By Nicolas Baumard
(LSE-ICCI) In a quite fascinating book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone — the well-off as well as the poor. The remarkable data the book lays out and the measures it uses are like a ‘spirit level’ which we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies. The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem — ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations — is more likely to occur in a less equal society.
Read the rest: Better live in Sweden than in the US: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
