Review: The Spirit Level

By Alan Go

Confirmation bias, seeking out evidence that supports our pre-existing beliefs, is among the most pervasive of our cognitive flaws, and something worth being on constant guard for. Whilst I may find life comfortable in the liberal, secularist space of ideas I have carved out for myself, I still try to recognise the danger of reading piece after piece that I agree with.

For these reasons, I attempted to restrain my enthusiasm after finding a book subtitled Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. I have written before about my fondness for a system of Rawlsian egalitarianism, and if I had wanted a book that provided empirical support for such principles, I doubt it would have looked too different. It can’t be too often that philosophical theories end up being tested against the evidence, so I was wary of any thesis that managed to show that one of my favourite thinkers has turned out to be exactly right. It all seemed slightly too fortuitous for my liking, but I was optimistic and hopeful.


Levels of trust, drug abuse, mental health, life expectancy, mental illness, obesity, education, teenage births, violence and prison populations; these are all things that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett attempt to show are at least partly driven by higher levels of inequality. That this one factor can have a significant influence on so many diverse areas of life, and that the relationship is a causal one, is a remarkable and bold claim. If it can be convincingly shown to be true, then the policy implications are obvious and profound.

The Spirit Level is a book about data, and as such, it lives or dies by its evidence. It represents the synthesis of many years of research on different aspects of society by a large group of researchers, and tries to bring everything together into one coherent picture. As you may already have guessed, there will be a large proportion of people to whom the thesis of the book is unpalatable. The authors are aware that their first target will be the empirical evidence itself, and know that if they cannot persuade people that the graphs they present are reliable, and that the data has not been cherry-picked, they will be unable to get very far.

Randomised trials on the scale of entire nations are impossible, so it is instead up to the natural experiments of history to do the work. By their very nature, these types of observational studies leave many variables uncontrolled, which provides critics with ample opportunity to nitpick at the details. In order to overcome this hurdle, the authors always use two data sets to demonstrate each relationship. The first is a comparison of different countries, but this is backed up with data from each of the states in the US. If every correlation is sufficiently strong, and shown to hold for both sets of data, for every variable, it should become impossible to deny the connection.

The need to provide perfect transparency in their methodology means that every new metric needs to be carefully explained, as do the absence of any data points. Whilst it is useful to be able to see the reasoning behind all the choices for their data, it can result in large sections feeling like extended meta-analyses, written in flat prose, as the authors quickly run by and explain each graph.

Every single one of the relationships examined is interesting and worthy of further comment. While some connections are stronger than others, it is their cumulative effect that convinces most. One statistic that is especially striking, due to the fact that it demonstrates how inequality can affect the psyche of an entire country as well as its individuals, is that even spending on foreign aid is higher among the more equal countries.

Another important consequence of inequality is its effect on levels of social mobility. Particularly in America, people seem to find inequality easier to swallow as long as the poorest people can still rise to the top if they work hard enough. But as is noted in the book, and more recently by Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, in what he called the Great Gatsby Curve (even though it’s a straight line), there is a strong correlation between inequality and the link between your parent’s and your own income. The authors speculate that this is probably due to some sort of feedback loop, where inequality feeds on class divisions, and increases prejudice, making it harder to climb up the social ladder. As Wilkinson quipped in his TED talk, 'If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.'

As any epidemiologist will be able to tell you, correlation does not equal causation. Showing a link is a very different matter from proving that one variable is dependent on the other, or that some third factor isn’t causing them both. Providing compelling evidence of causality is the most difficult task for the authors, but several strong lines of argument support their view.

One is that countries can be very different in many important aspects, but still conform to the trends related to inequality. At the most equal end of the scale lie the similar Scandinavian nations, but that group is joined by Japan, where similarities in culture are much harder to find. Perhaps the most important difference here is that Japan has much lower levels of taxation. Its equality is due to greater parity in pre-tax incomes, while the Nordic governments play a more active role in wealth redistribution. It seems that it doesn’t matter how you arrive there, just that you do at all. Similarly at the other end of the scale, America and the UK do not appear to have much in common with Portugal.

There is also a lack of plausible mechanisms to explain how any of the negative social outcomes can lead to increases in inequality, while it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to imagine how inequality can have adverse effects on human psychology. People care deeply how they are perceived by others, and if they see people around them with much higher social statuses, then this is likely to lead to heightened anxiety and stress.

