The effects of unequal societies on rich and poor
Transcript of Dr Kate Pickett discussing her book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
I think for a long time now politicians have been frightened of discussing inequality. It’s been alright to talk about poverty and helping the poor, it’s not been alright to talk about inequality. When New Labour came in Peter Mandelson famously said that they were very relaxed about people becoming very rich.
Now the terms of that debate are changing with the economic crisis and suddenly it is actually alright to talk again about runaway incomes at the top, the damage they might be able to do. So in a way it’s an opportune moment for us to be publishing this book.
What we’re trying to do is demonstrate with really hard evidence the effects so that people can’t just believe in inequality’s effects any more they can see the evidence, it no longer becomes a matter of your political ideology or your faith or just what you think, we are actually putting some evidence on the table for people to discuss. And if anything is going to change then there has to be the political will to make that change and we hope that this will bring inequality back into the political agenda, make it a topic that people can discuss.
One of the really interesting things we found is that if people discuss inequality and values and what’s going on in society, they feel that our societies are sort of missing something, that they are broken in a sense, that modern life is, you know, difficult and quality of life is poor and there’s lots of problems they worry about. But they sort of think they’re doing that on their own and that everybody else is sort of out for themselves and they’re the ones, you know, worried. And if they’re put in a room with other people and they discover that other people share those values they feel very optimistic and enthusiastic for change. So I think among the public there’s real potential for support for policies to reduce inequality. What we’ve been lacking is the political will to sort of mobilise that support. So we hope that by publishing this book we might encourage more debate.
It’s clear that all the problems that we’re looking at, health problems, social problems like teenage births, drug use, mental health, crime, all of those problems happen most often in the poorest areas of our society and they happen most frequently among the poorest people so that has been an important focus and it’s very important to keep that focus, in a way. But that has meant less attention has been paid to the effects of social factors on people higher up in the social hierarchy and I think that one of the most important contributions we make in the book is showing how far up the scale of society these problems go and how everybody is affected by greater inequality.
Basically, we are all being affected by the same thing and that’s our relative position, our social position relative to other people. Obviously the weight of society above you is greater at the bottom so it’s worse to have a relative social position that’s even lower down but all the way up there is always somebody above, somebody below and the sort of the competition, the status competition that induces runs all the way through society.
Our prescription for society is definitely that equality matters and that greater equality brings benefits across a whole range of health and social problems and it brings those benefits to everybody. What we’re not prescribing is a particular way of achieving that equality and that’s because we see that it doesn’t matter how a society achieves a certain level of equality or inequality, what matters is the level it gets to. So there are obviously lots of different policies, lots of different things you can do, to achieve that.
One of the contrasts that we draw attention to in the book, for instance, is the difference between Sweden and Japan, which are both very equal countries. But Sweden is more equal because it does more redistribution, has higher taxes and redistributes more wealth. Japan does it by having narrower income differences in the first place. And the same within US states. There are US states that are equally equal, like Vermont and New Hampshire but one has a strong welfare provision and the other doesn’t.
So because it doesn’t seem to matter how you get there, just that you get there at all, we are not being prescriptive about any particular policies.
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