The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger Read online

  RICHARD WILKINSON

  AND KATE PICKETT

  The Spirit Level

  Why Greater Equality

  Makes Societies Stronger

  BLOOMSBURY PRESS

  New York Berlin London

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Note on Graphs

  PART ONE

  Material Success, Social Failure

  1 The end of an era

  2 Poverty or inequality?

  3 How inequality gets under the skin

  PART TWO

  The Costs of Inequality

  4 Community life and social relations

  5 Mental health and drug use

  6 Physical health and life expectancy

  7 Obesity: wider income gaps, wider waists

  8 Educational performance

  9 Teenage births: recycling deprivation

  10 Violence: gaining respect

  11 Imprisonment and punishment

  12 Social mobility: unequal opportunities

  PART THREE

  A Better Society

  13 Dysfunctional societies

  14 Our social inheritance

  15 Equality and sustainability

  16 Building the future

  Appendix

  References

  Foreword

  ROBERT B. REICH

  Professor of Public Policy, University of California

  Former U.S. Secretary of Labor

  Most American families are worse off today than they were three decades ago. The Great Recession of 2008–2009 destroyed the value of their homes, undermined their savings, and too often left them without jobs. But even before the Great Recession began, most Americans had gained little from the economic expansion that began almost three decades before. Today, the Great Recession notwithstanding, the U.S. economy is far larger than it was in 1980. But where has all the wealth gone? Mostly to the very top. The latest data shows that by 2007, America’s top 1 percent of earners received 23 percent of the nation’s total income—almost triple their 8 percent share in 1980.

  This rapid trend toward inequality in America marks a significant reversal of the move toward income equality that began in the early part of the twentieth century and culminated during the middle decades of the century.

  Yet inequality has not loomed large as a political issue. Even Barack Obama’s modest proposal to return income tax rates to where they stood in the 1990s prompted his 2008 Republican opponents to call him a socialist who wanted to spread the wealth. Once president, Obama’s even more modest proposal to limit the income tax deductions of the wealthy in order to pay for health care for all met fierce resistance from a Democratically controlled Congress.

  If politicians have failed to grapple with the issue of inequality, few scholars have done better. Philosophers have had little to say on the subject. Some who would tax the rich to help the poor frame their arguments as utilitarian. Taking a hundred dollars from a rich person and giving it to a poor person would diminish the rich person’s happiness only slightly, they argue, but greatly increase the happiness of the poor person. Others ground their arguments in terms of hypothetical consent. John Rawls defends redistribution on the grounds that most people would be in favor of it if they had no idea what their income would otherwise be.

  Nor have economists, whom we might expect to focus attention on such a dramatic trend, expressed much concern about widening inequality. For the most part, economists concern themselves with efficiency and growth. In fact, some of them argue that wide inequality is a necessary, if not inevitable, consequence of a growing economy. A few worry that it cuts off opportunities among the children of the poor for productive lives—but whether to distribute wealth more equally, or what might be gained from doing so, is a topic all but ignored by today’s economic researchers.

  It has taken two experts from the field of public health to deliver a major study of the effects of inequality on society. Though Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are British, their research explores the United States in depth, and their work is an important contribution to the debate our country needs.

  The Spirit Level looks at the negative social effects of wide inequality—among them, more physical and mental illness not only among those at the lower ranks, but even those at the top of the scale. The authors find, not surprisingly, that where there are great disparities in wealth, there are heightened levels of social distrust. They argue convincingly that wide inequality is bad for a society, and that more equal societies tend to do better on many measures of social health and wealth.

  But if wide inequality is socially dysfunctional, then why are certain countries, such as the United States, becoming so unequal? Largely because of the increasing gains to be had by being just a bit better than other competitors in a system becoming ever more competitive.

  Consider executive pay. During the 1950s and ’60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. After the 1970s, the two pay scales diverged. In 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times; by 1990, it was 100 times. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned. Recent supports suggest that the upward trajectory of executive pay, temporarily stopped by the economic meltdown, is on the verge of continuing. To make the comparison especially vivid, in 1968 the CEO of General Motors—then the largest company in the United States—took home around 66 times the pay and benefits of the typical GM worker at the time. In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart—by then the largest U.S. company—took home 900 times the pay and benefits of the typical Wal-Mart worker.