The authors also try to pinpoint more specific reasons for how inequality can lead to each negative effect. In doing this, they often turn to stories of individuals, presumably aware that good narratives are easier to sell than soulless pages of statistics. However, these parts of the book tend not to work well. Reading about tabloid coverage of obese children, or a family with three teenage mothers, seem largely pointless. These are just anecdotes, and it is hard to take them seriously.

A chapter towards the end on evolutionary psychology which spends time on lab experiments on economic games, as well as talking about chimps and bonobos, seems so far removed from the data it is trying to explain that it is hard to know what to make of it all, and ends up bordering on irrelevancy.

It is also worth noting which explanations are not behind the relationships. The problem is not due a higher number of poor people in unequal societies. Everybody in the population, at all levels of income, is affected by the problems, and although it is the poorest people who would benefit most from rising equality, it is likely that even those further up the social ladder would see improvements as well.

What all of this points to is the possibility that tackling inequality can have hugely positive impacts for all societies. The fact that this one silver bullet issue exists seems almost too good to be true. Instead of spending large amounts of money and effort to solve specific problems by growing the economy, which runs out of positive effects past a certain baseline level, building prisons, or investing more in healthcare, which remarkably does not correlate with life expectancy, government could focus on the larger umbrella problem of inequality, and hopefully enjoy the wide range of benefits and savings in other areas which that would bring.

For example, if we wish to do something about global warming, cut back on carbon emissions and make the transition to a sustainable economy, it is likely that this procedure will be near impossible when there is a large class of people who aspire to live at the level of those higher up on the social scale. The author’s idea of introducing carbon ‘rations’ to everybody may not be the most helpful suggestion, but when they quote Henry Wallich, a former governor of the Federal Reserve, saying, ‘Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth, there is hope, and that makes large income differences tolerable,’ you feel they are onto something. If inequality is a driver of consumerism, then maybe greater equality is the best way to combat these tendencies.

Of course, it is unlikely to be that easy. In the final chapter, the authors discuss possible paths to make society more equal. Some policies are obvious, and would undoubtedly help a lot. Minimum wage legislation, progressive taxes, unionisation, inheritance taxes, and policies of that sort certainly wouldn’t hurt, but the authors also set their sight on a somewhat loftier goal. Nearly thirteen pages are dedicated to the topic of employee owned companies. When external shareholders are removed from the picture, the workers and their skills will no longer be assets that can be bought or sold, but people with the autonomy to make decisions on the way that their company is run. Sir Michael Marmot in his Whitehall studies has shown that a lack of control in the workplace has a major impact on health. Such a system would also increase the feeling of community, and allow workers to decide whether they wanted to pay executives a salary that was hundreds of times greater than their own.

This idea of worker-managed firms brings us neatly back to Rawls, who was an advocate of the idea. No philosophers are mentioned in the book, but by the end, I very much felt that Rawls deserved to be. If anything, his difference principle might turn out to still allow too much inequality, although a Rawlsian could easily counter by saying that the negative effects would simply need to be taken into account when deciding what levels would be acceptable.

Certain parts of political spectrum, who already advocate for greater equality on the grounds of fairness, can leave this book feeling smug and proud of themselves, viewing it as vindication of their worldview. But what about the large group of people who are against excessive government interference, and who see redistribution of wealth as akin to theft? Though big government may not be necessary to achieve greater equality (remember Japan), it seems unlikely that the free market will be ale to produce the optimum results on its own. Will they say that the morality of low taxes trumps the social ills it may bring about, or will they deem the possible benefits great enough to be worth aiming for? I am happy it is a conundrum I do not have to face.

The Spirit Level was published in 2009, so it has a couple of years behind it now. I will admit to being disappointed that it’s impact has been limited so far. It feels like an important book that could be an important weapon in the campaign to shift political discourse. In this battle, the Occupy movement feels like a natural ally that could help to raise awareness of the trends described in the book.

Although not always the most engaging read, at its best, The Spirit Level reads like a manifesto, or a call-to-arms. It is saying that not only can we make society better, but we know how. We can already see where the path towards a better future lies. We just need the political, and public backing to make it happen.