The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 1608193411

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


It is a well-established fact that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. The Spirit Level, based on thirty years of research, takes this truth a step further. One common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Further, more unequal societies are bad for everyone within them-the rich and middle class as well as the poor.

The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level exposes stark differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America's fifty states. Almost every modern social problem-poor health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness-is more likely to occur in a less-equal society.

Renowned researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett lay bare the contradictions between material success and social failure in the developed world. But they do not merely tell us what's wrong. They offer a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society.

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The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That at the top are people with the highest status, and at the bottom people with the lowest status, and then ask them to place an ‘X’ on the ladder to mark their own standing. It has been shown that this measure of subjective social status is linked to an unhealthy pattern of fat distribution139 and to obesity140 – in other words, obesity was more strongly related to people’s subjective sense of their status than to their actual education or income. If we can observe that changes in societal.

Three sisters. The father of the 12-year-old girl’s baby left her shortly after his son was born. The boy named by the middle sister as the father of her little girl denied having sex with her and demanded a paternity test. And the 38-year-old father of the oldest sister’s baby already had at least four other children. Sociologists Graham and McDermott discuss what has been learned from studies where researchers talk at length to young women about their experiences. What they show is that these.

Unintended consequence of the changes in income distribution. Rather than challenging the causal role of inequality in increasing health and social problems, if governments understood the consequences of widening income differences they would be keener to prevent them. Economists have never suggested that poor health and social problems were the real determinants of income inequality. Instead they have concentrated on the contributions of things like taxes and benefits, international.

The poorest 20 per cent. At the bottom of the chart are countries in which these differences are at least twice as big, including two in which the richest 20 per cent get about nine times as much as the poorest. Among the most unequal are Singapore, USA, Portugal and the United Kingdom. (The figures are for household income, after taxes and benefits, adjusted for the number of people in each household.) Figure 2.1 How much richer are the richest 20 per cent than the poorest 20 per cent in.

Seems likely that they might agree that the chief executive of the company they work for should be paid a salary several times as big as their own – maybe three, or perhaps even ten, times as big. But it is unlikely that they would say several hundred times as big. Indeed, such huge differentials can probably only be maintained by denying any measure of economic democracy. As long as the employee-owned sector remains only a small part of the whole economy, it cannot use very different pay scales.

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