 2015). Chapter 5: The Everything Monopoly 1 Douglas Rushkoff, one of the more self-aware of these people come close to an apology for his previous work in his recent book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Penguin, 2016). 2 Before he become Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian wrote a book called Information Rules (Harvard Business Review Press, 1998), where he summed this all up very well: ‘positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes.’ 3 This, according to data available through Nielsen SoundScan, cited in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff. 4 Duncan Robinson, ‘Google heads queue to lobby Brussels’, Financial Times, 24 June 2015.

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It’s a warning rather than a roadmap: if we can imagine a future, perhaps we can also figure out how to avert it. Growing inequality, which I think seems unavoidable at this point, would worsen many social problems, including depression, alcoholism and crime. As Pickett and Wilkinson argue in The Spirit Level, greater economic inequality in a country results in more big government because the demand for police, healthcare, prisons and social services all go up. And yet simultaneously the tax base would be falling, due to that unholy alliance of the gig economy, offshore monopolies and cryptocurrencies.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

RICHARD WILKINSON AND KATE PICKETT The Spirit Level Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger BLOOMSBURY PRESS New York Berlin London Contents Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Note on Graphs PART ONE Material Success, Social Failure 1 The end of an era 2 Poverty or inequality? 3 How inequality gets under the skin PART TWO The Costs of Inequality 4 Community life and social relations 5 Mental health and drug use 6 Physical health and life expectancy 7 Obesity: wider income gaps, wider waists 8 Educational performance 9 Teenage births: recycling deprivation 10 Violence: gaining respect 11 Imprisonment and punishment 12 Social mobility: unequal opportunities PART THREE A Better Society 13 Dysfunctional societies 14 Our social inheritance 15 Equality and sustainability 16 Building the future Appendix References Foreword ROBERT B.

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It has taken two experts from the field of public health to deliver a major study of the effects of inequality on society. Though Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are British, their research explores the United States in depth, and their work is an important contribution to the debate our country needs. The Spirit Level looks at the negative social effects of wide inequality—among them, more physical and mental illness not only among those at the lower ranks, but even those at the top of the scale. The authors find, not surprisingly, that where there are great disparities in wealth, there are heightened levels of social distrust.

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And it breeds cynicism among the rest of us. This is not to say that the superrich are at fault. By and large, “the market” is generating these outlandish results. But the market is a creation of public policies. And public policies, as the authors make clear, can reorganize the market to reverse these trends. The Spirit Level shows why the effort to do so is a vital one for the health of our society. Berkeley, California July 2009 Preface People usually exaggerate the importance of their own work and we worry about claiming too much. But this book is not just another set of nostrums and prejudices about how to put the world to rights.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Ossa, F. (2016) ‘The economist who brought you Thomas Piketty sees “perfect storm” of inequality ahead’, New York Magazine, 24 March 2016, available at: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/milanovic-millennial-on-millennial-war-is-next.html 16. Newsnight interview with Tony Blair and Jeremy Paxman, 4 June 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1372220.stm 17. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level. London: Penguin. 18. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2014) ‘The Spirit Level authors: why society is more unequal than ever’, Guardian, 9 March 2014, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/society-unequal-the-spirit-level 19. West, D. (2014) Billionaires: Darrell West’s reflections on the Upper Crust. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brookings-now/posts/2014/10/watch-rural-dairy-farm-writing-billionaires-political-power-great-wealth 20.

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‘Of all the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution,’ wrote the influential economist Robert Lucas in 2004.14 For most of the last 20 years at the World Bank, according to one of its lead economists, Branko Milanovic, ‘even the word inequality was not politically acceptable, because it seemed like something wild or socialist’.15 For others, the acceptable degree of social inequality came to be a matter of personal or political preference – as Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair quipped of the UK’s top footballer, ‘It’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.’16 Over the past decade, however, perspectives on inequality have shifted dramatically as its systemically damaging effects – social, political, ecological and economic – have become all too clear. Societies can be deeply undermined by income inequality. When epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett studied a range of high-income countries in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, they discovered that it is national inequality, not national wealth, that most influences nations’ social welfare. More unequal countries, they found, tend to have more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drug use, obesity, prisoners, school dropouts, and community breakdown, along with lower life expectancy, lower status for women, and lower levels of trust.17 ‘The effects of inequality are not confined to the poor,’ they concluded; ‘inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society.’18 More equal societies, be they rich or poor, turn out to be healthier and happier.

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Isle of Wight: Ellen McArthur Foundation. Wiedmann, T. O. et al. (2015) ‘The material footprint of nations’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112: 20, pp. 6271–6276. Wijkman, A. and Skanberg, K. (2015) The Circular Economy and Benefits for Society. Zurich: Club of Rome. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level. London: Penguin. World Bank (1978) World Development Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Economic Forum (2016) The Future of Jobs. Geneva: World Economic Forum. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book comes out of 25 years of learning, unlearning, and relearning economics and there are many people I would like to thank because they have inspired me on that long journey.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

‘A positive social ranking produces an inner glow that is also matched with a clear advantage in life expectation and health’, argues Avner Offer.13 But if this process is, as the previous chapter suggested, little more than a zero sum game, then there is little to lose, and perhaps quite a lot to gain, by changing it. A different form of social organisation – a more equal society – in which social positioning is either less important or signalled differently – is a clear possibility. This suggestion is borne out by the remarkable evidence marshalled by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level. Looking at a range of health and social issues across OECD nations they conclude that the benefits of equality don’t just accrue to the less fortunate members of society. Inequality has damaging impacts across the nation as a whole.14 Clearly, we would still need to confront the social logic that conspires to lock people into positional competition (Chapter 6).

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Unproductive status competition increases material throughput and creates both psychological distress and social unrest. The British clinical psychologist Oliver James has argued that more unequal societies systematically report higher levels of distress than more equal societies.31 This same point has been made by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level draws together astonishing evidence of the costs of inequality in terms of health and social problems. The broad hypothesis is clearly illustrated in Figure 10.1, which shows a high positive correlation between health and social problems and rising inequality in OECD nations.32 Figure 10.1 The health and social benefits of equality Source: Data from the Equality Trust (see note 30) Life expectancy, child wellbeing, literacy, social mobility and trust are all better in more equal societies.

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On São Paolo’s Lei Limpa Cuidade, see ‘São Paulo: a city without ads’, David Evan Harris, Adbusters, September–October 2007. 28 See ILSR (2014). 29 See www.fairtrade.org.uk/ (accessed 14 May 2016). 30 Cooper (2010), EMF (2015). 31 James (2007: appendix 1 and 2). 32 Data are taken from the Spirit Level data (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) published on the Equality Trust website at www.equalitytrust.org.uk/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5 (accessed 11 May 2016). The index of ‘health and social problems’ on the y-axis in Figure 10.1 includes life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, homicide, imprisonment, teenage births, trust, obesity, mental illness (including alcohol and drug addiction) and social mobility.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

According to WHO figures, over 20 per cent of the populations of the more unequal rich countries are likely to suffer forms of mental illness – such as depression, anxiety disorders, drug or alcohol addiction – each year. Rates may be three times as high as in the most equal countries. At the same time, measures of the strength of community life and whether people feel they can trust others also show that more equal societies do very much better. As discussed in The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2010), tackling inequality is an important step towards achieving sustainability and high levels of well-being. As the populations of the developed world have gained unprecedented standards of comfort and material prosperity, further increases in those standards make less and less difference to well-being.

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Indeed, anxiety about making ends meet can put relationships under stress, and cause shame and mental illness. So redistribution of income and power from the rich and affluent to those on low incomes would produce an overall net improvement in well-being. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential book, The Spirit Level, also shows that insatiable acquisitiveness is not the route to well-being. Rather than rely just on people’s own assessments of their happiness, it looks at data on things like life expectancy, health, violence, crime, education, trust and social mobility.22 Again, they find that once average incomes in countries reach a certain point, further increases make little difference to well-being as measured by indicators of these things.

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The percentage of people who say “Most people can be trusted” is only 30 per cent of people in the U.K. and U.S., compared to 60 per cent some 40 years ago. But in Scandinavia the level is still over 60 per cent, and these are the happiest countries too.’24 Figure 20.1: Health and social problems are worse in more unequal countries Source: Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level, London: Allen Lane Happiness research shows that whether people are happy tends to depend first on what they’re used to, and on how they compare to others – on habituation and social comparison, in other words.25 The habituation effect is like a ratchet: as income rises, so too do our ideas about what we need in order to be happy – except that beyond the threshold we don’t actually gain much.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

This book will look at how chav-hate is far from an isolated phenomenon. In part, itis the product of a deeply unequal society. 'In my view, one of the key effects of greater inequality is toincrease feelings of superiority and inferiority in society,' says Richard Wilkinson, coauthor of the seminal The Spirit Level, a book that effectively demonstrates thelinkbetween inequality and a range of social problems. And indeed inequality is much greater today than it has been for most of our history. 'A widespread inequality is an extremely recent thing for most of the world,' argues the professor of human geography and' inequality expert', Danny Dorling.

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'I wouldn't try and do anything about correcting the inequalities,' he explained, 'because the inequalities are widened by people getting richer, not by the poor getting poor-but by the rich getting richer. And frankly, so long as they generate wealth for the economy, so long as they generate tax income and so on, then I'm comfortable with it.' I pointed out the recent groundbreaking research by academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level. They used irrefutable statistics to show that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it has-like crime and poor health, for example. In other words, more equal societies were happier societies. David Davis gave the book short shrift. 'It's bullshit,' he said. 'It's bullshi: ...

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At the heart of this scandal is the destruction of the power of workers as an organized force-that is, the trade unions. 'There are studies that show that one of the features of more equal societies is stronger trade union movements,' says Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of seminal book The Spirit Level. I think the ability of people at the top, the bankers and chief executives and so on, to give themselves these huge bonuses reflects the fact they're in a situation where there are no constraints on them. If there were strong trade unions and perhaps a union or employee representative on the company's board, it would become more embarrassing for CEOs to award themselves huge pay increases and bonuses while holding down wage demands from employees.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

And they considered this unacceptable in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. For these younger people, social mobility was not a solution to inequality. And in arguing their case, they drew on perspectives that had found wider popularity since the financial crash. Over the next decade, books like Kate Pickett’s and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level, Danny Dorling’s Inequality and the 1%, and Owen Jones’s Chavs: The demonization of the working class and The Establishment became surprise bestsellers. These researchers revealed a Britain divided between a small wealthy elite and everyone else. They also showed that the existence of a wealthy elite didn’t create greater opportunity, but instead caused the growing poverty and insecurity that everyone else experienced.

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Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell, eds., Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 237–38; Duncan Gallie, ‘The Labour Force’, in Albert H. Halsey, ed., with Josephine Webb, Twentieth-Century British Social Trends, Macmillan, 2000, p. 316. 6 A. B. Atkinson, ‘Distribution of Income and Wealth’, in Albert Halsey with Webb, pp. 360–6; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Penguin, 2010, chapter 12. 7 ‘A bitter touch of class’, Daily Mail, 10 January 1980, p. 15. 8 Keith Waterhouse, ‘The Cowboy Tendency’, Daily Mirror, 17 January 1980, p. 11. 9 Chris Rhodes, Manufacturing: statistics and policy, House of Commons Briefing Paper, HMSO, 2017, p. 7. 10 Interview with Alan Watkins by Hilary Young, 2008. 11 Ibid. 12 Jane Ritchie, Thirty Families: Their living standards in unemployment, HMSO, 1990, p. 22. 13 Gallie, ‘The Labour Force’, in Halsey, ed., with Webb, pp. 316–17, and for details of women’s employment see Jean Martin and Ceridwen Roberts, Women and Employment A Lifetime Perspective, HMSO, 1984. 14 Patrick Heady and Malcolm Smyth, Living Standards during unemployment: A survey of families headed by unemployed people – carried out by Social Survey Division of OPCS on behalf of the Department of Social Security, HMSO, 1989, vol. 1, p. 36.

