Is inequality worse for us than poverty? That’s what Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue, sometimes convincingly, in their book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.

Wilkinson and Pickett examine income inequality across 23 countries. (Income inequality is measured in many ways, but one typical measure is to compare the income of the richest 20% of the population to the income of the poorest 20% of the population.) In Japan, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the richest 20% are about four times as rich as the poorest 20%. At the other end of the spectrum (i.e., the U.S. and Singapore), that is more than doubled, which is to say that the U.S. has very high inequality (only Singapore is worse).

Does it matter? Absolutely, say Wilkinson and Pickett. They tie inequality to many of our major social populations:

If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police. You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse, and every other kind of problem.

Take the example of health and life expectancy. The United States spends more per person ($6,000) on healthcare than any other country. You’d think that would at least put us in the top half for life expectancy, wouldn’t you? But no. In fact, only 3 of the 23 countries have lower life expectancies than the U.S. (those would be Portugal, which spends about $1,800 per person; Denmark, which spends about $2,800 per person; and Ireland, which spends about $2,500 per person). Highest life expectancy goes to Japan, which spends about $2,200 per person. The same pattern holds for infant mortality and teen pregnancy (see chart).

Conclusion? The more equally wealth is distributed in a society, the better the health of that society. They examine social relations, mental health, drug use, life expectancy, violence and homicide rates, obesity, education, teen pregnancy rates, incarceration rates and social mobility. The pattern holds.

Not convinced? They also look at inequality within the United States, and compare many of these same social ills across states, and the same pattern obtains. The authors contend that if the United States could reduce its income inequality to the average of the four most equal countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland), we would see:

• The proportion of the population feeling they could trust others increase by 75%
• Rates of mental illness drop by two-thirds
• Rates of obesity drop by two-thirds
• Teen birth rates cut in half
• Prison populations reduced by 75%

Now that’s something worth striving for!

I’ve been reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford for the last couple of weeks, and I can’t remember the last time I felt so ambivalent about a book. (Okay, I checked and it was 2005—Cool Memories by Jean Baudrillard, which alternately infuriated and impressed me.) Shop Class as Soulcraft is having a similar effect. 

For example, passages like the following infuriate me:

So now, if you go to a Toyota dealership to look at a Scion (their cheaper, youth-oriented brand), you get a brochure full of pictures of crazy custom Scions, and profiles of the custom fabricators who have built them, typically with a welding helmet perched just so on their heads, and the obligatory wife beater. 

And: 

If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him.

I found this annoying sexist writing woven throughout the book.

On the other hand, he challenges some assumptions that many of us hold dear, and with very good reasoning. The one that stopped me in my tracks was higher education in general and advanced degrees in particular. Crawford’s criticism isn’t based on envy; he has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. He was the executive director of a think tank for a while, and is currently a motorcycle mechanic and also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. 

I think what made him begin to question the value of higher education was his first job after getting his master’s degree: “My new job was to read articles in academic journals, index them under established categories, and write abstracts of about two hundred words.” For someone who loves to read and has a broad interest base, it sounds like a dream job.

But as it turns out, not so much. The job is based on the assumption that in writing an abstract, there is a method that merely needs to be applied. There is no need to actually understand the article. Doesn’t that seem a little odd? The starting quota was 15 articles a day. Indexed and abstracted. Before he had been there a year, the quota was up to 28.

Twenty-eight.

That’s a lot of abstracts. I would be pleased as punch if I could index and abstract five academic articles in one day.

Crawford found that meeting the quota “required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus.” Seriously, a good academic article can take hours to read and fully understand. (A bad one can take even longer.)

He questions the increasing educational credentials many employers require—often without evidence that the additional education will make them better at those jobs. He references a study of air traffic controllers—a job requiring complex decision making—which found an inverse correlation between educational achievement and job performance. Seriously. Think about that.

And that is why I am enjoying this book. It makes me think. It causes me to question some of my assumptions. 

And that is one of my definitions of an excellent book.