The Spirit Level mechanism

During my holiday, I finally got round to reading The Spirit Level. And I have a problem with it.
It’s not the data. This is convincing if you’re prepared to be convinced, and not if you are not. Facts are rarely decisive in political disputes.
Instead, it’s the mechanism: how, exactly, does inequality lead to ill-health, crime and the other ills Wilkinson and Pickett describe?
They say that “greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status.” The result is a “threatened egotism”. If the anxieties this creates are directed inwards, they lead to ill-health, and if they are focussed outwards, the result is distrust and violence.
My problem here is that status competition exists within small groups, rather than within whole societies. Drug-dealers and academics, for example, compete against each other, not against the super-rich. If we were to kill all bankers - a policy not wholly without merit - this competition would continue. It’s the narcissism of small differences that gets us.
Now, the right might say this just shows that status competition is an ineradicable feature of all societies, and it won‘t necessarily disappear if inequality declines.
However, it could also be that two other mechanisms are at work.
One is that it is inequalities of power that matter, not (just) income - though the two are of course correlated. In unequal societies, bosses create  stress and anxiety for workers. And societies with unequal incomes are generally societies with stronger bosses and weaker unions, and hence more stress and uncertainty for workers.
Secondly, there’s an interaction between inequality and ideology. Let’s say that big inequality exists for some reason. The just world effect and status quo biases then lead to a subconscious desire to legitimate this inequality - a process aided, if you like, by the capitalist media. Part of this legitimation consists in promoting a narcissistic-individualist ideology, in which success and failure are attributed to individuals’ merits or failings, rather than to luck, social structures or power differentials.
In this sense, inequality breeds “social evaluation anxieties” by promoting an ideology in which personal qualities have undue salience.
Now, I’m not sure how strong these mechanisms are. All I’m saying is that if the left is to invest its hopes in The Spirit Level, it should think more about the precise causal mechanism - if there is one! - between inequality and social problems.
Another thing: Wilkinson and Pickett do not discuss the possibility that inequality also reduces economic growth - an omission which allows some to claim that they are part of the anti-wealth egalitarianism. I’m not sure this is wise.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

"One is that it is inequalities of power that matter, not (just) income - though the two are of course correlated."

That's one of the problems I've had with the book, mostly to do with their treatment of Japan.

"They say that “greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status.” The result is a “threatened egotism”. If the anxieties this creates are directed inwards, they lead to ill-health, and if they are focussed outwards, the result is distrust and violence."

If we take that to be true then we have to take Japan as being a high inequality country. For social status differences are indeed large there.

Yet, in all of their graphs etc, Japan is taken as a low inequality country: because income inequality is low. But, as the example of Japan shows us, status inequality and income inequality are very much not the same thing.

And if they're right about it being that status stuff which produces the bad effects from the inequality...then Japan should show bad, not good, results for it is unequal in status. But it doesn't, so perhaps their supposition about the operative mechanism is wrong?

Or, as an alternative, perhaps different societies are too different to compare in this manner.....which leaves rather a hole in their entire approach.

[Chris]

Worth listening to Radio 4's More or Less interview with Kate Pickett.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless

She does herself no favours.

[Luis Enrique]

I can't help finding the "status stress" mechanism unconvincing. There are lots of more tangible factors that are correlated with equality, and perhaps other cultural correlates with implications for behaviour.

[TheOneEyedMan]

Have you seen "Super Economy"'s discussion of the spirit level? Haven't read the book, but his discussion seemed confined to a factual critique.

1)
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/02/spirit-level-is-junk-science.html

2)
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/07/spirit-level-writers-caught-lying.html

They also seem to have a much detailed critique elsewhere:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/spiritillusion.pdf

[Luis Enrique]

I can't help thinking there's something much simpler going on.

For example, think about the labour supply decision of people at the low end of the "employability" (skill) distribution, in highly unequal societies. How attractive are the jobs on offer to those people, relative to the jobs on offer to similar people in more equal societies? My guess is that in unequal societies, this group face lower-paid, less appealing jobs. Therefore (perhaps) a higher proportion of this group decide there's no point in keeping their noses clean and heads down to hold down a job, and are sufficiently more inclined to unhealthy and criminal behaviour to generate the statistical association between inequality and crime, health.

I don't propose the above with much confidence; I prefer explanations like that to status anxiety, which I just don't see as prevalent or powerful enough.

[Luis Enrique]

another more plausible (to my mind) possible mechanism is that more unequal societies feature greater concentrations of disadvantaged people, with negative consequences for education and peer group effects. If there are increasing negative returns to such things, then you'd get a correlation between inequality and bad things. It could also be that more unequal societies feature stronger assortative mating. Again, these strike me as more powerful explanations than status anxiety.

[ortega]

One more link.

http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/the-spirit-level

[john malpas]

is not inequality and its resolution the reason why something called sport exists. Here it is called competition.It certainly raises [passions.

[Joe Otten]

If Wilkinson and Pickett are correct about status anxiety, perhaps teaching stoicism would be more effective than policies to tackle inequality.