  What explains this trajectory? Have top executives become greedier? Have corporate boards grown less responsible? Are CEOs more crooked? Are investors more docile? Is Wall Street more tractable? There’s no evidence to support any of these theories. Here’s a simpler explanation: Forty years ago, everyone’s pay in a big company—even pay at the top—was affected by bargains struck among big business, big labor, and, indirectly, government. Big companies and their unions directly negotiated pay scales for hourly workers, while white-collar workers understood that their pay grades were indirectly affected. Large corporations resembled civil service bureaucracies. Top executives in these huge companies had to maintain the good will of organized labor. They also had to maintain good relationships with public officials in order to be free to set wages and prices; to obtain regulatory permissions on fares, rates, or licenses; and to continue to secure government contracts. It would have been unseemly of them to draw very high salaries.

  Since then, competition has intensified. With ever greater ease, rival companies can get access to similar low-cost suppliers from all over the world. They can streamline their operations with the same information technology their competitors use; they can cut their labor force and substitute similar software, culled from many of the same vendors. They can just as readily outsource hourly jobs abroad. They can get capital for new investment on much the same terms. They can gain access to distribution channels that are no less efficient, some of them even identical (Wal-Mart or other big-box retailers). They can attract shareholders by showing even slightly better performance, or the promise of it.

  The dilemma facing so many companies is therefore how to beat rivals. Even a small advantage can make a huge difference to the bottom line. In economic terms, CEOs have become less like top bureaucrats and more like Hollywood celebrities or star athletes, who
take a share of the house. Hollywood’s most popular celebrities now pull in around 15 percent of whatever the studios take in at the box office, and athletes are also getting a growing portion of sales. As the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki has reminded us, Mickey Mantle earned $60,000 in 1957. Carlos Beltran made $15 million in 2005. Even adjusting for inflation, Beltran got 40 times as much as Mantle. Clark Gable earned $100,000 a picture in the 1940s, which translates into roughly $800,000 today. Tom Hanks, by contrast, makes closer to $20 million per film. Movie studios and baseball teams find it profitable to pay these breathtaking sums because they’re still relatively small compared to the money these stars bring in and the profits they generate. Today’s big companies are paying their CEOs mammoth sums for much the same reason.

  In the world of finance, the numbers are yet greater. Top investment bankers and traders take home even more than CEOs or most Hollywood stars. For the managers of twenty-six major hedge funds, the average take-home pay in 2005 was $363 million, a 45 percent increase over their average earnings the year before. The Wall Street meltdown took its toll on some of these hedge funds and their managers, but by the end of 2009 many were back.

  This economic explanation for these startling levels of pay does not justify them socially or morally. It only means that in our roles as consumers and investors we implicitly think CEOs, star athletes, and Hollywood celebrities are worth it. As citizens, though, most of us disapprove. Polls continue to show that a great majority of Americans believes CEOs are overpaid, and that inequality of income and wealth is a large problem.

  In short, our nation’s wealth is becoming even more concentrated at the top. It has become the financial equivalent of hydrodynamics: Large streams of income create even larger pools of wealth. The family of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton has a combined fortune estimated to be about $90 billion. In 2005, Bill Gates was worth $46 billion; Warren Buffet, $44 billion. By contrast, the combined wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the United States population that year—some 120 million people—was estimated to be around $95 billion. Here again, the Great Recession of 2008–2009 took a toll; some of these billionaires’ fortunes were whittled down by 20 to 40 percent. But even then, they remained immense.

  As citizens, we may feel that inequality on this scale cannot possibly be good for us, and Wilkinson and Pickett supply the evidence that confirms our gut sense of unease. Such inequality undermines the trust, solidarity, and mutuality on which responsibilities of citizenship depend. It creates a new aristocracy whose privileges perpetuate themselves over generations (one of the striking findings in these pages is that America now has less social mobility than many poorer countries). And it breeds cynicism among the rest of us.

  This is not to say that the superrich are at fault. By and large, “the market” is generating these outlandish results. But the market is a creation of public policies. And public policies, as the authors make clear, can reorganize the market to reverse these trends. The Spirit Level shows why the effort to do so is a vital one for the health of our society.

  Berkeley, California

  July 2009

  Preface

  People usually exaggerate the importance of their own work and we worry about claiming too much. But this book is not just another set of nostrums and prejudices about how to put the world to rights. The work we describe here comes out of a very long period of research (over fifty person-years between us) devoted, initially, to trying to understand the causes of the big differences in life expectancy – the ‘health inequalities’ – between people at different levels in the social hierarchy in modern societies. The focal problem initially was to understand why health gets worse at every step down the social ladder, so that the poor are less healthy than those in the middle, who in turn are less healthy than those further up.

