Picture by Julia Manzerova
Read a response from the authors of The Spirit Level to the criticisms made in this articleSpeaking on the Today programme recently to promote his Labour leadership bid, Ed Miliband said: “If you look round the world—at the countries that are healthier, happier, more secure—they are the more equal countries.” He was making explicit reference to Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Penguin), a book that has been hugely influential on leftist politicians and activists since it was published in 2009. In a recent lecture entitled “In praise of equality,” Roy Hattersley said that “anybody who’s not read The Spirit Level ought not to be wasting their time listening to me this afternoon, but should be rushing out to buy a copy.” Its influence has even extended into parts of the right. David Willetts, now minister for universities and science, wrote (Prospect, May 2009) that Wilkinson was one of the authors who had “persuaded me that inequality matters.”
Yet there is growing evidence that the book’s claims about the link between a range of social maladies and the level of inequality in a society are simply untrue.
One of the first to sound the alarm was LSE professor of social policy Julian Le Grand. Reviewing the book for Prospect last May, he set out how the authors could be ascribing problems to inequality that are really the result of cultural differences between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian societies, or of out-and-out poverty. Now, new research suggests that the problem with the book could run deeper and that some of the statistics are unreliable.
A Swedish report by three economists—Nima Sanandaji, Arvid Malm and Tino Sanandaji—translated into English and published by the Taxpayers’ Alliance in July, focuses on the claimed link between health and equality. First, it finds that there is no statistically significant correlation between life expectancy and equality. This is in line with the existing academic literature. Research for the World Health Organisation, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in May 2001, concluded that there is “no direct link from income inequality to ill-health; individuals are no more likely to die [earlier] if they live in more unequal places.”
Second, it points out that the authors of The Spirit Level have come up with their own index of health and social outcomes, which allows them to choose a set of numbers that suit their case. But when you look at a range of health outcomes—from the prevalence of mental illness to heart attack deaths—there is no significant correlation. In a report for Policy Exchange released on 8th July, Peter Saunders, professor emeritus of sociology at Sussex University, created a “social misery index” of variables like the suicide rate, racist bigotry and alcohol consumption to show how The Spirit Level’s approach can produce any result researchers go looking for. His work suggested more equal societies in fact fared much worse if you looked at his set of variables instead of those cherry-picked for The Spirit Level.
Indeed, in order to substantiate a claim that more equal societies are more innovative, Wilkinson and Pickett have even argued that the US—home to Silicon Valley and most of the world’s top research universities—is about as innovative as Portugal. World Intellectual Property Organisation figures confirm this is nonsense.
Meanwhile Christopher Snowdon’s new book, The Spirit Level Delusion (Democracy Institute) takes Wilkinson and Pickett’s claims apart in areas ranging from crime to educational achievement. Snowdon, a public health researcher, shows how, if you don’t cherry-pick countries in the way The Spirit Level does, you can come up with a better correlation between educational achievement and the first letter of a country’s name than you can between educational achievement and equality. Distance from the north pole is an even more powerful predictor.
While actual, absolute poverty clearly has huge consequences, income inequality is a much more complex phenomenon than the all-purpose bogeyman The Spirit Level paints it as. Inequality can provide an incentive for people to learn new skills and move to better careers. There can certainly be problems if people are prevented from responding to that incentive by a lack of decent education and training, or social dysfunctions like family breakdown. However the answer then is not to try and treat the symptom (inequality) but the cause, and reform education and benefit systems that trap people in poverty.
The crucial question now is how all those enthusiastic evangelists for The Spirit Level will respond as many of its empirical claims fall apart like an ageing Trabant. Will they accept that the book is deeply flawed, and fall back on the older debate over whether inequality is simply unjust? Or will they ignore the evidence and go on citing it regardless?
Once ideas like the supposed link between social health and equality are out there among politicians and commentators, they can become extremely hard to dislodge. Another example is the idea that we live in a closed-shop society in which people’s chances are fixed by the class into which they are born. Peter Saunders has also recently written a devastating book, Social Mobility Myths, reprising his earlier work which showed this isn’t the case; people who are talented and committed generally do get ahead in Britain.
Last year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported focus-group evidence that there was a “widespread belief in the availability of opportunity.” Its report, however, argued that “providing more information about the barriers to opportunity” would be a good way of “building public support for tackling economic inequality.” The logic of such a conclusion is this: convincing people that the talented and hardworking can’t get ahead—which they can—is a good way of building support for a fight against inequality, a cause justified on the basis of dodgy statistics and non-existent correlations. Someone needs to tell the British people they’re right, and the liberal elite that they’re wrong.
