Income Equality and Spirit

This is an extraordinary 16 minute TED video with Richard Wilkinson, author (with his partner Kate Pickett) of The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger, released in April of 2011.

If you don't have time for the whole video, here are some key slides, taken by screenshot from his book:

There is no correlation between national income and a health/social problems scale. This scale is a composite measuring life expectancy, trust, obesity, mental health problems, imprisonment rates, teenage births, children's educational performance and similar measurements. We are the richest country per capita and also the country with the worst score for health and social problems. Norway with similar per capita income has a much better composite score. Portugal, the poorest country in the group, has almost as bad a score as we do.

So not connected to income when looking to compare different countries. What about finding a way to rank countries on an inequality scale? When you rank countries on a scale of how many times wealthier is the top 20% of a country than the bottom 20%, here is what comes out:

Only Singapore is more unequal than we are. Japan and the Nordic countries are on the bottom of this inequality scale. Now let's see what happens when we keep this ranking and add in a country's health/social problem scale. Is there a correlation?

Absolutely. There is a huge and powerful relationship between a country's Inequality Ranking and their level of health and social stability. Now here's something that blew me away: if you rank our individual states for Inequality, and then see if these rankings correlate with their individual scores for health and social stability, here's what you find:

Alaska, Utah, New Hampshire,Wisconsin, Iowa, Vermont, and Minnesota are the states with the lowest level of inequality. And they tend to have the best health/social stability grades as well. New York is almost off the chart as the most unequal state, but its grade on health and social stability is in the middle. On thee other hand, the old South- Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi - have the greatest income inequality and by far the worst scores on health and social stability.

Two more charts, zeroing in on Trust levels; first between countries and then between states:

The authors' conclusion: high income inequality leads to high social/status anxiety. When there are large, easily perceived differences between levels of society, and those levels carry social value, then people are forever chasing the next higher rung on the social ladder, and they remain always vulnerable to humiliation, loss of status, and too often when social station is threatened, loss of self worth. Competition moves from the healthy to the unhealthy, where the opponent becomes the enemy and must be destroyed.

Looking at the video this morning, then looking through the book and taking out these charts, it became very clear to me that this is what Occupy Wall Street is calling us to examine: the level of inequality in our society is too high by half; the playing field and the game have been rigged against the 99%; we have become more selfish, less compassionate, less generous.

 We are nowhere near as nice as we could be, nor as generous as we should be. Having a national conversation about this is necessary. And there is not one shred of evidence that if we were kinder, we could no longer be powerful or economically strong.