  Like others who work on the social determinants of health, our training in epidemiology means that our methods are those used to trace the causes of diseases in populations – trying to find out why one group of people gets a particular disease while another group doesn’t, or to explain why some disease is becoming more common. The same methods can, however, also be used to understand the causes of other kinds of problems – not just health.

  Just as the term ‘evidence-based medicine’ is used to describe current efforts to ensure that medical treatment is based on the best scientific evidence of what works and what does not, we thought of calling this book ‘Evidence-based Politics’. The research which underpins what we describe comes from a great many research teams in different universities and research organizations. Replicable methods have been used to study observable and objective outcomes, and peer-reviewed research reports have been published in academic, scientific journals.

  This does not mean that there is no guesswork. Results always have to be interpreted, but there are usually good reasons for favouring one interpretation over another. Initial theories and expectations are often called into question by later research findings which make it necessary to think again. We would like to take you on the journey we have travelled, signposted by crucial bits of evidence and leaving out only the various culs-de-sac and wrong turnings that wasted so much time, to arrive at a better understanding of how we believe it is possible to improve the quality of life for everyone in modern societies. We shall set out the evidence and our reasons for interpreting it the way we do, so that you can judge for yourself.

  At an intuitive level people have always recognized that inequality is socially corrosive. But there seemed little reason to think that levels of inequality in developed societies differed enough to expect any measurable effects. The reasons which first led one of us to look for effects seem now largely irrelevant to the striking picture which has emerged. Many discoveries owe as much to luck as judgement.

  The reason why the picture we present has not been put together until now is probably that much of the data has only become available in recent years. With internationally comparable information not only on incomes and income distribution but also on different health and social problems, it could only have been a matter of time before someone came up with findings like ours. The emerging data have allowed us, and other researchers, to analyse how societies differ, to discover how one factor is related to another, and to test theories more rigorously.

  It is easy to imagine that discoveries are more rapidly accepted in the natural than in the social sciences – as if physical theories are somehow less controversial than theories about the social world. But the history of the natural sciences is littered with painful personal disputes, which started off as theoretical disagreements but often lasted for the rest of people’s lives. Controversies in the natural sciences are usually confined to the experts: most people do not have strong views on rival theories in particle physics. But they do have views on how society works. Social theories are partly theories about ourselves; indeed, they might almost be regarded as part of our self-awareness or self-consciousness of societies. While natural scientists do not have to convince individual cells or atoms to accept their theories, social theorists are up against a plethora of individual views and powerful vested interests.

  In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweiss discovered that if doctors washed their hands before attending women in childbirth it dramatically reduced deaths from puerperal fever. But before his work could have much benefit he had to persuade people – principally his medical colleagues – to change their behaviour. His real battle was not his initial discovery but what followed from it. His views were ridiculed and he was driven eventually to insanity and suicide. Much of the medical profession did not take his work seriously until Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister had developed the germ theory of disease, which explained why hygiene was important.

  We live in a pessimistic period. As well as being worried by the likely consequences of global warming, it is easy to feel that many societies are, despite their material success, increasingly burdened by their social failings. If correct, the theory and evidence set o
ut in this book tells us how to make substantial improvements in the quality of life for the vast majority of the population. Yet unless it is possible to change the way most people see the societies they live in, the theory will be stillborn. Public opinion will only support the necessary political changes if something like the perspective we outline in this book permeates the public mind. We have therefore set up a not-for-profit Trust to try to make the kind of evidence set out in the following pages better known. Lacking funds and expertise it is – at the time of writing – scarcely more than a web site (www.equalitytrust.org.uk). But we hope at least to suggest that there is a way out of the woods for us all.

  Acknowledgements

  We are grateful to Danny Dorling, Stuart Proffitt and Alison Quick for their careful reading and many helpful comments on our manuscript. We also thank Molly Scott Cato for her comments on Chapter 15, Majid Ezzati for kindly sending us his corrected estimates of body mass index for US states, and Stephen Bezruchka for helpful discussions.

  Richard Wilkinson would like to thank the University of Nottingham and his former colleagues in the Division of Epidemiology and Public Health for the freedom which allowed him to devote his time to the research which went into this book. Kate Pickett thanks the University of York and her colleagues for their generous support.