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, https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/general-election-2010/money-spent-nhs, both consulted 18 March 2018. 49 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 50 Selina Todd, The People: the rise and fall of the working class 1910–2010, John Murray, 2014, p. 349. 51 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, M5113. 52 Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change, p. 2. 53 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, J5734. 54 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Dwelling Stock Estimates, England: 2017, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/710382/Dwelling_Stock_Estimates_2017_England.pdf/. 55 Dorling, p. 103. 56 Interview with Don Milligan by Jim Hinks. 57 Dorling, pp. 103–5. 58 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, R5429. 59 Ibid. 60 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 61 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Penguin, 2010, chapter 6 and 13; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being, Penguin, 2018, chapter 9. 62 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 63 Rebecca Tunstall and Ruth Lupton, Mixed Communities, Department for Communities and Local Government, 2010. 64 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Inner Level, chapter 9; Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, S4002. 65 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 66 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, State of the Nation in 2015, HMSO, 2015, p. v. 67 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, J5734. 68 https://www.speakers4schools.org/about-us/, consulted 20 July 2019. 69 ‘Kenneth Olisa: “To improve social mobility, we must raise children’s aspirations”’, Guardian, 9 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/09/kenneth-olisa-social-mobility-raise-childrens-aspirations, consulted 20 July 2019. 70 Quoted in Armstrong, p. 27. 71 https://www.speakers4schools.org/about-us/. 72 Danny Dorling, ‘Who should and who shouldn’t come up to Oxford as an undergraduate’, 8th Annual Access Lecture, University College Oxford, 2017, http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/8th-annual-access-lecture-2017, consulted 8 January 2020. 73 Interview with Helen Abeda by Andrea Thomson. 74 Interview with Richard Campbell by Andrea Thomson. 75 Walter Benn Michaels, ‘The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty’, Liberal Education, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 14-19; Floya Anthias and Cathie Lloyd, ‘Introduction’, in Anthias and Lloyd, eds., Rethinking anti-racisms: from theory to practice, Routledge, 2003; Pragna Patel, ‘Back to the Future.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015, half of all assets around the world are now controlled by the richest 1% of the global population, while “the lower half of the global population collectively own less than 1% of global wealth”.53 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that the average income of the richest 10% of the population in OECD countries is approximately nine times that of the poorest 10%.54 Further, inequality within most countries is rising, even in those that have experienced rapid growth across all income groups and dramatic drops in the number of people living in poverty. China’s Gini Index, for example, rose from approximately 30 in the 1980s to over 45 by 2010.55 Rising inequality is more than an economic phenomenon of some concern – it is a major challenge for societies. In their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put forward data indicating that unequal societies tend to be more violent, have higher numbers of people in prison, experience greater levels of mental illness and obesity, and have lower life expectancies and lower levels of trust.

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fileid=F2425415-DCA7-80B8-EAD989AF9341D47E 54 OECD, “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising”, 2011. http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49499779.pdf 55 Frederick Solt, “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database,” Working paper, SWIID, Version 5.0, October 2014. http://myweb.uiowa.edu/fsolt/swiid/swiid.html 56 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2009. 57 Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “More unequal and more separate: Growth in the residential segregation of families by income, 1970-2009”, US 2010 Project, 2011. http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Projects/Reports.htm http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/more-unequal-and-more-separate-growth-residential-segregation-families-income-1970-2009 58 Eleanor Goldberg, “Facebook, Google are Saving Refugees and Migrants from Traffickers”, Huffington Post, 10 September 2015.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
by William Davies
Published 11 May 2015

In 2007, three UK education authorities sent 100 British teachers to visit the Penn Resilience Project, so as to recreate it in the UK. 6‘Work for World Peace Starting Now – Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” Can Help’, huffingtonpost.com, 27 March 2012. 7Sarah Knapton, ‘Stressed Council House Residents Get £2,000 Happiness Gurus’, telegraph.co.uk, 9 October 2008. 8Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda and Fabrice Bartolomei, ‘Induction of a Sense of Bliss by Electrical Stimulation of the Anterior Insula’, Cortex 49: 10, 2013; ‘Pain “Dimmer Switch” Discovered by UK Scientists’, bbc.com, 5 February 2014. 9Gary Wolf, ‘Measuring Mood: Current Research and New Ideas’, quantifiedself.com, 11 February 2009. 10Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, New York: Penguin, 1990, 33. 11Campbell and Simmons, ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk’. 12See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane, 2009. Work by Carles Muntaner explores this issue further. 13Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report 2013, 2013 14Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock, ‘Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 111: 24, 2014. 15F.

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014; Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, London: Pluto Press, 2014. 5 The Crisis of Authority 1‘Full Text: Blair’s Newsnight Interview’, theguardian.com, 21 April 2005. 2Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. 3ESPNcricinfo staff, ‘We Urge the Development of Inner Fitness’, espncricinfo.com, 1 April 2014. 4‘Competitiveness and Perfectionism: Common Traits of Both Athletic Performance and Disordered Eating’, medicalnewstoday.com, 22 May 2009. 5Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 6See Toben Nelson et al., ‘Do Youth Sports Prevent Pediatric Obesity?

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Not If the Algorithms Say You’re Not’, smithsonianmag.com, 27 August, 2013. 21Cass Sunstein, ‘Shopping Made Psychic’, nytimes.com, 20 August 2014. 22Rian Boden, ‘Alfa-Bank Uses Activity Trackers to Offer Higher Interest Rates to Customers Who Exercise’, nfcworld.com, 30 May 2014. 23‘Moscow Subway Station Lets Passengers Pay Fare in Squats’, forbes.com, 14 November 2013. 8 Critical Animals 1Lizzie Davies and Simon Rogers, ‘Wellbeing Index Points Way to Bliss: Live on a Remote Island, and Don’t Work’, theguardian.com, 24 July 2012. 2Cari Nierenberg, ‘A Green Scene Sparks Our Creativity’, bodyodd.nbcnews.com, 28 March 2012. 3In Spring 2011, the British Psychological Society published an open letter, authored by clinical psychologists, criticizing the DSM-V. 4See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. 5One calculation produced by the British happiness economist Andrew Oswald suggests that an unemployed person would need benefits of £250,000 a year to compensate them for the negative psychological impact of unemployment. 6Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny, ‘Acute Stressors and Cortisol Responses: A Theoretical Integration and Synthesis of Laboratory Research’, Psychological Bulletin 130: 3, 2004; Robert Karasek and Tores Theorell, Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life, New York: Basic Books, 1992. 7Ronald McQuaid et al., ‘Fit for Work: Health and Wellbeing of Employees in Employee Owned Businesses’, employeeownership.co.uk, 2012. 8David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 9See the CIPD Absence Management Annual Survey, cipd.co.uk, 2013. 10Tim Kasser and Aaron Ahuvia, ‘Materialistic Values and Well-Being in Business Students’, European Journal of Social Psychology 32: 1, 2002. 11Miriam Tatzel, M.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott
Published 14 Apr 2016

See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 21. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2013). It should be noted that Wilkinson and Pickett’s methodology, evidence, and conclusions have been challenged. See, for instance, Peter Saunders, “Beware False Prophets: Equality, the Good Society and the Spirit Level,” Policy Exchange, July 8, 2010. 22. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 4, 2010. 23.

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Family ties, collegial relations, and old friendships can be soured by envy on the one side and arrogance on the other, particularly where the inequality becomes very great over a relatively short period. And inequality is also likely to undermine the benefits of wealth to society at large, an idea made familiar recently by works like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality.21 According to Wilkinson and Pickett, among wealthy societies, those where income inequality is greater suffer more from a variety of social ills, including higher rates of physical illness, mental illness, and violence, along with lower levels of education, social mobility, and trust.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Contrary to an earlier belief that people are so mindful of their richer compatriots that they keep resetting their internal happiness meter to the baseline no matter how well they are doing, we will see in chapter 18 that richer people and people in richer countries are (on average) happier than poorer people and people in poorer countries.13 But even if people are happier when they and their countries get richer, might they become more miserable if others around them are still richer than they are—that is, as economic inequality increases? In their well-known book The Spirit Level, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett claim that countries with greater income inequality also have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, physical and mental illness, social distrust, obesity, and substance abuse.14 The economic inequality causes the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people feel that they are pitted in a winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the stress makes them sick and self-destructive. The Spirit Level theory has been called “the left’s new theory of everything,” and it is as problematic as any other theory that leaps from a tangle of correlations to a single-cause explanation.

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Chicago: National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Snow, C. P. 1959/1998. The two cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press. Snow, C. P. 1961. The moral un-neutrality of science. Science, 133, 256–59. Snowdon, C. 2010. The spirit level delusion: Fact-checking the left’s new theory of everything. Ripon, UK: Little Dice. Snowdon, C. 2016. The Spirit Level Delusion (blog). http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.co.uk/. Snyder, T. D., ed. 1993. 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait. Washington: National Center for Educational Statistics. Somin, I. 2016. Democracy and political ignorance: Why smaller government is smarter (2nd ed.).

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Social comparison theory comes from Leon Festinger; the theory of reference groups comes from Robert Merton and from Samuel Stouffer. See Kelley & Evans 2016 for a review and citations. 12. Amartya Sen (1987) makes a similar argument. 13. Wealth and happiness: Stevenson & Wolfers 2008a; Veenhoven 2010; see also chapter 18. 14. Wilkinson & Pickett 2009. 15. Problems with The Spirit Level: Saunders 2010; Snowdon 2010, 2016; Winship 2013. 16. Inequality and subjective well-being: Kelley & Evans 2016. See chapter 18 for an explanation of how happiness is measured. 17. Starmans, Sheskin, & Bloom 2017. 18. Ethnic minorities perceived as cheaters: Sowell 1980, 1994, 1996, 2015. 19.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Turkey, Mexico and Portugal have low levels of trust, low living standards and high levels of income inequality. It would seem to follow, then, that reducing income inequality should raise levels of trust and, at the very least, make societies a bit happier. Plenty of people have been happy to make the argument. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue powerfully in favour of greater equality, concluding: We know that greater equality will help us rein in consumerism and ease the introduction of policies to tackle global warming. We can see how the introduction of modern technology makes profit-making institutions appear increasingly anti-social as they find themselves threatened by the rapidly expanding potential for public good which new technology offers … We have seen that the rich countries have got to the end of the really important contributions which economic growth can make to the quality of life …5 If only things were that simple.

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In this respect, he has something in common with the family of George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 3. S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Knopf, New York, 1989). 4. Specifically, King James II was deposed, the risk of a Catholic monarchy was reduced, William and Mary took the throne and Parliament reigned supreme. 5. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (Allen Lane, London, 2009). 6. See F. Roth, ‘Trust and Economic Growth: Conflicting Results between Cross-Sectional and Panel Analysis’, Program on the Future of the European Social Model, Göttingen, 2007. 7. ‘Economy Rankings’, Doing Business Project: Measuring Business Regulations, International Finance Corporation/World Bank, 2012, at http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings/ (accessed Jan. 2013). 8.

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The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Revised 1920 Edition, trans. and updated by Stephen Kalberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011 Weinberg, D. H. ‘US Neighbourhood Income Inequality in the 2005–2009 Period’, American Community Survey Reports, United States Census Bureau, Washington, DC, Oct. 2011 Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, Allen Lane, London, 2009 Wood, J. and Berg, P. ‘Rebuilding Trust in Banks’, Gallup Business Journal, at http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/148049/rebuilding-trust-banks.aspx#2 (accessed Jan. 2013) Yellen, J. ‘Housing Bubbles and Monetary Policy’, Speech to the Fourth Haas Gala, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, San Francisco, 21 Oct. 2005 Yellen, J.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

The criticisms were many, but each time the authors pushed back convincingly with highly detailed counter-arguments.9 Ten years after The Spirit Level was published, Pickett and Wilkinson released their second book, The Inner Level. Unlike the first, this focused on just one variable: the relationship between inequality and mental distress. When I spoke to Richard Wilkinson in 2020, I asked him what he and Kate Pickett wanted to achieve by undertaking their new study. ‘As we’d already focused on how inequality impacts so many facets of social life, we now wanted to know about the personal and psychological effects of inequality too.’ After replicating the statistical analyses deployed in The Spirit Level, Pickett and Wilkinson found something unnerving: that unequal societies experience over twice the prevalence of mental distress as their more equal counterparts.

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This is to say, when all tax advantages are taken into consideration (as well as national insurance, VAT and council tax), the richest 10 per cent of UK households pay an average of 13 per cent less of their total income on tax than the poorest 10 per cent.6 So the poorer you are in the era of new capitalism, the more tax you invariably pay.7 In 2011, a bestselling book emerged that explored in detail how growing economic inequality affected the heart and soul of a nation. It was called The Spirit Level, and was written by two leading British health epidemiologists, Professor Kate Pickett and Professor Richard G. Wilkinson. The book represented the culmination of their career-long research into the relationship between inequality and human and social well-being. Could the former affect the latter?

Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World
by Dominic Chinea
Published 5 Oct 2022

John Rabone & Sons supplied tape measures for the British war effort – if you ever come across one you can tell because they feature a small arrow on the brass handle, a symbol known as the “broad arrow” mark. The original tape measures were made of flat steel wound up inside a leather case. g MEASURING & MARKING g Contents Tool No. 12 SPIRIT LEVEL The spirit level – a sealed glass tube containing alcohol and an air bubble – was invented around 1661 by Frenchman Melchisédech Thévenot. He was a colourful character, serving as Ambassador to Rome in the 1650s and appointed the Royal Librarian to King Louis XIV in 1684. He also wrote a famous book on swimming that popularized breaststroke.

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At some point, lead became the metal of choice for the weight suspended from the apex of the “A”, and this is where the word “plumb”, meaning exactly vertical, originates, sometime in the early 14th century. “Plumb” comes from the Old French word plombe, which comes from the Latin word plumbum, meaning lead. Although the spirit level had been invented in 1661, it was mainly used for telescopes and specialized surveying equipment, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that spirit levels produced in factories, resembling those we still use today, started to be used widely by carpenters. g MEASURING & MARKING g Contents Tool No. 13 THREAD PITCH GAUGE Imagine I’m taking something apart that your grandad had made, to restore it.

