The Spirit Level Quotes

“You can predict a country’s performance on one outcome from a knowledge of others. If – for instance – a country does badly on health, you can predict with some confidence that it will also imprison a larger proportion of its population, have more teenage pregnancies, lower literacy scores, more obesity, worse mental health, and so on. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“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.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“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.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements in the real quality of life – in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship and community life, which really matters. However, rather than simply having fewer of all the luxuries which substitute for and prevent us recognizing our more fundamental needs, inequality has to be reduced simultaneously.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“The truth is that modern inequality exists because democracy is excluded from the economic sphere. It needs therefore to be dealt with by an extension of democracy into the workplace. We need to experiment with every form of economic democracy – employee ownership, producer and consumer co-operatives, employee representatives on company boards and so on.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Despite the modern impression of the permanence and universality of inequality, in the time‐scale of human history and prehistory, it is the current highly unequal societies which are exceptional. For over 90 per cent of our existence as human beings we lived, almost exclusively, in highly egalitarian societies. For perhaps as much as the last two million years, covering the vast majority of the time we have been ‘anatomically modern’ (that is to say, looking much as we do now), human beings lived in remarkably egalitarian hunting and gathering – or foraging – groups.332–5 Modern inequality arose and spread with the development of agriculture. The characteristics which would have been selected as successful in more egalitarian societies would have been very different from those selected in dominance hierarchies.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Once we have enough of the basic necessities for comfort, possessions matter less and less in themselves, and are used more and more for what they say about their owners. Ideally, our impressions of each other would depend on face‐to‐face interactions in the course of community life, rather than on outward appearances in the absence of real knowledge of each other.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“A common response to research findings in the social sciences is for people to say they are obvious, and then perhaps to add a little scornfully, that there was no need to do all that expensive work to tell us what we already knew. Very often, however, that sense of knowing only seeps in with the benefit of hindsight, after research results have been made known.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others’ eyes.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Studies in the USA often report even larger differences, such as a 28‐year difference in life expectancy at age 16 between blacks and whites living in some of the poorest and some of the richest areas”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Martin Luther King said 'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice'. Given that in human prehistory we lived in remarkably equal societies, maintaining a steady state - or sustainable - way of life in what some have called 'the original affluent society', it is perhaps right to think of it as an arc, curving back to the very basic human principles of fairness and equality which we still regard as good manners in any normal social interaction.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“The idea that we can't have both liberty and equality seems to have emerged during the Cold War. What the state-owned economics of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union seemed to show was that greater quality could only be gained at the expense of freedom. An important ideological cost of the Cold War was that America gave up its historical commitment to equality. For the first Americans, as for Tom Paine, you couldn't have true liberty without equality.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“Rather than reducing inequality itself, the initiatives aimed at tackling health or social problems are nearly always attempts to break the links between socio-economic disadvantage and the problem it produces. The unstated hope is that people - particularly the poor -v can carry on in the same circumstances, but will somehow no longer succumb to mental illness, teenage pregnancy, educational failure, obesity, or drugs.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“Economists now use the term 'Veblen effect' to refer to the way goods are chosen for their social value rather than their usefulness... Too often consumerism is regarded as if it reflected a fundamental human material self-interest and possessiveness. That, however, could hardly be further from the truth. Our almost neurotic need to shop and consume is instead a reflection of how deeply social we are. Living in unequal and individualistic societies, we use possessions to show ourselves in a good light, to make a positive impression and to avoid appearing incompetent in inadequate in the eyes of others. Consumerism shows how powerfully we are affected by each other. Once we have enough of the basic necessities for comfort, possessions matter less and less in themselves and are used more and more for what they say about their owners.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“How much people's desire for more income is really a desire for more status has been demonstrated in a simple experiment. People were asked to say whether they'd prefer to be less well-off than others in a rich society, or have a much lower income in a poorer society but be better off than others. 50% of the participants thought they would trade as much as half their real income if they live in a society in which they would be better off than others.