Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "dysfunction"

Social Anxiety Rooted in Inequality?
From Blog 18 by Donald Neeper at http://neeper.net/social-anxiety/
Richard G. WilkinsonA Review of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, updated 2010.

What's going on? There's a feeling that people sense an impending social failure but are unable to identify it. What's causing this stress? As documented in the recent scholarly book, The Spirit Level, we really are much more anxious than we used to be.

Wilkinson and Pickett (W&P) are professors who have studied economics and epidemiology. They quantitatively evaluate many symptoms of social dysfunction, comparing results for 23 developed countries and also comparing data for the 50 states of the U.S. In each case, they correlate the severity of a social problem (e.g. teen births or homicides or obesity) with income inequality. The correlations are independent of the average income or overall wealth of a country. In other words, the greater the disparity in income, the more dysfunction a society has in multiple characteristics, including infant mortality, social mobility, literacy, AIDS, homicide rate, degenerative diseases, teenage births, trust, and status of women.

The authors present extensive arguments to justify inequality as the common factor underlying the other characteristics. For example, public spending on health and education does not correlate with homicide rates, but income inequality does. In a postscript, the authors counter what appears to be politically motivated criticism of the book, including statistical arguments or missing factors such as ethnicity. W&P assert ethnicity is not a factor because the same correlations occur across societies of widely differing cultures. Data from Italy and Finland fall along the same line in the graphs.

Wilkinson and Pickett argue that our need to feel valued and capable implies we crave feedback regarding our worth, but social status causes distress because it carries messages of superiority and inferiority. Greater inequality amplifies the importance of social status.

Both the relatively rich and the relatively poor have relatively better health, less violence, and less anxiety in a country (or state) with less inequality. That is, despite our expectations otherwise, all classes are happier in a society with less inequality.

Obesity occupies a special chapter in Spirit Level. In the U.S., about half the population were overweight and 15 percent were obese in the late 1970s. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and about thirty percent are obese as measured by body mass index, which normalizes the effect that a taller person normally weighs more.

Obesity in the U.S. is more than twelve times greater than that in Japan, which is the least unequal society of the 23 so-called rich countries. In Japan, the basic wages are more equal, with smaller differences between the highly paid and the lower salaries.

Wilkinson and Pickett explain that many people have a strong personal belief in equality and fairness, but these values have remained private, hidden, unshared, inactive because people think their fellows disagree. Instead, political differences reflect beliefs about how to solve the problems, while desire for a safer and more friendly society goes across political lines. Politics have been weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society, a vision of how to get from here to there.

The authors, however, clearly identify corporate power as the elephant in the living room—the biggest determinant of political action. In the U.S., the highest-paid people in corporations received almost 40 times as much as the highest-paid people in the non-profit sector, and 200 times more than the highest-paid generals or cabinet secretaries in the Federal Government. Does that illustrate where our social priorities lie, despite our underlying shared personal belief? B&P suggest that worker ownership of corporations would induce both better satisfaction and better production.

Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that many of the growing social problems are maintained by income inequality, whereby the poor cope with their own poverty and also with the consequences of the poverty of their neighbors, while the rich pay to live separately in residential economic segregation. As the authors say, governments can spend either to prevent social problems or else to deal with the consequences. In the U.S. since 1980, public expenditure on prisons has risen six times as fast as public expenditure on education.

A missing argument.
One key observation seems missing from the excellent presentation of data and observations in The Spirit Level. Almost any enduring symptom (good or bad) of a complex system is maintained by a loop of positive feedback, as outlined in Blog 14 and Blog 16 at http://neeper.net. The search for ways to rectify income inequality must first locate the unchecked positive feedback loops that maintain and increase the inequalities. Often, those loops are what we label "growth." As argued in Blog 16, disallowing political action by corporations would be one powerful step toward equal justice because corporate governance is simply sophisticated bribery.