Richard Wilkinson

Kate Pickett

A groundbreaking investigation of how inequality infects our minds and gets under our skin Why are people more relaxed and at ease with each other in some countries than others? Why do we worry so much about what others think of us and often feel social life is a stressful performance? Why is mental illness three times as common in the USA as in Germany? Why is the American dream more of a reality in Denmark than the USA? What makes child well-being so much worse in some countries than others? As The Inner Level demonstrates, the answer to all these is inequality. In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put inequality at the center of public debate by showing conclusively that less equal societies fare worse than more equal ones across everything from education to life expectancy. The Inner Level now explains how inequality affects us individually, altering how we think, feel and behave. It sets out the overwhelming evidence that material inequities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority. A deep well of data and analysis is drawn upon to empirically show, for example, that low social status leads to elevated levels of stress hormones, and how rates of anxiety, depression and addictions are intimately related to the inequality which makes that status paramount. Wilkinson and Pickett describe how these responses to hierarchies evolved, and why the impacts of inequality on us are so severe. In doing so, they challenge the conception that humans are inescapably competitive and self-interested. They undermine, too, the idea that inequality is the product of "natural" differences in individual ability. This book draws together many of the most urgent problems facing societies today, but it is not just an index of our ills. It demonstrates that societies based on fundamental equalities, sharing and reciprocity generate much higher levels of well-being, and lays out the path towards them.

How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-Being

The Inner Level

Richard G. Wilkinson

Everyone knows that the poor in rich societies are more likely to have shorter, less healthy, lives, to do less well at school and to end up on the wrong side of the law. But The Spirit Level goes further than this, to demonstrate for the first time that a whole range of social problems - from poor health to educational failure, from mental illness to obesity, from drug addition to violence, from teenage births to the weakening of community life - share one overwhelming feature: they are all several times more common in more unequal societies. The evidence that bigger income differences create more problems is conclusive. And rather than affecting just the poor, inequality reduces the quality of life for everyone in less equal. This groundbreaking work book, based on 30 years research by two of the UK's leading social epidemiologists, provides a powerful and fascinating new perspective on the social failings of rich societies. In light of their findings government policy will need serious rethinking. Philip Birch, Assistant Editor, on The Spirit Level: 'This is one of the most interesting and important books I have ever read. It is driven by a simple idea: that inequality is the root cause of all societies' ills. It doesn't matter if the average level of income is very low or very high, it is the gap between rich and poor that is important. It is why, when polled, more Indonesians, Vietnamese, Finnish and Japanese will claim to be more happy than Brits and Americans. And it isn't just the poorest in the most unequal societies that suffer but the richest too. In London on the one hand we hear regularly about teenagers from poorer communities stabbing each other, but on the other more and more apparently successful, university educated, richer young people suffer from anxiety, depression and are open to casual drug use than ever before. Violence, crime, low educational achievement, poor health; and status anxiety and the misery of having too much money and too much choice go hand in hand, because of inequality. This is not necessarily a new idea but it is proved here for the first time. The graphs are quite remarkable.'

Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

The Spirit Level

Eva Decker

5 stars for content, but 4 for presentation. The results are thorough, but the writing is dry—more engaging than a research paper, but I wouldn't consider it enjoyable past a mental exercise. Also, graphs are often labelled extremely vaguely ("high" vs "low", "more" vs "less", etc). I understand this was done in the name of simplicity, to show the correlation between graphs and between concepts, but really? I think most of us can read and interpret a numbered graph. As it stands, the reader has no idea whether a graph represents 5% of the scale of something or 100%.

Nonetheless, the research is intriguing, and The Spirit Level is a solid factual resource to back up assumptions that most of us have always shared: we are most happy and healthy when we live as equals with our peers.

The Inner Level How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-Being

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