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“More power-efficient washing machines or better insulated houses will help the environment; but they also cut our bills, and that immediately means we lose some of the environmental gain by spending the saved money on something else. As cars have become more fuel-efficient we have chosen to drive further. As houses have become better insulted we have raised standards of heating, and as we put in energy-saving light bulbs the chances are that we start to think it doesn't matter so much leaving them on.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“As well as the potential for conflict, human beings have a unique potential to be each other's best source of co-operation, learning, love and assistance of every kind. While there's not much that ostriches or otters can do for an injured member of their own species, among humans there is. But it's not just that we able to give each other care and protection. Because most of of our abilities are learned, we depend on others for the acquisition of our life skills. Similarly, our unique capacity for specialisation and division of labour means that human being have an unrivalled potential to benefit from co-operation. So as well as the potential to be each other's worst rivals, we also have the potential to be each other's greatest source of comfort and security.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“A dramatic example of how reductions in inequality can lead to rapid improvements in health is the experience of Britain during the two world wars. Increases in life expectancy for civilians during the war decades were twice those seen throughout the rest of the twentieth century. In the decades which contain the world wars, life expectancy increased between 6 and 7 years for men and woman, whereas in the decades before, between and after, life expectancy increased by between 1 and 4 years... Both wartime's were characterised by full employment and considerably narrow income differences - the result of deliberate government policies to promote cooperation with the war effort. During WW2 for example, working-class incomes rose by 9 per cent, while incomes of the middle class by 7 per cent; rates of relative poverty were halved. The resulting sense of camaraderie and social cohesion not only led to better health - crimes rates also fell.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“The problems in rich countries are not caused by the society not being rich enough (or even by being too rich) but by the scale of material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“The Whitehall I study, a long term follow-up study of male civil servants, was set up in 1967 to investigate the causes of heart disease and other chronic illnesses. Researchers expected to find the highest risk of heart disease among men in the highest status jobs; instead, they found a strong inverse association between position in the civil service hierarchy and death rates. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers etc) had a death rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“... When infectious diseases lost their hold as the major causes of death, the industrialised world underwent a shift, known as the 'epidemiological transition' and chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, replaced infections as the major causes of death and poor health.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“So why do people tend to have mental health problems in more unequal places? Psychologist and journalist Oliver James uses an analogy with infectious disease to explain the link. The 'affluenza' virus, according to James, is a 'set of vlaues which increase our vulnerability to emotional distress' which he believes is more common in affluent societies. It entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. These kinds of values place us at greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder...”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“So why do people tend to have mental health problems in more unequal places? Psycholigst and journalist Oliver James uses an analogy with infectious disease to explain the link. The 'affluenza' virus, according to James, is a 'set of vlaues which increase our vulnterably to emotional distress' which he believes is more common in affluent societies. It entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possestion, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. These kinds of values place us at greater risk of depression, anxiet, substance abuse and personality disorder...”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“For thousands of years the best way of improving the quality of human life was to raise material living standards. When the wold was never far from the door, good times were simply times of plenty. But for the vast majority of people in affluent countries the difficulties of life are no longer about filling our stomachs, having clean water and keeping warm. Most of us now wish we could eat less rather than more. And, for the first time in history, the poor are - on average - fatter than the rich. Economic growth, for so long the great engine of progress, has, in the rich countries, largely finished its work.”
― Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

“In conventional employment people are specifically hired to work for purposes which are not their own. They”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Employee‐ownership has the advantage of increasing equality specifically by extending liberty and democracy. It is bottom‐up rather than top‐down. Although we don’t know what scale of income differences people would think fair, it seems likely that they might agree that the chief executive of the company they work for should be paid a salary several times as big as their own – maybe three, or perhaps even ten, times as big. But it is unlikely that they would say several hundred times as big. Indeed, such huge differentials can probably only be maintained by denying any measure of economic democracy.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth: the issue is now community and how we relate to each other.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.’350”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone