Should we strive for more equality in our societies?

Dear Friends,
The first image has nothing to do with the topic of this blog, unless the phenomenon of a guy making chutney connects with equality. We had a glut of zucchini, so several of us made a large amount of excellent chutney a few days ago. These are fellow Atamai villagers, Craig and Lynda. Took us all day.

OK, back to work. I read this book because other things I was reading referred to it. I thought it was very good; it has me thinking seriously about the issue. A young Green party friend says that all the politicians are reading it.

See what you think yourself.

Book Review of Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, New York, Berlin, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010

The merits of societies more equal in income and wealth have been discussed for centuries. In the late 19th century, Edward Bellamy published two novels in the US – Looking Backward and its sequel, Equality. The plot of both involves a young man, Julian West, who goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find that the US has undergone an economic revolution. All persons, male and female, are now economic equals. The two novels are an extended elaboration on the implications of this change and moral arguments for economic equality. Looking Backward became the third best-seller in the US at the time and gave rise to ‘Bellamy Clubs’, to several attempts at communities founded on these principles, and to a spate of books written in response to Bellamy’s ideas.

In the real world, inequality within countries has increased, at least over the 50 years for which we have adequate data . The increase is attributed substantially to increased wealth of the uppermost 20% of each country’s population. Does this matter, in that, in almost every country, per capita income has increased over this period?

Wilkinson and Pickett, UK public health scholars, bring a great deal of evidence to support their assertion that income inequality is a crucial variable in a great range of dimensions of human well-being. Their data apply only to high income countries, those on the plateau of the curve of happiness or life expectancy plotted against income, where more income does not mean more happiness or years of life. In those countries, it seems, more equality does mean more happiness. More equality correlates with more child well-being, more trust in other people, higher status of women, more of the national income spent on foreign aid, less mental illness, less drug use, greater life expectancy, lower infant mortality, fewer obese adults and overweight children, higher maths and literacy scores, fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer homicides, less bullying in children, fewer people in prison and more social mobility. These trends are derived from data of the 20 richest countries and also data on inequality levels for all US states. What is enormously interesting is that people at all income levels, not just the poor, do worse in unequal societies. And at any given income level, a person will be better off in a more equal society. Interestingly, the relationship does not apply for inequalities in small local areas.

What is it about living in an unequal society, both at a country level and a US state level that could contribute to such a wide range of physical and social ills? Social relationships, as measured by social cohesion, trust, involvement in community life, are better in more equal societies, and are known to be important correlates of health and well-being. Conversely, social hierarchies appear to be bad for health and well-being. People experience social evaluative situations, where they see themselves being compared with others in some way, as particularly highly stressful. Assigned social status, or in more rigid societies, caste, is a cognitive organiser of social evaluation. Income and its visible markers of house, car, clothes and possessions are prominent markers of social status. People lower on the hierarchy are stressed by their position relative to others, and strive to attain markers of higher status.

Herve Kampf, in the forthrightly titled How the Rich are Destroying the Earth cites research showing that the greater the gap between where a person regards themselves as situated on a social scale and the reference group for their aspirations, the more hours they will be prepared to work. People in more unequal societies work many more hours per year.

It is this behaviour, ‘conspicuous consumption’, that is a major driver of carbon emissions, other pollution and habitat reduction. So inequality, say the authors, is a significant contributor to climate change and the many other survival -threatening aspects of the degradation of Nature.

What is to be done? Wilkinson and Pickett argue strongly for the adoption of means towards a more equal society. They point out that a more equal distribution of income can be achieved at the point of salary received or taxes paid. There can be both ceilings and floors on allowable salaries. There can be agreed ratios in corporations between highest and lowest earners. A few corporations have already adopted such a measure. Their most favoured measure is the conversion of hierarchical corporations into workers’ cooperatives, where decision-making power, responsibility and salaries are shared equally. Interestingly, this happened inadvertently during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The rich fled the region, and workers took over the factories and corporations – successfully, it seems. Equality was a strong value in these organisations. Mondragon, the world's largest workers' cooperative, in the Spanish Basque region, has recently made an agreement with United Steel Workers to set up cooperative structures in Canada and the US. This is an extremely interesting development. Mondragon's salasry ratio is never more than 5:1. (This compares with 400: 1 in some corporations.)

The findings put together so masterfully by Wilkinson and Pickett have major public health significance generally. In New Zealand, the Green Party has explicit measures to achieve a more equal society in this highly unequal one. There are implications for our village. There are wealth differences in the beginning population of the village. The social structures of the village equalise this, but beyond this settlement’s enthusiastic beginnings, will that prevail? Or will wealth and income differences create a social hierarchy with its very many attendant ills? We must try to avoid this.

Markus Jantti and Susanna Sandstrom. Trends in Income Inequality: A critical study of the evidence in WIID2. 2005. http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/widerconf/JanttyStr.pdf Accessed 2010 Jan7.
Herve Kampf. How the Rich are Destroying the Earth. Vermont, USA: Chelsea Green Publishing company, 2007.
Ted Trainer. Inspiration for Local Economies Today: The Success of the Spanish Collectives. Pacific Ecologist 19, Winter/Spirng 2010, pp43-47.