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  • The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better See large image

    The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Hardback) By (author) Richard G. Wilkinson, By (author) Kate Pickett

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    Short Description for The Spirit LevelLarge inequalities of income in a society have often been regarded as divisive and corrosive, and it is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. This book demonstrates that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them - the well-off as well as the poor.
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    The Spirit Level5

    Mark Thwaite Neoliberalism was always a profoundly ahistoric -- and stupid -- way to run economic policy. And goodness are its chickens coming home to roost right now! If the credit crunch has done anything it has proved, once again, that capitalism's internal contradictions can never be pretended away. No matter how many different ways countless Harvard-educated fund managers can cut and slice up debt, it is still debt. No matter how often we hear about the trickle-down effect, the world is still full of very many very poor folk.



    We've always known that "large inequalities of income in a society [are] divisive and corrosive" and that "in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem" but Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's excellent 'The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better' shows that "more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them -- the well-off as well as the poor... Almost every modern social and environmental problem -- ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations -- is more likely to occur in a less equal society." The present economic crisis, then, offers us the chance to realise that post-war economic policy has failed us all, and that we need to think anew about how best to create a much fairer society.



    We face a stark choice: we can move our society in a more cooperative and far more collaborative direction, curb the excesses of the super-rich, and work to create effective structures to share all that we have and all that we produce -- or we can continue to create an ever-more unequal society that only brings destruction in its wake.



    Wilkinson and Pickett's 'The Spirit Level' is a useful part of this debate, but critics might suggest that as inequality is a structural prerequisite of capitalism, if true equality is the aim of your social policy then your social policy actually needs to be truly anti-capitalist. by Mark Thwaite

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