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

For more technical work the US Federal Reserve has long been thinking about these effects, for example, Sheiner et al., “A Primer on the Macroeconomic Implications of Population Aging” (https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/FEDS/2007/200701/200701pap.pdf) and Niklas Engbom, “Firm and Worker Dynamics in an Aging Labor Market” (https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp756.pdf). On micro-level stressors in our daily lives, Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) is a great place to start. Then try Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2010) for an argument about the epidemiological effects of sustained inequality. Finally, Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s paper “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century” (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf) is a tragic indictment of how we cope with such stressors and the costs of doing so.

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, CESifo Working Paper Series, 7159 (2018), 5. 16.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Report on the economic wellbeing of US households in 2017”, 1; https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-report-economic-well-being-us-households-201805.pdf. 17.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FEDS Notes, “A wealthless recovery”; https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asset-ownership-and-the-uneven-recovery-from-the-great-recession-20180913.htm. 18.Anne Case & Angus Deaton, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, spring 2017; https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf. 19.See Stephen Margolin & Juliet Schor, The Golden Age of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 20.See Eric Helleiner, States and the Re-emergence of Global Finance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 21.See Juliet Johnson, The Priests of Prosperity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 22.See “Citibank launches $100 million ad campaign”; https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/citibank-launches-100-million-ad. 23.See Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 24.See respectively, Carl Frey & Michael Osborne, “The future of employment” (2013); https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf; Bank of England, “Will a robot takeover my job”; https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/will-a-robot-takeover-my-job and OECD, “Automation, skills use and training” (2018); https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/fr/employment/automation-skills-use-and-training_2e2f4eea-en. 25.A search of the Financial Times archives from 2009 to 2020 on the topic “robots and employment” yields 403 results. 26.See Matthew Tracey & Joachim Fels, “70 is the new 65”, Pimco (2016); https://www.pimco.com/en-us/insights/viewpoints/in-depth/70-is-the-new-65-demographics-still-support-lower-rates-for-longer. 27.See Timo Fetzer, “Did austerity cause Brexit?”

The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013

Marriage Choices and Class Boundaries: Social Endogamy in History. International Review of Social History Supplement 13. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge. Weitz, Rose. 2013. The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care: A Critical Approach. Boston: Wadsworth. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Willenbacher, Barbara. 2003. “Individualism and Traditionalism in Inheritance Law in Germany, France, England, and the United States.” Journal of Family History 28, no. 1: 208–25. ———. 2012. “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class.”

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There are several policy options, all of which depend on the will of those in charge. In the final analysis, policy is determined by the outcome of political contests. These contests reflect competing visions regarding what kind of society people think we ought to have or what is desirable. In the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009), epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett provide compelling cross-cultural evidence showing that countries with high levels of economic inequality are associated with a variety of what most would agree are undesirable outcomes such as poor physical health (including lower levels of life expectancy and higher rates of infant mortality), higher rates of stress and mental illness, higher rates of drug abuse, lower levels of overall childhood well-being (as well as higher rates of childhood obesity, lower levels of student math and literacy scores, and higher teenage rates of pregnancy), higher levels of violence (including homicide rates), higher rates of incarceration, and lower levels of social mobility.

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New York: Basic Books. Waters, Mary C. 2012. “Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy.” In The New Guilded Age: The Critical Inequality Debates of Our Time, ed. David B. Grusky and Tamar Kricheli-Katz, 230–46. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winant, Howard. 2012. “A Dream Deferred: Toward a U.S. Racial Future.” In The New Gilded Age: The Critical Inequality Debates of Our Time, ed.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

Inequality leads to inferior social outcomes Recently, studies have come out to show that inequality leads to poor outcomes in health and other social indicators of human well-being. And this is independently of the sheer effect of higher inequality producing a higher number of poor people, who are bound to perform worse in these regards. This argument has been made popular recently by the book The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The book examined the data from two dozen or so rich countries (roughly countries with per capita incomes above the level of Portugal, which is around $20,000). It argues that more unequal countries definitely do worse in terms of infant mortality, teenage births, educational performance, homicide and imprisonment, and also possibly in terms of life expectancy, mental illness and obesity.3 More egalitarian societies have grown faster in many cases Not only is there a lot of evidence showing that higher inequality produces more negative economic and social outcomes, there are quite a few examples of more egalitarian societies growing much faster than comparable but more unequal societies.4 During their ‘miracle’ years between the 1950s and the 1980s, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan grew much faster than comparable countries despite having lower inequalities.

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MILANOVIC The Haves and the Have-Nots (New York: Basic Books, 2011). A. SEN Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). J. STIGLITZ The Price of Inequality (London: Allen Lane, 2012). D. STUCKLER AND S. BASU The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (London: Basic Books, 2013). R. WILKINSON AND K. PICKETT The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). ‘Lady Glossop: Do you work, Mr Wooster? Bertie: What, work, as in honest toil, you mean? Lady Glossop: Yes. Bertie: Hewing the wood and drawing the old wet stuff and so forth? Lady Glossop: Quite. Bertie: Well, I’ve known a few people who’ve worked.

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See OECD, Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2011), and ILO, World of Work 2012 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2012). 10. The following Gini coefficients are for 2010 from ILO, World of Work 2012, p. 15, figure 1.9. Figures for Botswana and Namibia are from older sources. 11. Interestingly, the dividing line here is similar to what some of the friendly critics of The Spirit Level use when they say that inequality produces negative social outcomes in countries above a certain level of inequality. 12. UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 2012 (Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2012), Chapter 3, p. 66, chart 3.6. The fifteen countries studied were Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, (South) Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Thailand, the UK and the US.

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World
by Michael Marmot
Published 9 Sep 2015

There is, in Japan, a shared commitment to success. We see it in relatively narrow income inequalities, low rates of poverty, low rates of crime, care for older people – and the longest life expectancy in the world. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett captured public imagination with their book The Spirit Level.27 It contains a simple and powerful idea: inequalities of income damage the health and well-being of all of us, rich, poor, or somewhere in between. I have co-edited books with Richard Wilkinson, and co-written a paper defending his ideas against some of his critics. I agree that social and economic inequalities are bad for health inequalities.

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OECD Stat Extracts: Income Distribution and Poverty – Poverty rate after taxes and transfers, poverty line 60% 2013 [14/04/2014]. Available from: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD. 19Galbraith JK. The Affluent Society. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. 20Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009. 21Lewis M. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. London: Allen Lane, 2011. 22Hampshire S. Justice Is Conflict. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 23New Policy Institute, MacInnes T, Aldridge H, Bushe S, Kenway P, Tinson A.

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Family and Childcare Trust, 2014. 25Ferguson D. The costs of childcare: how Britain compares with Sweden. The Guardian. 31 May 2014. 26Mackenbach JP. The persistence of health inequalities in modern welfare states: The explanation of a paradox. Social Science & Medicine. 2012; 75(4): 761–9. 27Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009. 28Marmot MG, Sapolsky R. Of Baboons and Men: Social Circumstances, Biology, and the Social Gradient in Health. In: Weinstein M, Lane MA, editors. Sociality, Hierarchy, Health: Comparative Biodemography: A Collection of Papers.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

CONSEQUENCES OF INEQUALITY FOR WELL-BEING In the absence of any evidence on the impact on growth per se, what about evidence of the impact of inequality on more direct measures of well-being? Some researchers are passionate advocates of a causal link between increased inequality and worse outcomes in a wide range of social indicators, from health and life expectancy to teenage pregnancy and crime. In their recent book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett make exactly this argument and what’s more suggest that in an unequal society even the people at the top of the pile in terms of income have a reduced level of welfare compared to their counterparts in more equal places. Much of their evidence consists of presenting simple correlations between measures of inequality in different countries and measures of some social bad such a depression rates or prevalence of heart disease.

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Economic Growth in the Information Age.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1, pp. 125–211. Kaletsky, Anatole. 2010. Capitalism 4.0. London: Bloomsbury. Kamarck, Elaine. 2003. “Government Innovation around the World.” Cambridge, MA: John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Kay, John. 2009a. “Review of The Spirit Level.” Financial Times, 23 March 2009. ———. 2009b. “Labour’s Love Affair with Bankers Is to Blame for This Sorry State.” Financial Times, 25 April 2009. ———. 2010. Obliquity. London: Profile. Keefer, P., and S. Knack. 1997. “Does Social Capital Have An Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation.”

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Waal, Frans de. 2008. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weale, Martin. 2009. “Saving and the National Economy.” Discussion Paper No. 340. London: National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Wilkinson, Will. 2007. “In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is it Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy.” Policy Analysis, No. 590, 11 April 2007, Washington DC: Cato Institute. Willetts, David. 2010. The Pinch. London: Atlantic Books.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

As a 2007 UN-Habitat report concludes: Significant impacts of gating are seen in the real and potential spatial and social fragmentation of cities, leading to the diminished use and availability of public space and increased socio-economic polarisation … even increasing crime and the fear of crime as the middle classes abandon public streets to the vulnerable poor, to street children and families, and to offenders who prey on them.23 Distrust goes hand in hand with the rise of inequality, and becomes ingrained into the very fabric of the city itself. As Uslaner points out, inequality undermines the sense of common purpose and ownership, it attacks optimism and a sense of being in control of one’s fate. This is the same conclusion that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett came to in The Spirit Level: ‘Think of trust as an important marker of the ways in which greater material equality can help create a cohesive, cooperative community, to the benefit of all.’24 In almost every statistic on the subject, however, society has been growing increasingly unequal since the 1970s, and we are only now starting to audit the consequences.

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Graham, S., 2011, p. 263. 21. arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/53-of-mobile-users-happy-to-hand-over-location-data-for-coupons.ars 22. www.theinternetofthings.eu/content/new-years-contest-panopticon-metaphor-internet-things---why-not-if-it-were-opposite 23. Goodyear, S., ‘Do Gated Communities Threaten Society?’, 11 April 2012, www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/04/do-gated-communities-threaten-society/1737 24. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K., The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin, 2010, p. 62. 25. Dorling, D., So You Think You Know About Britain, 2011, p. 73. 26. Milanovic, B., The Haves and the Have-Nots, Basic Books, 2012, p. 72. 27. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html?

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a=v&q=cache:3GR-6hrbkOYJ Walker, J., Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities, Island Press, 2011 Walljasper, J., All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, The New Press, 2010 Weber, R. and Craine, R., The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, OUP, 2012 Weaver, W., ‘Science and Complexity’, American Scientist 36, 1948 Welter, V. M., Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, MIT Press, 2002 Whyte, W. H., City: Rediscovering the Centre, Doubleday, 1988 Whyte, W. H. (ed. Goldberger, P.), The Essential William H. Whyte, Fordham University Press, 2000 Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K., The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin, 2010 Williams, A. and Donald, A., The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs, Pluto Press, 2011 Wilson, J. Q. and Kelling, G. L., ‘Broken Windows’, Atlantic Monthly, 1982, from www.manhattan-institute.org Wirth, L., ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology, 1938 Wood, A.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Such has been the corruption of American politics since then. But the problem of economic inequality goes even wider and deeper. A mountain of research has been generated in the past decade on the consequences of growing inequality for the health of American society—or any nation, for that matter. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level has earned justifiable acclaim for its documentation of how increasing inequality—far more than simply the actual amount of wealth in the elites of society—damages almost every measure of well-being, from life expectancy and mental health to violence and human happiness. This is largely true for the very rich, ironically enough, as well as the poor.

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Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012). 36. Drake Bennett, “Commentary: The Inequality Delusion,” BloombergBusinessweek.com, Oct. 21, 2010; and Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 214–15. 37. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). 38. Stiglitz, Price of Inequality, 43. 39. Thorstein Veblen, arguably the most original and greatest American economist of all time, was the first to grasp this fundamental change in capitalism, though many, of course, have followed in his wake.

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See government secrecy self-obsession, 241n72 sensationalism, 83, 85, 242n88 serendipity, 9–10 “server farms,” 136 sexuality, 10–11 SF Public Press, 196, 199 Shaxson, Nicholas: Treasure Islands, 144–45 The Shallows (Carr), 11 Shirky, Clay, 173–74 Cognitive Surplus, 6, 9 Silver, Josh, 93 Simon, David, 274n52 Simons, Henry C., 263n81 Sirota, David, 178 Skype, 138, 150 slavery, 25, 54, 191 smartphones, 112, 120, 128–29, 131, 135, 139 as data tracking devices, 150, 151, 152 as news platforms, 187, 188–89 patents, 260n25 used for unpaid overtime, 218 Smith, Adam, 218 social class. See class socialists and socialism, 229, 244–45n5 social media, 11, 12, 139, 149, 152, 157, 165, 243n102 Arab Spring role, 234n36 See also Facebook; MySpace Solove, Daniel, 169 Sony, 120, 256n134 Soviet Union, 17 Spanish-language newspaper editions, 277n104 The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett), 36 sports media, 193 stagnation, 20, 24, 30, 47, 48, 49, 221, 227 Stallman, Richard, 103 Starkman, Dean, 273n37 StatSheet, 193 “stealth marketing,” 147, 149 Stearns, Josh, 181, 197, 200 steel industry, 224, 225 Stiglitz, Joseph, 30, 37, 39, 138, 220, 224, 225, 226, 251n14 stimulation, economic.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari
Published 1 Jan 2018

So it seemed like there might be something in the theory that depression and anxiety are a response to the constant status anxiety many of us live with today. But how could this theory be tested? I went to see a married couple who had taught me about this science and found an intriguing way of investigating it. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level—has made them two of the most influential social scientists in the world. When they looked at Robert’s work, they knew that with baboons, the hierarchies are fairly fixed:15 they are always going to live that way, with only minor variations. But Kate and Richard knew that for humans, it doesn’t quite work like that.

