More unequal rich societies are claimed to have worse outcomes on a wide range of health and social problems, for rich and poor alike.
Wilkinson and Pickett argued it in The Spirit Level (2009), plotting income inequality against indices of life expectancy, mental illness, obesity, imprisonment, teenage births and trust across about two dozen rich countries and the American states. More unequal places did worse on most of them, and the authors proposed that inequality raises status anxiety.
In practice
- A government weighing a tax change finds the book's correlations cited on both sides of the argument.
- A city compares its crime and health statistics with a more equal neighbour and debates how much of the difference inequality explains.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation, the authors', is psychosocial: steeper hierarchies raise status anxiety and erode trust. Others are that inequality tracks differences in history, institutions and population that also affect the outcomes.
- In its favour
- Drew wide attention to correlations between inequality and social outcomes, and some of them, notably with trust and imprisonment, appear across several datasets.
- Against it
- Critics including Snowdon and Saunders argued in 2010 that the results depend on which countries are included and that several correlations weaken or vanish with other samples or controls. Correlations across countries cannot show that inequality causes the outcomes.
- Standing
- Contested on method as well as interpretation. Compare status syndrome, the individual-level gradient it scales up.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change