Good to see Green colleagues giving The Spirit Level an extended promo in Question Time today. It is a fine book much discussed already on Red Alert here and here and here.
The Greens repeatedly questioned Social Development Minister Paula Bennett about the book’s argument that the more unequal a society is, the worse it performs, and the strong correlation between income inequality and numerous social ills including teen pregnancy, obesity, mental illness, violence and poor educational achievement. And whether National Government policies like tax cuts for the rich, and the canning of the training incentive allowance, would increase or decrease inequality.
It is not surprising Bennett hadn’t read the book. But she appeared not to even understand the concept of a link between inequality and social problems. Hopeless. Pretty remarkable for a Minister of Social Development.
You’re asking Bennett about a book? Why not go all the way and ask Gerry Brownlee about schrodinger equations?
Phil, I don’t think it has enough pictures for Paula.
That would be so far over her head,it would be in near Earth orbit.
I have yet to read this book. But it sounds like its been adopted a littley hastily as gospel by the left.
I’m sure inequality does have some effect on societal ills, but correlation doesn’t imply causation.
There are many other factors that could be the cause, which i’m sure are ommitted by the book.
And also surely suicide rates must be surely one of the biggest social ills of all? yet in the most “equal” societies like the Scandinavian countries they’re about the same as New Zealand and in Japan, it is higher. While unequal countries like the UK and US, have significantly lower rates.
Issues please guys
Worse, Bennett did not seem to be able to tell the difference between the overall HDR rank and the ranking for inequality. I was left wondering if she was illiterate, or merely dishonest.
Malcolm, I suggest you read the book, or at least the lengthy threads from the earlier posts. Much discussion there about correlation and causation. The book deals directly with the issue of causation and makes a pretty compelling case.
Phil, if this books outcomes are correct, and these events dont magically happen overnight, then it is a damning report of the last nine years of labour rule.
sweetd, I don’t think so. From the late 1980s through to 2004 NZ steadily became more and more unequal. 2004-2008 was the first period in 25 years that inequality reduced, largely due to the impact of Working for Families. 2000-2004 inequality increased but mainly because incomes of the top 20% grew very quickly. Labour did pretty well to stop the tide. Nevertheless I think the gap between rich and poor is unfinished business for Labour and something that needs to be at the heart of our agenda when we get back into government. It sure as hell is not on the radar screen for National-ACT as Paula Bennett demonstrated so well today.
Phil, are you really saying that the nat govt, which has not even been in power for one year yet, has stopped, and reduced the gains in inequality? If so, can you point to what particular policies caused this, and dont you think a more understandable cause is a huge recession/depression we are currently experiencing?
sweetd – We wont know what has happened to inequality in the 2009 calendar year until this time next year when the next round of MSD reporting is out. We can guess that the results probably won’t be all that crash hot. Rising unemployment caused by the recession and hitting the unskilled and low paid worst (exacerbated by the Government sitting on its hands & failure to do much at all to protect jobs), and flat-lining wages (helped along by Bill English’ unofficial wage freeze), and the significant corporate executive bonuses and salary increases (including MPs)…are all likely to have widened the gap between rich and poor. Add to that a round of tax cuts that disproportionately benefitted the well off. Imagine how much worse it would have been if that second round of tax cuts hadnt been cancelled!
The Social Report 2009 does suggest that the last year or two of the Fifth Labour Government was not so flash on the inequality front. I agree that Labour made a difference by reversing the trend of the 80s and 90s, and this should be celebrated. But more could and should have been done.
I do agree that this National government will be much worse for inequality, and we will see the trend going backwards, very frustrating.
Looks like it is an interesting book to read – however, anyone who works in the communities where inequality rests, will tell you that what they point to is true.
To suggest that these relationships are causal does not involve a major departure from what we know already. Within countries we know that all the components of our Index of Health and Social Problems are strongly related to social status: the further down the social ladder the more common they become. The new part of the picture is simply that if you stretch out the social status differences all the problems related to social status become more common. Rather than postulating entirely new causal processes the book is therefore only providing a bit more information about the relationships that have always been recognised.
People who have studied the graphs on the web site (www.equalitytrust.org.uk) and in The Spirit Level carefully will have noticed that there is a clear tendency for countries which do badly on one outcome to do badly on others. The book shows evidence that 10 or 12 different problems tend to move together. That implies that they share an underlying cause. The association between inequality and the books Index of Health and Social Problems is very close and no one has yet suggested an alternative.
Lastly, as the different chapters of the book show, many of the causal processes leading from inequality to the various health and social problems are already known. For example, the effects of social status on health have been demonstrated among monkeys in experiments which kept diet and material conditions the same while altering social status by moving animals into new groups and the effects of chronic stress on the immune and cardiovascular systems are increasingly well understood. Similarly, violence is more common in more unequal societies (where status competition is intensified) because it is so often triggered by people feeling looked down on, disrespected and humiliated.
Have a look at the website and you can get much more info on the subject.
You make a fine argument and I agree with you, but it sickens me that people continue these cruel experiments on monkeys
They deserve better from us as we’re more intelligent and have way more power than they do. Moral responsibility.