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Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically Erick Messias et al., “Economic grand rounds: Income inequality and depression across the United States: an ecological study,” Psychiatric Services 62, no. 7 (2011): 710–2. See also http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/?p=642, as accessed December 10, 2016. This is true if you compare different countries Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2009), 31–41, 63–72, 173–196. “We’re extraordinarily sensitive to these things,” Paul Moloney, The Therapy Industry (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 109. If you work for a company, in living memory http://www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/ftse-100-bosses-earn-average-5-5m-year-report-says/100790, as accessed January 10, 2017; Sebastian Junger, Tribe: One Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, 2016), 31.

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See Internet and social media social neuroscience, here social prescribing definition of, here and holistic approach to diagnosis and treatment, here limited research on, here opposition of drug companies to, here and prescribing of activities rather than drugs, here See also Bromley-by-Bow Center society, Western rejection of concept, here The Spirit Level (Pickett and Wilkinson), here Sptizer, Eliot, here SSRIs. See Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors Star-D Trials, of SSRIs, here starvation, effects on body, here status and respect current large differences in, here disconnection from, as cause of depression, here and depression as type of submission response, here and status hierarchy in baboon troops, here and low/threatened status as source of stress, here, here, here reconnection to cooperatives and, here universal basic income and, here Stein, Richard, here, here, here stigmatization of depressed persons research on, here undermining of, as motive for chemical imbalance theory of depression, here stress long-term, as cause of depression, here impact of research on, here, here research on, here low/threatened status as source of, here, here, here Sudblock (Berlin gay club) and bonding of Kotti residents, here and Kotti neighborhood protest, here and Tuncai (homeless man), adoption of, here, here, here suicide rates, among Native American/First Nations groups, here Sullivan, Andrew, here Summerfield, Derek, here symptoms, painful of depression, as message about needed changes in society, here as key to discovering underlying problem, here, here, here, here Tamir, Maya, here taxi drivers in London, and neuroplasticity, here teenagers, ineffectiveness of antidepressants for, drug companies’ hiding of, here television, and advertising power to create materialistic desires, here sense of inadequacy generated in viewers, here Thatcher, Margaret, here Ticu, Alex, here, here tribe, human need for connection to cooperatives and, here, here and disconnection from other people as cause of depression, here, here, here, here Internet gaming and, here Tuncai (homeless man) freeing of, by Kotti protesters, here and involvement with others as treatment for depression, here and Kotti neighborhood protest, here return to psychiatric institution, here Tuncer, Neriman, here Twenge, Jean, here twins studies, and genetic factors in depression, here unhappiness, and depression, continuum between, here unions, difficulty of establishing, here United Nations, on social causes of mental illness, here universal basic income cost of implementing, here experiments with, here experiment with, in Dauphin, Canada, here effects on residents, here ending of, here Forget’s analysis of data from, here and improvements in working conditions, here, here mental health effects of, here as realizable dream, here as remedy for economic insecurity created by globalization, here, here Utopia for Realists (Bregman), here values, meaningful, disconnection from as cause of depression, here advertising’s encouragement of materialistic values and, here, here and chemical imbalance model of depression, here link between materialism and depression, here and materialism, destructive effects of, here, here values, meaningful, reconnecting to, here alternative lifestyle designed for, here banning of advertising and, here and consumer values, experiment in changing, here difficulty of, here meditation and, here psychedelic drugs and, here Vietnam, author’s food poisoning in, here, here Virno, Paul, here Virtually Normal (Sullivan), here wand, healing.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

As Professor Sam Friedman of the London School of Economics (LSE) notes in his own research and analysis of this phenomenon, ‘people find stories of the past – of working-class struggle, of upward social mobility, of meritocratic striving – that provide powerful frames for understanding their own experiences and identity’. A person’s class can change throughout their life and they may also feel that they belong to a different class to the one that their socio-economic status puts them in. Class is an identity. Income and wealth are a reality. In their 2009 book The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson make a similar point, arguing that social class is subjective as it is classified differently in various studies and pieces of research, but income differences are more objective. Any discussion of wealth and class in Britain necessarily intersects with race and ethnicity.

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Author’s Note 60 per cent of people in Britain: Patrick Butler, ‘Most Britons regard themselves as working class, survey finds’, Guardian, 29 June 2016, www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/29/most-brits-regard-themselves-as-working-class-survey-finds a quarter of people in such jobs: NatCen Social Research, ‘Social Class’, in British Social Attitudes 33 (2016), p. 9, www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-33/social-class.aspx ‘people find stories of the past’: ‘Why do so many middle class professionals insist they are working class?’, LSE, 19 January 2021, www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2021/a-Jan-21/Why-do-so-many-middle-class-professionals-insist-they-are-working-class social class is subjective: Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009; London: Penguin, 2010). Prologue the average rent for a one-bedroom home was £1,265: The house price statistics at the start of each chapter are taken from the online property website rightmove.co.uk. Please note these will therefore be asking prices and not sale prices.

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(London: Penguin, 2017) Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013) Nathalie Olah, Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity (London: Repeater, 2019) George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001) Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009; London: Penguin, 2010) Martin Pugh, We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (London: Bodley Head, 2008) Chris Renwick, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State (London: Allen Lane, 2017) Josh Ryan-Collins, Why Can’t You Afford a Home?

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change
by Ehsan Masood
Published 4 Mar 2021

” — Nicholas Stuart, Sydney Morning Herald “An important and interesting book that shows how trapped we have become by the idea of Gross Domestic Product—and reveals how important it is to develop alternatives that will help us reduce inequality and respond to climate change.” — Kate E. Pickett, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York and co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone “The writing is effortless and intriguing. Like a novel, it weaves personal stories and the significance of individuals into a narrative about tectonic shifts in world politics.” — Maria Ivanova, Associate Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and author of The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty In memory of Mahbub ul Haq (1934–1998) Contents Title Page Dedication Preface to the Second Edition Preface Prologue: Lost History Introduction: The Great Invention One: GDP and Its Discontents Two: The Fight for the Formula Three: Made in Cambridge Four: The Karachi Economic Miracle Five: Red Star Over Central Square Six: The Talented Mr.

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Many thanks also go to Dasho Karma Ura who described the making of Gross National Happiness; to Gustav Papanek for his memories as an economic development consultant in 1950s Karachi; and to Lord Nicholas Stern for re-living both the Commission for Africa and the Stern review on the economics of climate change. A huge thanks also to Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level, for the generous cover quote. You would think that our digital age would mean less work for librarians and archivists, but I can assure readers that their services remain much sought after. I am especially grateful to Kate Mollan of the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC for dogged pursuit of an original copy of Simon Kuznets’s 261-page report National Income 1929–32; and to the staff at the library of the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex for material on Dudley Seers.

The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne
Published 8 May 2017

surveyed the vast medical literature on the relationship: R. G. Wilkinson and K. E. Pickett, “Income Inequality and Population Health: A Review and Explanation of the Evidence,” Social Science and Medicine 62 (2006): 1768–84. For an accessible overview of this research, see R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). Chapter 3: Poor Logic Venkatesh studied the economics of the drug trade: S. A. Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets (New York: Penguin, 2008). classic experiment led by psychologist Ned Jones: E.

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Singh-Manoux, N. E. Adler, and M. G. Marmot, “Subjective Social Status: Its Determinants and Its Association with Measures of Ill-Health in the Whitehall II Study,” Social Science & Medicine 56 (2003): 1321–33. greater income equality had longer life expectancies: R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). death rate for middle-aged white Americans has been rising: A. Case and A. Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (2015): 15078–83.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

Galbraith and Travis Hale, “Income Distribution and the Information Technology Bubble,” Working Paper No. 27, University of Texas Inequality Project, January 2004. 56. Robert Frank, The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 54. 57. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 58. Rana Foroohar, “Thomas Piketty: Marx 2.0,” Time, May 19, 2014. 59. Federal Reserve Flow of Funds; Congressional Research Service, “Rebuilding Household Wealth: Implications for Economic Recovety,” by Craig K. Elwell, September 13, 2013. 60.

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Mian and Sufi, House of Debt. 10. Turner, Between Debt and the Devil. 11. Robert J. Shiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 12. Mian and Sufi, House of Debt. 13. For an interesting discussion of alternative models, see chapter 16 of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 14. Asker, Farre-Mensa, and Ljungqvist, “Comparing the Investment Behavior of Public and Private Firms.” 15. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2012). 16. Rana Foroohar, “What Hasn’t Been Fixed Since the Last Market Crash?”

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New York: Picador, 2015. Weill, Sandy, and Judah S. Kraushaar. The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy. New York: Warner Business Books, 2006. Whitney, Meredith. Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity. New York: Penguin Press, 2013. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Wolf, Martin. The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. Zingales, Luigi. A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Bush administrations.”15 The similarities between mismanaged nations and America in 2013 are unsettling: weak productivity growth, stagnant wages, Red Queens, deteriorating economic mobility, and widening income disparity. Johnson’s analogy is extended by statistics suggesting the United States also has come to resemble a mismanaged nation on social indices, as described by Australian journalist Leon Gettler, drawing on research by epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level: “The US has the worst health and social problems in such areas as numeracy and literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage pregnancies, lack of trust, obesity, mental illness including drug and alcohol addiction, and social mobility.”16 Voters can end gridlock by reasserting their economic self-interest at the polls, weighing carefully the consequences of policies expected from the leaders they elect.

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Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” NBER working paper 18315, August 2012. 6 Ibid. 7 Jim Clifton, The Coming Jobs War (New York: Gallup Press, 2012), 2. 8 Ben Austen, “End of the Road,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2009. 9 Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, Norton, 2012. 10 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail, (New York: Crown Business, Random House, 2012), p. 156, 159. 11 Ibid., pp. 157, 427. 12 Rich Morin, “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor,” Pew Research Center, Pew Social and Demographic Trends, Jan. 11, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/01/11/rising-share-of-americans-see-conflict-between-rich-and-poor/Top of Form. 13 Francesco Guerrera, “A Need to Reconnect,” Financial Times, March 12, 2009. 14 John P. Hussman, “Misallocating Resources,” Weekly Market Comment, July 12, 2010, http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc100712.htm. 15 Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” The Atlantic, May 2009. 16 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Leon Gettler, “The Wealth Time Bomb,” Sydney Morning Herald, Oct. 28, 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-wealth-time-bomb-20101027-173xm.html#ixzz1ndiT7ObQ. 17 Nancy Folbre, “Defining Economic Interest,” Economix, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2011. 18 Michael I.

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(Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce), 41, 180, 181, 186, 203–04, 214, 216, 225, 367, 369, 376, 389 Petri, Alexandra, 427 Pew Research Center, 20, 45, 263, 292, 300, 345, 431–32, 452 Pfeffer, Jeffrey (professor), 311 Phelps, Edmund (Nobel Laureate), 146, 149, 151, 163, 440, 442 Philippon, Thomas (economist), 137 Phillips, Kevin (economic historian), 80, 282, 391 Phillips-Fein, Kim, 35–36 Phillipson, Nicholas, Phipps, Maureen, 303 Pickett, Kate (epidemiologist), 433, The Spirit Level, 434 Pierce, Justin R., 345 Pierson, Paul (political scientist), 41 Piff, Paul K., 127 Piketty, Thomas (economist), 5, 23–24, 263, 265, 274–75 Pisano, Gary P., 161, 365, 395 Plender, John (Financial Times columnist), 30, 199, 201 Polglaze, Mark (GM-Holden, Australia), 114 Pomorski, Lukasz, 119 Porter, Eduardo, 390 (chart) Porter, Michael E.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

Rewards at the top of finance and business, their authors argue, have become increasingly disproportionate and undeserving, the product of an increase in the concentration of political and market power rather than a greater economic contribution.2 One of the most influential of these critiques, The Spirit Level, has shown that highly unequal societies are much more likely to impose widespread social damage.3 These are important arguments but they deal mainly with the moral and social consequences of the surge in polarisation. An equally important issue, but one that has been largely ignored, is the impact of soaring inequality on the way economies function.

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A failure to act risks a new phase of permanent or near-permanent recession, one that will condemn much of the population—in the UK, the US and elsewhere—to a prolonged period of depressed wages, stagnant living standards and blighted opportunities. Notes 2 See, for example, W Hutton, Them and Us, Little Brown, 2010; D Dorling, Injustice, Policy Press, 2010; G Irvin, Super Rich, Polity Press, 2008; P Toynbee & D Walker, Unjust Rewards, Granta, 2008; S Lansley, Rich Britain, Politico’s, 2006. 3 R Wilkinson and K Pickett, The Spirit Level, Penguin, 2009. 1 AN ECONOMIC MEGASHIFT Thirty years ago, the United Kingdom was one of the most equal countries in the developed world. Today it is one of the most unequal. 4 This shift started at the beginning of the 1980s and put into reverse a half century of political and social change that had reduced the gap between the top and the bottom to its lowest level in history.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

But among those who assert their own self-worth, psychologists found two distinct personality types. One group are those who report high self-esteem and also high levels of happiness, fulfilling friendships, and social relations. The other group report high self-esteem but also display a host of antisocial tendencies, including violence, racism, and lack of empathy. In their book The Spirit Level, authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett describe this latter kind of self-esteem as “primarily defensive, a kind of internal attempt to talk oneself up”: People with insecure high self-esteem tend to be insensitive to others and to show an excessive preoccupation with themselves, with success, and with their image and appearance in the eyes of others.

