And where will this concentration, if we let it continue, lead us? Increasingly inherited wealth, Piketty writes, will confront us with an extreme concentration of capital “potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.”
But we face other threats as well from extreme inequality, threats that sour our daily lives on any number of fronts, from the trust we have in each other to our physical and mental health. Capital in the Twenty-First Century doesn’t go into these threats. Another landmark book on inequality does.Inequality.org
That book — The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better — appeared five years ago, first in the UK and then around the world. Spirit Level editions have appeared since then in two dozen nations and sold, in English alone, well over 150,000 copies, a monster total, at least before Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for a serious book in the social sciences.
Like Thomas Piketty, Spirit Level co-authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have marshaled vast arrays of data. These two epidemiologists — scientists who study the health of populations — have identified nearly every social problem where reliable statistics let us compare how well or poorly the major nations of the developed world are delivering a decent quality of life.People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies.In which developed nations, Wilkinson and Pickett ask, do people live the longest? What nations show the highest levels of obesity? Where do people born at the bottom have the best shot at climbing up? Which nations send the most people to prison? Have the most teenage moms? Tally the most homicides?
People in some developed nations, the Spirit Level documents, can be anywhere from three to ten times more likely than people in other developed nations to be obese or get murdered, to mistrust others or have a pregnant teen daughter, to become a drug addict or escape from poverty.
And the nations that do the best, on yardstick after yardstick, all turn out to share one basic trait. They all share their wealth.
“If you want to know why one country does better or worse than another,” as Wilkinson and Pickett note, “the first thing to look at is the extent of inequality.”
The United States, the developed world’s most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on every quality-of-life indicator that Wilkinson and Pickett examine. Portugal and the UK, nations with levels of inequality that rival the United States, rank near that same bottom.
All Hail Piketty, But Props for Pickett, Too
Inequality.org Staff
1 comment:
Yes Hail, Pickety,good work ,but there is litterary thousands of studies with solid statistical significance and rigour in each every sociology departement available that basically tell the same story about unequal wealth distribution and gini coefficient that tells the same story and confirm what Pickety what came. up with. Nothing new under the sun ,and Wilkinson and Picket have done a hell of a good job gathering very solid material on this issue for years now. Economists should leave their computers more often and visit their neighboring social scientist more often. I think they. it will broaden their knoweledge enormously.
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