The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

by Richard G. Wilkinson

Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status … It has grown … as an invidious distinction between classes … Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement ‘I am an important person’, but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent. So what could have been going on? People becoming much more self‐confident doesn’t seem to fit with them also becoming much more anxious and depressed. The answer turns out to be a picture of increasing anxieties about how we are seen and what others think of us which has, in turn, produced a kind of defensive attempt to shore up our confidence in the face of those insecurities.

The recognition that what we have seen is the rise of an insecure narcissism – particularly among young people – rather than a rise in genuine self‐esteem now seems widely accepted.

‘social evaluative threat’.

Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others’ eyes.

The evidence of our sensitivity to ‘social evaluative threat’, coupled with Twenge’s evidence of long‐term rises in anxiety and narcissism, suggests that we may – by the standards of any previous society – have become highly self‐conscious, obsessed with how we appear to others, worried that we might come across as unattractive, boring, stupid or whatever, and constantly trying to manage the impressions we make.

While Americans are more likely to attribute individual successes to their own abilities and their failures to external factors, the Japanese tend to do just the opposite.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti

A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.

the past the rich were fat and the poor were thin, but in developed countries these patterns are now reversed.

One of the biggest problems facing British schools is the gap between rich and poor, and the enormous disparity in children’s home backgrounds and the social and cultural capital they bring to the educational table.145, p. 23

Evans. Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.