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Esquire, January 18, 2011. 41 “And I—I mean—you know, my dad”: See “Republican Presidential Candidates Participate in a CNN-Sponsored Debate,” Political Transcript Wire, January 20, 2012. 42 “It was always a business where you had to have an edge”: Steve Fishman, “The Madoff Tapes,” New York, February 27, 2011. 43 “I am an important person”: Jean M. Twenge et al., “Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” Journal of Personality 76, no. 4 (2008): 878. 44 “People with insecure high self-esteem”: Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury), p. 37. 45 “not that smart and kind of a bully”: See Jeffrey Rosen, “The Case Against Sotomayor,” New Republic, May 4, 2009. 46 “meritocratic feedback loop”: Ho, Liquidated, p. 57. 47 “There’s 100 percent no question”: Author interview. 48 “the outstretched arms of J.P.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

In any event, higher real estate values and an economy dependent on servicing the rich are probably the only two certain consequences of living in a country with a lot of wealthy people. These benefits, themselves dubious, should be weighed against the well-documented negatives. In their highly acclaimed book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw on a vast body of social science evidence, as well as their own research, in revealing the long list of problems that large income inequalities exacerbate, including poor physical health, mental illness, drug use, violence, obesity, shorter life spans, diminished social relations and reduced prospects for upward social mobility.

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We show that countries with higher taxes tend to have significantly better social outcomes and that their economies have been unaffected, and indeed arguably have benefited, from the increased government spending that higher taxes have financed. Some readers will note that our findings are similar to those of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level. Wilkinson and Pickett revealed that more equal countries tend to have better social outcomes. We measure tax levels (instead of equality) and find that there is also a strong correlation between high tax levels and better social outcomes. The overlap is perhaps not surprising since countries with higher tax levels tend to have greater equality.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

See also William Lamb et al., ‘Transitions in pathways of human development and carbon emissions,’ Environmental Research Letters 9(1), 2014; Angus Deaton, ‘Income, health, and well-being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll,’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2), 2008, pp. 53–72; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton University Press, 1997). 13 Tim Jackson, ‘The post-growth challenge: secular stagnation, inequality and the limits to growth,’ CUSP Working Paper No. 12 (Guildford: University of Surrey, 2018). 14 Mark Easton, ‘Britain’s happiness in decline,’ BBC News, 2006. 15 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (Penguin 2010). 16 Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown, ‘Income inequality and status seeking: Searching for positional goods in unequal US states,’ Psychological Science, 2015. 17 Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, I. V. Holmes and Derek R. Avery, ‘The subjective well-being political paradox: Happy welfare states and unhappy liberals,’ Journal of Applied Psychology 99(6), 2014; Benjamin Radcliff, The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 18 According to the UN’s World Happiness Report. 19 Dacher Keltner, Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (WW Norton & Company, 2009); Emily Smith and Emily Esfahani, The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfilment in a World Obsessed with Happiness (Broadway Books, 2017). 20 Sixty-year-old Nicoyan men have a median lifetime of 84.3 years (a three-year advantage over Japanese men), while women have a median lifetime of 85.1.

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See Luis Rosero-Bixby et al., ‘The Nicoya region of Costa Rica: a high longevity island for elderly males,’ Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, 11, 2013; Jo Marchant, ‘Poorest Costa Ricans live longest,’ Nature News, 2013; Luis Rosero-Bixby and William H. Dow, ‘Predicting mortality with biomarkers: a population-based prospective cohort study for elderly Costa Ricans,’ Population Health Metrics 10(1), 2012. 21 Danny Dorling, ‘Is inequality bad for the environment?’ Guardian, 2017. 22 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level. 23 Extreme Carbon Inequality, Oxfam, 2015. 24 Yannick Oswald, Anne Owen, and Julia K. Steinberger, ‘Large inequality in international and intranational energy footprints between income groups and across consumption categories,’ Nature Energy 5(3), 2020, pp. 231–239. 25 Thomas Piketty, ‘The illusion of centrist ecology,’ Le Monde, 2019. 26 World Happiness Report. 27 CFO Journal, ‘Cost of health insurance provided by US employers keeps rising,’ Wall Street Journal, 2017. 28 David Ruccio, ‘The cost of higher education in the USA,’ Real-World Economics Review blog, 2017. 29 Average real wages peaked in 1973 at $23 per hour, declined to a nadir of $19 per hour in 1995, and stood at $22 per hour in 2018 (US Bureau of Labour Statistics).

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Inequality It is not just the size of the economic pie that is causing concern; it is how it is divided. Since the turn of the century, and especially since the financial crisis, there has been a growing concern about the gap between the richest and the rest. Wilkinson and Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level argues that inequality leads to crime, poor health, and unhappiness not just among the poor but also across society.6 In 2011, the Occupy movement popularised the meme of “The 99%,” highlighting the dichotomy between a rich elite and the population as a whole. And Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought decades of empirical work on wealth inequality to bear on the public debate.7 FIGURE 1.3: Growth by Income Group in the World, 1980–2016.

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“The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 11 (1): 1–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/765068. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1911. An Introduction to Mathematics. London: Williams and Norgate. Wilkinson, Frank, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Williamson, Elizabeth J., Alex J. Walker, Krishnan Bhaskaran, Seb Bacon, Chris Bates, Caroline E. Morton, Helen J. Curtis, et al. 2020. “Factors Associated with COVID-19-Related Death Using OpenSAFELY.” Nature 584 (7821): 430–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2521-4.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Might it be harder for Americans, as gated communities spread across the land while middle-class enclaves disappear, to sustain in such discussions the necessary sense of moral superiority? That income inequality weighs heavily on the noneconomic life of a nation is the thesis of the 2009 book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two medical researchers based in Yorkshire, England. The book has been criticized for overreaching. Wilkinson and Pickett relate income inequality trends not only to mental and physical health, violence, and teenage pregnancy, but also to global warming.

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Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Andy Stern, A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track (New York: Free Press, 2008; originally published in 2006). Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 1. Trends in the Distribution of Household Income, Congressional Budget Office, 19. 2. Warren Buffett, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2011, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html; “Options to Tax Individuals with Incomes over $1 Million,” Table T11-0302, Tax Policy Center (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2011), at http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/Content/PDF/T11-0302.pdf; “Monthly Budget Review,” Congressional Budget Office, Nov, 7, 2011, at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/125xx/doc12541/2011_Nov_MBR.pdf. 3.

Social Class in the 21st Century
by Mike Savage
Published 5 Nov 2015

Yet, despite people’s hesitancies about identifying themselves economically, we will insist on the centrality of such inequalities in shaping people’s lives. The power of income inequalities Income inequalities in Britain are very high, and have been rapidly increasing. In their highly influential book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett use the standard metric to measure inequality between countries – the Gini coefficient – in the fifteen states who were members of the European Union prior to its major enlargement in 2004 and also the major industrial English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada and the USA.2 Figure 2.1 gives an indication of the inequalities within nations as they reflect the relative differences between countries in terms of earnings.

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Garthwaite, Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay No-pay, Britain (Bristol: 2012). CONCLUSION: THE OLD NEW POLITICS OF CLASS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 1. Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: 1956), p. 237. 2. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: 2014), Chapter 14. 3. See, notably, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: 2009). 4. See Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: 2005). 5. See Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects (London: 2013); T. Shildrick, R. MacDonald, C. Webster and K. Garthwaite, Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay, No-pay Britain (Bristol: 2012); Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: 2004); and John Hills, Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us (Bristol: 2015).

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

Only in its early stages does economic growth boost life expectancy. Source: United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). FIGURE 7. Health and social problems are closely related to inequality among rich countries. Source: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin, 2009), 20. FIGURE 8. Ecological footprint versus human development index, 2008. Source: Global Footprint Network and WWF, Living Planet Report 2012 (Gland, Switzerland: WWF, 2012), 60. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues in The Price of Inequality that even after the 2007–08 financial crisis, “the wealthiest 1 percent of households had 220 times the wealth of the typical American, almost double the ratio in 1962 or 1983.”4 Stiglitz emphasizes that inequality results from political failure and argues that inequality contributes not only to the social pathologies pointed out above, but also to economic instability in the form of a “vicious downward spiral.”

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Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005). Chapter 2. Structure 1. Lau, “What the World Needs Is Financial Stability.” 2. See the description of archetypes in Senge et al., Presence; and Senge et al., The Fifth Discipline. 3. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin, 2009), 7. 4. Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 8. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of vols. I–VI by D. C. Somervell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1946] 1987). 7.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

‘The Political Economy of Property Tax Reform’. OECD Working Papers on Fiscal Federalism no. 18, 9 April. Sloman, J., and A. Wride. 2009. Economics. 7th ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall. Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Snowdon, Christopher. 2010. The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-Checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything. Ripon: Little Dice. Solow, Robert M. 1956. ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth’. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1): 65–94. Stephens, Mark. 1993. ‘Housing Finance Deregulation: Britain’s Experience’. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 8 (2): 159–75.

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‘The Scope and Method of Political Economy in the Light of the “Marginal” Theory of Value and of Distribution’. The Economic Journal 24 (93): 1–23. Wilcox, S. 2006. The Geography of Affordable and Unaffordable Housing: And the Ability of Younger Working Households to Become Home Owners. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin. Wilson, W., and L. Blow, L. 2013. Extending Home Ownership – Government Initiatives. London: House of Commons Library. Wise, Sarah. 2013. The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. London: Random House. Woetzel, Jonathan, Sangeeth Ram, Jan Mischke, Nicklas Garemo, and Shirish Sankhe. 2014.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Notwithstanding the studied references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, the book's success is puzzling. The problems of rising inequality have been identified before, by economic historian Angus Maddison, World Bank economist Branko Milanović, James Galbraith and the University of Texas Inequality Project, and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. The French reaction to Capital was subdued. Its rapturous treatment in Anglo-Saxon territories has been less about the book than deep-seated anxiety about inequality. The book challenges the mythology central to liberal societies of an egalitarian meritocracy based on skill, hard work, entrepreneurship, and competition.

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Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Touchstone Books, 1991. ——, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, Penguin, 2011. Inequality and Trust Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2011. Satyajit Das is a globally respected former banker and consultant with over thirty-five years’ experience in financial markets. He presciently anticipated, as early as 2006, the Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt problems, as well as the unsustainable nature of China's economic success.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

For sailing, Ellen MacArthur’s Taking on the World. 21 For example, Steven Hawking responding to an audience question after one of his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures: ‘We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least 100 years, so we have to be very careful in the meantime’. https://tinyurl.com/ReithHawking 22 Kinetic energy = ½ mv 2. m = 50
70 kg = 3500 kg. Speed of light (c) = 300,000,000 m/s. v = c/10. KE = 1.5
1018 J = 440 TWh or 18.3 TW for a day. 5 Growth, Money and Metrics 1 For example, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickerty’s The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better lays out a bullet proof case for reduction in inequality and chilling out about GDP in rich countries. The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows laid out perhaps the first proper challenge to the ‘more is better’ mantra, and Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth and, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics build on these themes, as does the New Economics Foundation (https://neweconomics.org). 2 For a more detailed analysis of the link between GDP and carbon emissions, see The Burning Question, Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark, Profile Books 2013 (Chapter 9, The Growth Debate). 3 Bobby Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 1968, speaking to Vietnam War protesters. https://tinyurl.com/ BobbyKennedy-onGDP 264 NOTES TO PAGES 124–134 4 Tom Peters might not have been the first to coin the phrase, which is also widely associated with Peter Drucker.

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See also Wikipedia’s posts on supply side economics and trickle-down economics. 9 Credit Suisse 2017 Global Wealth Report https://tinyurl.com/globalhwealth By wealth, we mean the sum of all assets; house, money, pension fund, clothes, toothbrush – the lot. 10 See endnote 9 above. 11 Using data compiled by on Giving What We Can from https://tinyurl.com/meanmedianwealth as well as Credit Suisse. The factor of 4 is a rough but probably conservative estimate, based on guestimating the income distribution within the poorest half of Africa’s population. 12 See Wilkinson and& Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Also relevant is Andrew Notes to Pages 136–140 265 Sayer’s book Why We Can’t Afford The Rich. The Equality Trust website gives us a broad overview of the issues: https://www .equalitytrust.org.uk/ 13 The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution as defined for molecules moving in a gas between speeds c1 and c2:  3=2 2 mc m f ðcÞ ¼ 4πc2 e 2kB T 2πkB T • m is the mass of the molecule • kB is the Boltzmann constant • T is absolute temperature. 14 Here is where the money spent on the UK National Lottery ends up. • 53% is paid out in prizes • 25% goes to ‘good causes’ (some of which, some people argue, are causes that are rarely used by the people who buy most of the lottery tickets) • 12% goes to the government as tax • 5% goes to the gambling company, Camelot, that runs it. • 4% goes to the shop that sold the ticket So when you buy a ticket, you give away nearly half the money.

