The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine.
The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is.
US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan
Part of the problem, I think, is that the argument is not as straightforward as its authors would like. Despite their obvious sense of conviction, and maybe even because of it, they fudge the central issue at crucial moments, whereas at others, perhaps in order to compensate, they overstate their case, which only makes things worse.
Is the basic claim here that in more equal societies almost everyone does better, or is it simply that everyone does better on average? Most of the time, Wilkinson and Pickett want to insist that it’s the first. ‘Reducing inequality,’ they argue, ‘is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us.’ They also contend that inequality takes its toll on almost everyone because of the increased stress of living in a society where rewards are unequally distributed, leading to constant worries about our place in the pecking order, even if we are quite high up it. So that’s why, in unequal societies, even many of the rich are getting fatter and dying younger than they might otherwise.
However, most of the data they rely on doesn’t exactly say this. Instead, the graphs rank different countries’ performance according to life expectancy rates, incarceration rates, obesity rates, etc, which are simply average measures. What these graphs tell us is that overall there is a better chance of getting fat or dying young if you live in an unequal society.
Take rates of imprisonment. Here the US has the worst record of any rich country by far (the graph showing rates of imprisonment per 100,000 of population is the only one that has to be recorded on a log scale, because otherwise the US would be off the chart, even off the page). But, as Wilkinson and Pickett admit, ‘there is a strong social gradient in imprisonment, with people of lower class, income and education much more likely to be sent to prison than people higher up the social scale.’ The US imprisons great swathes of its poor, black population. It doesn’t follow from this that almost everyone is worse off than they would be under a more equal system. To show that, we would need to know that even members of the white middle class are much more likely to be jailed in the US than they are in, say, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland (other countries on the graph). Now it is almost certainly true that white middle-class Americans are more likely to be jailed than they would be elsewhere, simply because a system that is so hooked on incarceration at the bottom end of the scale is bound to suffer from a kind of ‘trickle-up’ effect. From a European perspective, it is still shocking to see the spectacular prison terms sometimes handed down to those Wall Street miscreants unlucky enough to find themselves before the courts. But if there are figures to demonstrate that almost everyone is worse off in the US than elsewhere, Wilkinson and Pickett don’t provide them, even though this is what they need to support the case they want to make.