Why Equality is Better for Everyone

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Why Equality is Better for Everyone
Book Review: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level" shows how inequality—and misery—trickle up.

by Kristy Leissle
posted Dec 27, 2011


A recent report using income data from the 2010 Census drew attention to a harsh aspect of wealth inequality in the United States, already among the highest in the world. The number of Americans living in poverty increased to 46.2 million, and 6.7 percent crossed the threshold into “deep poverty.” Without food stamps and unemployment insurance, an additional 6.8 million would have fallen below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent continue to command a fifth of the nation’s income, and for an increasing number of Americans, the dream of middle-class security is ever more elusive.

The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which has sold more than 100,000 copies since its 2009 publication in Britain, offers insight beyond the bare facts of the census income data. Our national response to the hardships caused by the market crisis of 2008 has been to apply more of the same economic system—subsidize the banks in the hope this gets the economy growing again. But as Wilkinson and Pickett argue from their opening pages, “Economic growth, for so long the great engine of progress, has, in the rich countries, largely finished its work.” Once wealth rises past a certain level, the benefits to life expectancy, health, and happiness stabilize, and then stagnate.

The crux of The Spirit Level is that the best measure of a country’s well-being is not GDP or wealth overall, but its distribution of wealth. Of the developed countries (the focus of the book), those with highest income inequality—the United States, Britain, and Portugal—have the lowest levels of social “goods” such as educational achievement, long life expectancy, gender parity, and trust among neighbors. They have the highest rates of mental illness, obesity, violent crime, teen pregnancy, and incarceration. When the lion’s share is captured by a few, and the rest divide the remainder into increasingly tiny slivers—the “deep poverty” of more than 20 million Americans—social ills rise. Take the statistics on violence: along with the Scandinavian countries, Japan ranks highest on income equality; it also has the lowest homicide rate in the developed world. By contrast, the United States suffers from the highest murder rate, 64 people per million annually. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-yes-breakthrough-15/why-equality-is-better-for-everyone

[xchrom]

1. 'class' the great unfinished work of the West. Nt

[PETRUS]

2. "It is not only those at the bottom of the ladder who suffer."

The authors emphasize that subtracting the poor from the analysis does not change the score. “Inequality,” they suggest, is “like a pollutant spread throughout society.”