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 27 Mar 2000

A Roman builder, or mensor aedificorum, was familiar with the try square, the plumb line, and the chalk line—all tools that were developed by the ancient Egyptians.3 The level, or libella, also an Egyptian invention, consisted of a wood frame resembling the letter A, with a plumb bob suspended from the apex. To level, the string was lined up with a mark in the center of the crossbar. Not as compact as my spirit level, perhaps, but obviously just as serviceable since A-levels continued to be used until the mid-1800s. The spirit level, with its sealed tube containing an air bubble floating in alcohol, was invented in the mid-1600s. It was first exclusively a surveying instrument—it took another two hundred years to find its way into the carpenter’s toolbox. For measuring length, the Roman mensor used a regula, or a wooden stick divided into feet, palms, twelfths or unciae (whence our inches), and digiti or finger widths.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16 ‘We would need to create …’ Kevin Anderson, ‘Talks in the city of light generate more heat’, Nature 528, 21 December 2015. 17 ‘Deforestation is a major cause …’ US Environmental Protection Agency, ‘Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data’, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data, accessed 4 February 2017. 18 ‘As the soils deplete …’ ‘Deforestation and its extreme effect on global warming,’ Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deforestation-and-global-warming/. 19 ‘Livestock farming alone contributes more …’ Carbon Countdown, Carbon Budget 2016 Update, Carbon Brief, www.carbonbrief.org. 20 ‘Now, let’s accept that poor …’ Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 21 ‘In this scenario, poor countries …’ Then they will have to reduce emissions aggressively from 2025, cutting by about 7 per cent each year until net zero in 2050, with assistance from rich countries. 22 ‘And poor countries are going …’ The rate necessary for them to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, assuming maximum reductions from clean energy technologies and efficiency improvements. 23 ‘We already have plenty of …’ Daniel W.

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Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 21 ‘In this scenario, poor countries …’ Then they will have to reduce emissions aggressively from 2025, cutting by about 7 per cent each year until net zero in 2050, with assistance from rich countries. 22 ‘And poor countries are going …’ The rate necessary for them to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, assuming maximum reductions from clean energy technologies and efficiency improvements. 23 ‘We already have plenty of …’ Daniel W. O’Neill, ‘The proximity of nations to a socially sustainable steady-state economy’, Journal of Cleaner Production 108, 2015, pp. 1213–31. 24 ‘After that, what makes us …’ Benjamin Radcliffe, ‘A happy state’, Aeon, 17 September 2015. See also Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level. 25 ‘We should look at societies …’ P. Edward, ‘The Ethical Poverty Line: a moral quantification of absolute poverty’, Third World Quarterly 27(2), 2006, pp. 377–93. 26 ‘A similar majority also believe …’ Reported in Jennifer Elks, ‘Havas: “Smarter” consumers will significantly alter economic models and the role of brands’, Sustainable Brands, 15 May 2014. 27 ‘It made headlines in 2012 …’ Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, The Chicago Plan Revisited, IMF Working Paper WP/12/202 (New York: International Monetary Fund, 2012). 28 ‘According to a recent report …’ US advertising expenditure data available at: http://purplemotes.net/2008/09/14/us-advertising-expenditure-data/. 29 ‘This frenzy of advertising has …’ Betsy Taylor and Dave Tilford, ‘Why consumption matters’, in Juliet B.

London Under
by Peter Ackroyd
Published 1 Nov 2011

A survey of the sewers of London was undertaken in the summer and autumn of 1848 when their condition was described as “frightful”; the system was dilapidated and decayed, even dangerous. The sewer for the Westminster workhouse was “in so wretched a condition that the leveller could scarcely work for the thick scum that covered the glasses of the spirit-level a few minutes after being wiped.… A chamber is reached about thirty feet in length from the roof of which hangings of putrid matter like stalactites descend three feet in length.” One of the investigating party was “dragged out on his back (through two feet of black foetid deposits) in a state of insensibility.”

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough
by Peter Barnes
Published 31 Jul 2014

The data for figure 2.1 (the most recent available) were taken from Edward N. Wolff, “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18559 (November 2012), table 2, 58. 2. See especially Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 49 ff. 3. US Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/, table H-6, and http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/, table P-8. 4. James Madison, National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_madison.html. 5.

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World
by Michael Edwards
Published 4 Jan 2010

Johnston, “2005 Incomes on Average Still Below 2000 Peak,” New York Times, August 21, 2007. 49. Vision of Humanity, Global Peace Index, http://www.visionofhumanity. org/gpi/results/rankings/2008. 50. O. James, The Selfish Capitalist (London: Vermilion, 2007). 51. D. Callahan, “The Moral Market,” Democracy Journal (Summer 2009): 49–59. 52. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). chapter 4 1. From Alan Krueger’s introduction to the Bantam edition of The Wealth of Nations (New York, 2003). 2. ReasonOnline, “Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business: A Reason Debate Featuring Milton Friedman, John Mackey and T.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

As biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “the disease consequences of feeling poor are often rooted in the psychosocial consequences of being made to feel poor by one’s surroundings.” If you’ve got food and a roof over your head, the worst part of poverty may in fact be the feeling of being poorer than other people. Big gaps in socioeconomic status can mean trouble for society in general. In their book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate how gross inequality can lead to higher rates of violent crime, drug use, children born to teenagers, and heart disease. “If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” they warn governments.

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“psychosocial consequences”: Adler, Nancy, Elissa Epel, Grace Castellazzo, and Jeannette Ickovics, “Relationship of Subjective and Objective Social Status with Psychological and Physiological Functioning: Preliminary Data in Healthy White Women,” Health Psychology, 2000: 586–92. Status comparisons: Layard, Richard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005), 43–48. higher rates of mental illness: Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Society Stronger (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). This may be part of the reason: Harris, Gregory, “Liberal or Tory, Minority Gov’t Would Hit ‘Sweet Spot,’ Profs Say,” University of Calgary press release, January 18, 2006, www.ucalgary.ca/mp2003/news/jan06/third-way.html (accessed January 12, 2011); Helliwell, John F., Globalization and Well-Being (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002).

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

Marmot’s 2004 book, The Status Syndrome: How social standing affects our health and longevity, is a book that may change the way you understand ­human nature and our social world. He played a leading role in the World Health Organ­ ization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health whose 2008 report sets out how a better world is possible. Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better (2009) provides a wealth of information on the pervasive effects of inequality on societies. 218 10  |  Trade and globalization without the rosetinted glasses ‘There is no branch of economics in which there is a wider gap between orthodox doctrine and actual problems than in the theory of international trade.’

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UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) (2008) World Investment Report 2008: Transnational corporations and the infrastructure challenge, New York and Geneva: United Nations. UNDP (United Nations Development ­Programme) (2007) Human Development Report 2007/2008, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, available at hdr. undp.org/en/. UNICEF (2007) ‘WHO and UNICEF call for renewed commitment to breastfeed- 288 Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009) The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane. Winkelmann, L. and R. Winkelmann (1998) ‘Why are the unemployed so unhappy? Evidence from panel data’, Economica, 65(1): 1–15. Wolf, M. (2004) Why Globalization Works, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wolff, E. and A.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey
by Robert Macfarlane
Published 1 May 2019

‘Again, I was hit, and vaguely sickened, by Greenland’s inhuman scale,’ she writes in her fine essay ‘Greenland is Melting’, New Yorker, 24 October 2016 <https://www.new yorker.com/ magazine/2016/10/24 /greenland-is-melting>. 363 ‘deaden[ed] . . . gangplank of a cattle truck’: Seamus Heaney, ‘Mycenae Lookout’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 29. 364 ‘thick speech’: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 252. 364 ‘interpret or respond’: Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 250. 364 ‘back-flowing’: Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 249. Chapter 11: Meltwater Pages 380 ‘matter out of place’: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 44. 380 ‘animate (endowed with life) . . . landscapes they inhabit’: Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?

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.: Duke University Press, 2016) Hardy, Thomas, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872; London: Penguin, 2012) Harman, Graham, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) *Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Hawks, John, et al., ‘New Fossil Remains of Homo Naledi from the Lesedi Chamber, South Africa’, eLife 6 (2017) Heaney, Seamus, The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) Herzog, Werner (dir.), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Hesjedal, Anders, ‘The Hunters’ Rock Art in Northern Norway: Problems of Chronology and Interpretation’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 27:1 (1994) Hoffmann, D. L. et al., ‘U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art’, Science 359:6378 (February 2018) Hogenboom, Melissa, ‘In Siberia There is a Huge Crater and It is Getting Bigger’, BBC, 24 February 2017 <http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170223-in-siberia-there-is-a-huge-crater-and-it-is-getting-bigger> Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment
by Lucas Chancel
Published 15 Jan 2020

Éloi Laurent, “Inequality as Pollution, Pollution as Inequality: The Social-Ecological Nexus” (working paper, Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2013), https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_media/working_papers/laurent_inequality-pollution.pdf. See also Éloi Laurent, Social-écologie (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). 14. Michael Marmot and Richard G. Wilkinson, eds., Social Determinants of Health, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2010). See also Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (London: Penguin, 2018). 16. A visitor from Mars falls into this trap when, observing that rain falls on Earth every time umbrellas can be seen, it deduces that umbrellas are the cause of the rain.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

They’ll find it hard to develop a fundamental faith in self-efficacy—a belief that they can shape the course of their life. They’ll be less likely to have confidence in the proposition that cause leads to effect, that if they sacrifice now, something good will result. Then there are the psychic effects of inequality itself. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that the mere fact of being low on the status totem pole brings its own deep stress and imposes its own psychic costs. Inequality and a feeling of exclusion causes social pain, which leads to more obesity, worse health outcomes, fewer social connections, more depression and anxiety.

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18 Public-education spending Eric Hanushek, “Milton Friedman’s Unfinished Business,” Hoover Digest, Winter 2007, http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/friedmanhoover_digest.pdf. 19 A mother with two kids Haskins and Sawhill, 46. 20 If you read part Margaret Bridges, Bruce Fuller, Russell Rumberger, and Loan Tran, “Preschool for California’s Children: Unequal Access, Promising Benefits,” PACE Child Development Projects, University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute (September 2004): 9, http://gse.berkeley.edu/research/pace/reports/PB.04-3.pdf. 21 About half the students Haskins and Sawhill, 223. 22 Isabel Sawhill has calculated Haskins and Sawhill, 42. 23 If you get married before Haskins and Sawhill, 70. 24 Wilkinson and Pickett point Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 75 25 “Low-income families” Haskins and Sawhill, 101. 26 As James Heckman argues James Heckman and Dimitriy V. Masterov, “The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children,” Invest in Kids Working Group, Committee for Economic Development, Working Paper 5 (October 4, 2004): 3, http://jenni.uchicago.edu/Invest/FILES/dugger_2004-12-02_dvm.pdf. 27 But social and emotional skills Heckman and Masterov, 28–35. 28 Small classes may be better Malcolm Gladwell, “Most Likely to Succeed,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell. 29 The City University of New York Marc Santora, “CUNY Plans New Approach to Community College,” New York Times, January 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/education/26college.html?

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
by Sandy Tolan
Published 1 Jan 2006

"Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations." UNI-SPAL. http://domino.un.Org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/abl4d4aafc4elbb985256204004f55 fa?OpenDocument. "Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine." UNISPAL. http:// domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/O/cc33602f61b0935c8025648800368307? Document. Remnick, David. "Profiles: The Spirit Level: Amos Oz Writes the Story of Israel." The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/P04ll08fa_fact. Shlaim, Avi. "Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948." Cambridge University Press. http://www.fathom.com/course/72810001. "The Law of Return 5710 (1950)." Knesset, http://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/ "The Law of Return 5710 (1950)."

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Oz and his colleagues produced The Seventh Day: Soldiers' Talk About the Six-Day War, a book aimed at "recording in permanent form the effect of the Six-Day War on their generation." The soldiers' stories and quotes are taken from it. Oz's early stance against the occupation is documented by David Remnick in his New Yorker article "The Spirit Level," November 8, 2004. The remainder of the chapter—Dalia and Richard's arrival in Ramallah, their reception by the Khairi family, and the encounter between Dalia and Bashir—is recounted according to their memories, as described at the beginning of the notes for this chapter. Chapter 10 This chapter is based on a combination of eyewitness interviews, memoirs, secondary sources describing the historical and political context of the day, and interviews with various actors among the Palestinian political factions from 1969 to the mid-1980s.

The Globalization of Inequality
by François Bourguignon
Published 1 Aug 2012

There is indeed a relationship between income inequality and the mean health status of a population. But it could be due exclusively to the fact that on the one hand there is a correlation between individual health and income, and, on the other hand, it tends to disappear for high incomes. Thus, in one society 14 A similar hypothesis is proposed in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Globalization and Costly Inequality141 where rich people are richer and poor people poorer than in another society, rich people have the same health status but poor people are less healthy. On average, health is worse in the more unequal society.

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future
by John Whitelegg
Published 1 Sep 2015

WHO (2013b) Fact sheet 311, Obesity and overweight, World Health Organisation, Geneva. WHO, (2014a) Air quality deteriorating in many of the world’s cities. News Release, 7th May 2014, World Health Organisation, Geneva. WHO (2014b) Obesity and Overweight. Fact sheet Number 311, May 2014, World Health Organisation, Geneva. Wilkinson, R and Pickett, K (2009) The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Woodcock, J and 17 others (2009) Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: urban land transport, Lancet 374:1930-43. World Bank (2014) Transport for health. The global burden of disease from motorised road transport, Report 86304.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Kollewe, ‘London Retains Crown as Favourite City of World’s Ultra-Rich’, Guardian, 5 March 2014. 8. R. Fuentes, ‘Anatomy of a Killer Fact: The World’s 85 Richest People Own as Much as the Poorest 3.5 Billion’, Oxfam Blog, 31 January 2014, at oxfamblogs.org. 9. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, ‘The Spirit Level Authors: Why Society Is More Unequal than Ever’, Observer, 9 March 2014. 10. L. Elliott, ‘Britain’s Five Richest Families Worth More than Poorest 20 Per Cent: Oxfam Report Reveals Scale of Inequality in UK as Charity Appeals to Chancellor over Tax’, Guardian, 17 March 2014. 11. K. Moreno, ‘The 67 People As Wealthy As The World’s Poorest 3.5 Billion’, Forbes Magazine, 25 March 2014, at forbes.com. 12.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

‘The Empirical Status of Empirically Supported Psychotherapies: assumptions, findings, and reporting in controlled clinical trials’. Psychological Bulletin, 2004, 130 (4), pp. 631–63. Wilkinson, R. The Impact of Inequality: how to make sick societies healthier. London: Routledge, 2005. Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone (revised edition). London: Penguin, 2010. World Health Organisation. Mental Health, Resilience, and Inequalities. Copenhagen: World Health Organisation, 2009. Young, M. ‘Down with Meritocracy’. The Guardian, 29 June 2001. ——. The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: an essay on education and equality.

The Joy of Tax
by Richard Murphy
Published 30 Sep 2015

The work of professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett has been fundamental in establishing a common understanding of this seemingly obvious truth and although there are some economists who have challenged the way in which they have evidentially supported their claims the fact is that the vast majority of observers think these objections nitpicking, at best. The claims made by Wilkinson and Pickett in their book The Spirit Level represent truths that are self-evident to most of us. But in that case the very real practical challenges in delivering equality, some of them already mentioned at the start of this section, have to be addressed if principles are to be turned into reality. Truth Truth should, if truth be told, be the foundation of all successful tax systems.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by William Poundstone
Published 4 Jan 2012

Your job is to deduce how the balloon does move and to explain it to the interviewer. One good response is to draw an analogy to a spirit level. For the not so handy, a spirit level is the little gizmo carpenters use to make sure a surface is horizontal. It contains a narrow glass tube of colored liquid with a bubble in it. Whenever the spirit level rests on a perfectly horizontal surface, the bubble hovers in the middle of the tube. When the surface isn’t so level, the bubble migrates to the higher end of the tube. The takeaway here is that the bubble is simply a “hole” in the liquid. When the surface isn’t level, gravity pulls the liquid toward the lower end.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009). Tomasello, Michael. Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009). Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Index The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader. accelerated spending access, ownership vs.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice
by Molly Scott Cato
Published 16 Dec 2008

Robertson (1998) Beyond the Dependency Culture: People, Power and Responsibility, London: Praeger. 5 D. Byrne (2001) ‘Class, tax and spending: Problems for the Left in postindustrial and postdemocratic politics – or why aren’t we taxing the fat cats till the pips squeak?’, Capital and Class, 75: 157–66. 6 Quotation and interpretation from R. G. Wilkinson and K. E. Pickett (2009, forthcoming) The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Harmondsworth, Penguin) 7 J. Robertson (2004) ‘Using common resources to solve common problems’, Feasta Review 2: Growth: The Celtic Cancer, Dublin: Feasta. 8 Wilkinson and Pickett Spirit Level. 9 M. S. Cato (2004) ‘The freedom to be frugal’, Feasta Review 2: Growth: The Celtic Cancer, Dublin: Feasta. 10 J.

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age
by Claudia Hammond
Published 5 Dec 2019

And with the development of larger societies and sophisticated economies, the need to cooperate, to trust each other and build relationships has become more important, not less. The notion that human beings have thrived through selfishness has been demolished by an endless line of anthropologists, sociologists and economists. In their recent book The Inner Level, a sequel to the hugely successful The Spirit Level, the renowned academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw extensively on evidence from these fields and from evolutionary neuroscience to come to the following conclusion: ‘Clearly, the human brain is, in a very real sense, a social organ. Its growth and development have been driven by the requirements of social life.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Donlan, “The Benefits of Failure,” Barrons, April 12, 2010. 160 inequality . . . means lower economic growth: Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). 160 lower levels of trust: Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 160 risen by 22%: Taylor Telford, “Income Inequality in America Is the Highest It’s Been Since Census Bureau Started Tracking It, Data Shows,” Washington Post, September 26, 2019. 160 nowhere has it spiked more: Alvaredo et al., “World Inequality Report 2018,” 6, 8. 160 captured less than 10%: “The Unequal States of America: Income Inequality in the United States,” Economic Policy Institute infographic, adapted from Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, “The New Gilded Age: Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County,” an Economic Policy Institute report published July 2018, https://www.epi.org/multimedia/unequal-states-of-america/#/United%20States. 160 from 22% in 1970 to 15% today: Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike I.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Take the London Underground train eastwards from Green Park on the Jubilee Line, and the average life expectancy for someone born in London drops by one year for every two stops. If you travel northbound from Hyde Park Corner to Holloway Road, a fifteen-minute ride on the Piccadilly Line, life expectancy decreases by eleven years.26 Books like The Spirit Level and The Killing Fields of Inequality argue that it is not just poverty that is the problem. Inequality in itself creates status stress and health issues. Therefore it is not enough to fight poverty; we must also fight great wealth. Angus Deaton, the Nobel laureate who has done so much to focus the world on deaths of despair in the United States, is very critical of such research: ‘[I]t is not true that income inequality itself is a major determinant of population health… it is low incomes that are important, not inequality, and there is no evidence that making the rich richer, however undesirable that may be on other grounds, is hazardous to the health of the poor or their children, provided that their own incomes are maintained.’27 In his book Deaths of Despair, written with Anne Case Deaton, he also points out that inequality is a ‘false trail’ in the debate: ‘those in despair are in despair because of what is happening to their own lives and to the communities in which they live, not because the top 1 per cent got richer’.28 Almost all examples that are popular in the debate can be explained by the fact that unequal countries have on average more poverty, and it is poverty – not income difference – that undermines health.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

1 March. www.resolutionfoundation.org/events/consumingcarbon Whyte, W.F. (1943) Street corner society: The social structure of an Italian slum. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Wilkie, D. (2015) Is the annual performance review dead? SHRM. 19 August. www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/ employee-relations/pages/performance-reviews-are-dead.aspx Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The spirit level: Why equality is better for everyone. London: Penguin. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2019) The inner level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s wellbeing. London: Penguin. Williams, Z. (2015) Get it together: Why we deserve better politics. London: Hutchinson.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

WILSON, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change IAN KERSHAW, The End: Hitler's Germany, 1944-45 T M DEVINE, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 CATHERINE HAKIM, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital DOUGLAS EDWARDS, I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 JOHN BRADSHAW, In Defence of Dogs CHRIS STRINGER, The Origin of Our Species LILA AZAM ZANGANEH, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness DAVID STEVENSON, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 EVELYN JUERS, House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles HENRY KISSINGER, On China MICHIO KAKU, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 DAVID ABULAFIA, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean JOHN GRIBBIN, The Reason Why: The Miracle of Life on Earth ANATOL LIEVEN, Pakistan: A Hard Country WILLIAM D COHAN, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World JOSHUA FOER, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything SIMON BARON-COHEN, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty MANNING MARABLE, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention DAVID DEUTSCH, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World DAVID EDGERTON, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War JOHN KASARDA AND GREG LINDSAY, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next DAVID GILMOUR, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples NIALL FERGUSON, Civilization: The West and the Rest TIM FLANNERY, Here on Earth: A New Beginning ROBERT BICKERS, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 MARK MALLOCH-BROWN, The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics KING ABDULLAH OF JORDAN, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril ELIZA GRISWOLD The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline between Christianity and Islam BRIAN GREENE, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos JOHN GRAY, The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death, PATRICK FRENCH, India: A Portrait LIZZIE COLLINGHAM, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food HOOMAN MAJD, The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge DAMBISA MOYO, How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices Ahead EVGENY MOROZOV, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World RON CHERNOW, Washington: A Life NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms HUGH THOMAS, The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V AMANDA FOREMAN, A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided NICHOLAS OSTLER, The Last Lingua Franca: English until the Return of Babel RICHARD MILES, Ancient Worlds: The Search for the Origins of Western Civilization NEIL MACGREGOR, A History of the World in 100 Objects STEVEN JOHNSON, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation DOMINIC SANDBROOK, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 JIM AL-KHALILI, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science HA-JOON CHANG, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism ROBIN FLEMING, Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 TARIQ RAMADAN, The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism JOYCE TYLDESLEY, The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt NICHOLAS PHILLIPSON, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life PAUL GREENBERG, Four Fish: A Journey from the Ocean to Your Plate CLAY SHIRKY, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane NIALL FERGUSON, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg SEAN MCMEEKIN: The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 RICHARD MCGREGOR, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers SPENCER WELLS, Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization FRANCIS PRYOR, The Making of the British Landscape: How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today RUTH HARRIS, The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France MICHAEL HUNT ed., A Vietnam War Reader: American and Vietnamese Perspectives PAUL COLLIER, The Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity With Nature NORMAN STONE, The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War SIMON PRICE AND PETER THONEMANN, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine HAMPTON SIDES, Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Chagall: Love and Exile RICHARD MILES, Carthage Must be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization TONY JUDT, Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents MICHAEL LEWIS, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine OLIVER BULLOUGH, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus PAUL DAVIES, The Eerie Silence: Searching for Ourselves in the Universe RICHARD WILKINSON, KATE PICKETT, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone TOM BINGHAM, The Rule of Law JOSEPH STIGLITZ, Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy JOHN LANCHESTER, Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay CHINUA ACHEBE, The Education of a British-Protected Child JARON LANIER, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto JOHN CASSIDY, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities ROBERT FERGUSON: The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

G. and Kivimäki, M. (2010), ‘Overtime Work and Incident Coronary Heart Disease: The Whitehall II Prospective Cohort Study’, European Heart Journal, 31: 1737–44. Wacquant, L. (2008), ‘Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the Punitive Upsurge’, Radical Philosophy Review, 11(1): 9–27. Weber, M. ([1922] 1968), Economy and Society, Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. E. (2009), The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane. Willetts, D. (2010), The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give It Back, London: Atlantic. Willsher, K. (2010), ‘Leaked Memo Shows France’s Expulsion of Roma Illegal, Say Critics’, Guardian, 14 September, p. 20.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

Johnson, 1798) Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Milanovic, Branko, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) Mokyr, Joel, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) _____, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Moretti, Enrico, The New Geography of Jobs (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) Murray, Charles, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group, 2012) Pickett, Kate, and Wilkinson, Richard, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Allen Lane, 2009) Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2001) Rifkin, Jeremy, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Rodrik, Dani, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Saadia, Manu, Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek (San Francisco, CA: Pipertext, 2016) Shirky, Clay, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (London: Allen Lane, 2010) Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community
by Karen T. Litfin
Published 16 Dec 2013

London: Earthscan, 2009. Korten, D. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2006. Leonard, Annie, www.storyofstuff.org, accessed June 3, 2013. New Economics Foundation, www.neweconomics.org, accessed June 3, 2013. Pickett, K. and Wilkinson, R., The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2011. PostCarbon Institute, www.postcarbon.org, accessed June 3, 2013. Robin, Vicki, et al. Your Money or Your Life. New York: Penguin, 2008. Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs, 1973. www.smallisbeautiful.org, accessed June 3, 2013.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

International comparisons of inequality are found in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries (OECD Publishing, October 2008), pp. 77-92. Data on the impact of income inequality on health and segregation are drawn from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); and Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” NBER Working Paper, July 2006. 125-127 The Vanishing Middle: The discussion of the impact of education on income growth draws from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); David Autor and David Dorn, “Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States,” NBER working paper, November 2008; Congressional Budget Office, “Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007,” October 2009; Francine Blau, Marianne Ferber, and Anne Winkler, The Economics of Women, Men and Work, 5th edition (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t05.htm, accessed 08/08/2010); Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 2008 (www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf, accessed 08/09/2010); Bureau of Labor Statistics, “100 Years of U.S.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

Tsangarides, Redistribution, Inequality and Growth, IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN 14/02, 2014, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016). For a wider discussion on the relationship between economic performance, well-being and inequality, see R. G. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London, Allen Lane, 2009. 58 R. Riley and C. Rosazza Bondibene, Raising the Standard: Minimum Wages and Firm Productivity, NIESR Discussion Paper 449, National Institute for Economic and Social Research, 2015, http://www.niesr.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Minimum%20wages%20and%20firm%20productivity%20NIESR%20DP%20449.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016). 59 N.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

crime is caused by 5 percent of the population: Örjan Falk, Märta Wallinius and Sebastian Lundström, “The 1% of the Population Accountable for 63% of All Violent Crime Convictions,” Social Psychiatry Psychiatric Epidemiology 49, no. 4 (2014): 559–71. diminish the well-being of an entire society: Richard Wilkinson and Katie Pickett, The Inner Level (London: Allen Lane, 2018), xxi. Wilkinson and Pickett also explored these issues in their previous book, The Spirit Level. 64 percent less likely to attempt suicide: Chloe Reichel, “Suicide Prevention: Research on Successful Interventions,” Journalist’s Resource, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019. 4 percent of pediatricians screen for ACEs: Vanessa Sacks and David Murphey, “The Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences, Nationally, by State, and by Race or Ethnicity,” Child Trends, February 20, 2018.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

“Denver’s International Airport: A Case Study in Large Scale Infrastructure Development, Part 2.” Municipal Finance Journal 13, no. 3 (1992): 62–79. Weisman, Steven R., ed. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Wood, Robert Coldwell. 1400 Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metropolitan Region. Harvard University Press, 1961. Zeng, S. X., X. M. Xie, and C. M. Tam. “Relationship between Cooperation Networks and Innovation Performance of SMEs.”

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Add in the unregistered millions, and a large fraction of British people are forever ‘don’t know’ – and probably also ‘don’t much care’. Yet political passivity and even poll reports of general contentment do not mean everything is well; they certainly do not mean people are fulfilled. Published towards the end of Labour’s reign, The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett amassed international evidence to show the close association between people’s sense of well-being and the objective facts of income distribution; here might even have been a governing proposition. In spite of the evidence, Labour were not sure what they believed or, more debilitating still, whether what they believed was politically doable if it meant challenging power, ownership and the deep complacency of middle England.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Published 17 Mar 2020

The same is almost certainly true of the developing country surveys used by the World Bank, so the truth of the comparison remains unresolved. The ethnographic work by Edin and Shaefer, Desmond, and, on a smaller scale, Alston, documents the grotesque poverty that exists in the US. 4. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009, The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Bloomsbury. See also the wide range of claims at the Equality Trust’s website, https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/. 5. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015, “Table A-4: Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment,” Data Retrieval: Labor Force Statistics (CPS), https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab4.htm. 6.

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer
by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel
Published 3 Jan 2017

Conclusion: Entwined: Our Cellular Legacy 1. Pickett, K. E., and R. G. Wilkinson, “Inequality: An Underacknowledged Source of Mental Illness and Distress,” British Journal of Psychiatry: The Journal of Mental Science 197, no. 6 (December 2010): 426–28, doi:10.1192/bjp.bp.109.072066. 2. Ibid; and Wilkerson, R. G., and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 3. Stone, C., D. Trisi, A. Sherman, and B. Debot, “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, updated October 26, 2015, http://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. 4.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Pinker also places too much emphasis on the admittedly weak links between inequality and happiness and well-being (with all the caveats that were described in Chapter Four), while discounting the very strong links found within a plethora of quantifiable social ills such as mental illness, diseases of despair, crime, incarceration rates, teen pregnancies, and so on. He implies that these phenomena, as analyzed in works such as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, constitute “the left’s new theory of everything” yet makes no effort to factually debunk the plethora of statistical claims that this book makes.44 If anything, responsible policymakers should welcome these linkages. For fiscally-strapped, post-austerity governments, it is far more efficient to concentrate on addressing one socio-economic indicator (inequality) than a dozen others in isolation.

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence
by Rachel Sherman
Published 21 Aug 2017

Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Whillans, Ashley V., Nathan J. Wispinski, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. 2016. “Seeing Wealth as a Responsibility Improves Attitudes towards Taxation.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 127: 146–154. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press. Willis, Paul. 1979. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Wright, Erik Olin (ed.). 2005. Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
by Angus Deaton
Published 15 Mar 2013

Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, 2000, “Genes, culture, democracy and happiness,” in Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, eds., Culture and subjective well-being, MIT Press, 165–83; Richard Layard, 2005, Happiness: Lessons from a new science, Penguin; and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009, The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Bloomsbury. CHAPTER ONE: THE WELLBEING OF THE WORLD 1. For a related calculation, see James Vaupel and John M. Owen, 1986, “Anna’s life expectancy,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 5(2): 383–89. 2. Robert C. Allen, Tommy E. Murphy, and Eric B.

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 11 Apr 2011

“It is social and human capital, as well as the overall policy regime that matter.”32 These, of course, need tax dollars. Second, tax isn’t only about revenue, the first of four “Rs” of taxation. The second “R” is redistribution, notably tackling inequality. This is what democratic societies always demand, and as the painstakingly researched book The Spirit Level attests, it is inequality, rather than absolute levels of poverty and wealth, that determines how societies fare on almost every single indicator of well-being, from life expectancy to obesity to delinquency to depression or teenage pregnancy. The third “R” is representation—rulers must bargain with citizens in order to extract taxes from them—and this leads to accountability and representation.

The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison
Published 28 Jan 2019

Whitely, W., Dougherty, T.W. and Dreher, G.F. (1991) ‘Relationship of career mentoring and socioeconomic origin to managers’ and professionals’ early career progress’, Academy of Management Journal, 34(2), 331-50 (https://doi. org/10.5465/256445). 356 References Notes Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2018) The inner level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s wellbeing, London: Penguin UK. Williams, C.L. (1992) ‘The glass escalator: Hidden advantages for men in the “female” professions’, Social Problems, 39(3), 253-67 (https://doi.org/10.2307/3096961).

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

Foroohar, Makers and Takers (New York: Crown, 2016), p. 7. 4. H. P. Minsky, ‘Finance and stability: The limits of capitalism', Levy Economics Institute Working Paper no. 93 (1993). 5. F. Grigoli and A. Robles, ‘Inequality overhang', IMF Working Paper 17/76, 28 March 2017; R. Wilkinson and H. Pickett, The Spirit Level (London: Penguin, 2009). 6. W. Churchill, ‘WSC to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 22 February 1925', Churchill College, Cambridge, CHAR 18/12A-B. 7. Bank of England database, ‘Three centuries of macroeconomic data': http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/onebank/threecenturie 8. Data in this sentence from House of Commons Library reports -Standard Note SN/EP/06193 (Gloria Tyler, 25.2.15) and Briefing Paper 01942 (Chris Rhodes, 6.8.15).

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

Cromie, “Marriage Lowers Testosterone,” Harvard Gazette, August 22, 2002, https://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/08/marriage-lowers-testosterone/. 59 Rick Sarre, Andrew Day, Ben Livings, and Catia Malvaso, “Men Are More Likely to Commit Violent Crimes: Why Is This So and How Do We Change It?” The Conversation, March 25, 2021, https://www.theconversation.com/men-are-more-likely-to-commit-violent-crimes-why-is-this-so-and-how-do-we-change-it-157331. 60 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Society Stronger, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, Kindle Edition, 2010), 205. 61 Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman, and Norman Loayza. “Inequality and Violent Crime.” The Journal of Law and Economics 45, no. 1 (2002): 1–39. 62 https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-stark-relationship-between-income-inequality-and-crime. 63 B.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Oxford University Press, 2001. Philippon, Thomas, and Ariell Reshef. “Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Finance Industry: 1909–2006.” Working paper. March 2011. Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway, 2002. Pickett, Kate, and Richard Wilkinson. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2009. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 96:2 (May 2006). pp. 200–205. ———. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.”

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

In a sea of cynicism, this book is the sturdy, unsinkable lifeboat the world needs’ Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive ‘This is a wonderful and uplifting book. I not only want all my friends and relations to read it, but everyone else as well. It is an essential part of the campaign for a better world’ Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level ‘A fantastic read … Good fun, fresh and a page turner’ James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life ‘This stunning book will change how you see the world and your fellow humans. It is mind-expanding and, more importantly, heart-expanding. We have never needed this message more than now’ Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections ‘Rutger Bregman’s extraordinary new book is a revelation’ Susan Cain, author of Quiet ‘Rutger Bregman is one of my favourite thinkers.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

It was, he stated, ‘plain wrong to think that we can build a stronger society when we are relaxed about bankers being paid 200 times that of their cleaners’1 and he denounced ‘brutish US-style capitalism’. In all this, Ed Miliband had been inspired by a profoundly influential book by the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, which produced evidence to show that societies with less inequality have fewer social problems, from crime to physical and mental health to child wellbeing. In his campaign, Miliband attracted the decisive support of major trade unions – notably the most politically powerful, Unite – on the left of the party, a factor which would fuel bitterness on the Blairite Labour right.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

exaggerate the risk John Mueller (2006), Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, Free Press. tolerance for risk Meir Statman (2010), “The Cultures of Risk Tolerance,” Social Sciences Research Network Behavioral & Experimental Finance eJournal, 1–23. income inequality Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2011), The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press. false confessions Saul M. Kassin, “False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17: 249–53. Jennifer T. Perillo and Saul M. Kassin (2011), “Inside Interrogation: The Lie, The Bluff, and False Confessions,” Law & Human Behavior, 35:327–37.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18:1947–58. Wheatley, T., and J. Haidt. 2005. “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe.” Psychological Science 16:780–84. Wilkinson, G. S. 1984. “Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat.” Nature 308:181–84. Wilkinson, R., and K. Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury. Williams, B. 1967. “Rationalism.” In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards, 7–8:69–75. New York: Macmillan. Williams, G. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

City: Rediscovering the Center. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. ———. The Exploding Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage, 2011. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011. Zukin, Sharon. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989 ———. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
by Jared Diamond
Published 6 May 2019

Confessions of an Eco-sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff. (Beacon Press, Boston, 2008). William Perry. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2015). Laurence Smith. The World in 2050: Four Forces Facing Civilization’s Northern Future. (Dutton Penguin Group, New York, 2010). Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. (Allen Lane, London, 2009). EPILOGUE: LESSONS, QUESTIONS, AND OUTLOOK Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Hero in History. (James Fraser, London, 1841). Jared Diamond and James Robinson, eds. Natural Experiments of History.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

“Some Comments on Multiple Discovery in Mathematics.” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics 7, no. 1: 172–188. Wigner, Eugene. 1960. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. London: Bloomsbury. Wilson, David Sloan. 1975. “A Theory of Group Selection.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 72, no. 1: 143–146. Wolfram, Stephen. 2001. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media. Wright, Robert. 2001.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

New York: Basic Books, 1989. Warren, Elizabeth, and Amelia Warren Tyagi. The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke. New York: Basic Books 2003. Wicker, Tom. One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1991. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009. Woodward, Bob. Obama’s Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Young, Andrew. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———, and Kabir Sehdal.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

Of course, selling the TV (or one of these other appliances) would not go far to provide food, medical care, housing, or access to good schools. There is another important area, exploring the relationship between consumption and happiness, going back at least to Veblen’s (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class, which introduced the concept of “conspicuous consumption.” More recently, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), argue that more equality can improve happiness through reducing “social evaluation anxieties” and associated stresses. 105. See U.S. Census, “The Research Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2010,” November 2011. 106.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 12 Oct 2020

Across the whole period, the two world wars are associated with massive spikes, but our analysis considers those spikes only insofar as they outlast the war. 19 Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1951). 20 William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn & Co, 1911), 12–13. 21 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 267–72. 22 See, for example, Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (New York: Allen Lane, 2009); Eric M. Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,” American Politics Research 33, no. 6 (2005): 868–894, doi:10.1177/1532673X04271903; and Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (New York: Viking, 2017). 23 David Morris Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 24 See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and John L.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

Basic Income: An Anthology of ConÂ�temporary Research. New York: Wiley-Â�Blackwell. Widerstrom, Klaus. 2010. “Erich Fromm and His Proposal for a Basic Income.” Indybay, July 6. http://Â�w ww╉.Â�indybay╉.Â�org╉/Â�newsitems╉/Â�2010╉/Â�07╉/Â�06╉/Â�18652754╉.Â�php. Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal SocieÂ�ties Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Willmore, Larry. 2007. Universal Pensions for Developing Countries. World Development 35(1): 24–51. Withorn, Ann. 1993/2013. “Is One Man’s Ceiling Another Â�Woman’s Floor?” In Karl Widerquist et al., eds., Basic Income: An Anthology of ConÂ�temporary Research, 145–148.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

“Theology and the Rise of Political Economy in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Paul Oslington, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Economics, pp. 94–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waterman, Anthony M. C. 2014b. “Inequality and Social Evil: Wilkinson and Pickett on The Spirit Level.” Faith and Economics 63 (Spring): 38–49. Watson, Andrew M. 1983. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weatherford, Jack. 2004.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

Piketty focuses on capital’s share of income (such as dividends and capital gains) and argues that we are seeing a return to a widening gulf between capital and labour that scarred the nineteenth century. But the inequality that has come since the 1970s is not primarily between capital’s and labour’s share of income, it is within labour between CEOs on high salaries and low-earning manual and clerical labour. 95. Richard G. Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London, rev. edn, 2009). OECD, ‘Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising’ (OECD: 2011). It is a matter of debate whether ‘stress’ and ‘depression’ have actually increased since the 1950s or whether rising numbers reflect a rise in diagnostic tests and categories.