Upstream - The Spirit Level with Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

Episode Date: August 31, 2016

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are the authors of the book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. The Spirit Level not only changed the way we understand and view inequality, it inspired the creation of The Equality Trust, an organization that works to improve the quality of life in the UK by reducing economic inequality. We interviewed them for our 3-part series "Welcome to Frome". Parts of this interview are featured in the series. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, You're listening to an Upstream interview with Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, co-authors of The Spirit Level and co-founders and board members of The Equality Trust. Welcome, Kate and Richard. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. It's nice to be able to do this with you. And let's start with what is the spirit level? Can you introduce us to what the book is about? Well, first I should explain its title. In Britain, a spirit level is what you might call a bubble level or the level that a builder or carpenter uses to check that things are horizontal or vertical. So it's

to do with leveling. And of course, we have lots of graphs with lines at different angles. So it's nothing to do with spirituality. And in the book, we simply looked at the scale of income differences in rich developed societies, and related that to a whole range of health and social problems. Basically showing that more unequal countries like Britain and the United States have higher levels of homicide, more people in prison, lower levels of child well-being, weaker community life, people trust each other less, there are more drug problems, there is more mental illness, there's worse physical health, a whole range of outcomes like those are worse in more unequal societies. And then when you look at the more equal ones like

Japan or the Scandinavian countries, you find they do much better on all those things. A whole range of apparently unrelated problems, all bad in some countries and better in others. So the thing that unites them is that they're all related to relative deprivation in each society, and they all get worse when you increase the scale of income differences in each society. And the other really important thing is that it appears that income inequality affects everybody in society and so that these aren't just effects that relate to poor people or uneducated people or people at the bottom of the social scale. They affect those people more but they affect even those who are well-educated, with good incomes, living in affluent neighborhoods. And so both the average level of problems and the social gradient in those problems is different in more equal and more unequal societies. Yes, so you know that health is

always worst in the poorest areas. So if you draw a sort of gradient, say, in life expectancy between the richest and poorest neighbourhoods, that gets steeper in more unequal societies. And as Kate says, everyone is affected. So when we say that everyone would do better in a more equal society, I mean that if we take you with whatever your income level is, your education, your job, you you would if you lived in a more equal society probably live a little bit longer you'd be less likely to become a victim

of violence your children might do a little bit better at school in these international maths and literacy tests they'd be less likely to become teenage parents or get involved in serious drug addiction. And a nice phrase that our colleagues at Harvard have used is that inequality is like a social pollutant. Its effects are so widespread. Another way you described it in the book was inequality is structural violence. I think a lot of people have talked about inequality in those terms, certainly Gandhi, and I don't know whether he originated that concept or... Yeah, so you mentioned the title, The Spirit Level, and then you also just clarified the

subtitle, which is Why an Equal Society is Better for Everyone. So what about your background? What is your background and what brought you to do the work that you do? Let's start with you because you're older, so you've had more chance for more background. Yes, I'm much older than Kate. I was one of the first people trained in epidemiology who had not done medicine first. So my background actually was economic history. And I think coming from a different background into epidemiology, epidemiology is really about the study of health in populations rather than clinically in individuals or laboratory or whatever. It means you ask different questions. And in economic history, always, you look at death rates as an indication of what's

happening to the standard of living, you know, in the 15th, 16th century, whatever you're looking at. And so for me, it was perfectly natural to think that death rates were influenced by social and economic life. But the particular interest was health inequalities, the big social class differences in death rates. You know, if you take people in professional occupations with people in unskilled manual occupations, in the more egalitarian countries, you might find a four or five year difference in life expectancy. But in more unequal societies, perhaps it's as much as 15 years difference. And it's an extraordinary abuse of human rights. And anyway, as people around the world worked on trying to understand the drivers of health inequalities, we realized rather unexpectedly

how important psychosocial factors were to do with stress and all the sources of stress, which basically lead to something that looks like more rapid aging. You become more vulnerable to a whole range of diseases and physical mental health problems. But then, you know, the idea that stress can influence death rates but doesn't show up anywhere else is absurd. And so when we began to think about maybe it's not just income that drives that, but also a whole range of other problems and looking at income distribution, we gradually became aware that more equal societies have longer life expectancy.

The first work on that was done in the 1970s, not by us at all. Our work really builds on an enormous body of research accumulated since the 1970s. The significant thing about our book is not that it contains new research, but it provides a picture that people can understand and follow easily that's been coming together often in statistically very complicated terms and using difficult methods in academic journals that nobody reads. So Richard started out in the social sciences as an economic historian. I started out in the life sciences as a biological anthropologist and went on to study nutritional sciences

and thought that what I was most interested in was trying to save the world and stop babies starving. So I thought my career would be around trying to prevent the effects of famine and malnutrition in the developing world. And I went to America to study after my first degree and quite soon realized that actually all of the problems that I thought were developing world problems were actually right there on my doorstep in America. Children were stunted, children were suffering from both overnutrition and undernutrition, and all of the kinds of problems that I thought shouldn't be around in a rich,

developed society were there. And so I did want to understand those more. But when I was thinking about a PhD, I thought I would do one just on maternal and child health. And my PhD at Berkeley, my advisor there, Barbara Abrams, said to me, no, you should study epidemiology. And I said, I don't want to, because it's got too much maths in it. And I'm not very good at that. And I've done some statistics before, and I didn't like it. And she said, no, that's what you need to study, because it's a toolkit. And if you've got the toolkit and you've got the methods, you can study the effect of anything you're interested in on any kind of outcome. And that was really good advice. And so then I started to get interested in looking at the social

determinants of health and health inequalities in America, and in particular differences between African Americans and the white population. And through that, I in particular, differences between African Americans and the white population. And through that, I started publishing, working on that. And I met Richard through that mutual interest. I wanted to talk to him about his work. And we found we had lots in common, and sort of lots to talk about. But all to do with the psychosocial influences of society on health and well-being. And where were you when you were seeing this? You said at your doorstep. What were you seeing?

Was it in the Bay Area? No. When I lived in the USA, I lived in upstate New York for four years where poverty is rural poverty. New York for four years, where poverty is rural poverty. Then four years in the Midwest in Bloomington, Indiana, where again, there's lots of differences between different racial ethnic groups, rural urban populations, and then in the Bay Area. Wherever you are in America, those differences are apparent. And here too. And in any British city, you find within the same city, comparing the richest and poorest neighborhoods, huge differences in life expectancy. And once you see that, you sort of see there's a really interesting thorny problem. Why is it in a rich developed country, there are these huge gaps and not just a gap between the rich and the poor, but a gradient, a social gradient in health.

So that even if you are, say, in the second to the top group, whether it's education, income, social class, your health and well-being is a little bit worse than the people at the very top. And so all of our old explanations about the cause of ill health being to do with poverty or material deprivation, you just have to throw those out of the window and think of something else. Yes, as researchers like Michael Marmot have said many times, you can take away all the problem of poverty and poor health

and you still have most of the pattern of health inequalities left because we're all part of that picture. And one of the things that has changed so completely in people's understanding of health inequalities, when I started this kind of work, I've been interested in it since the 1970s, I think we thought our job in terms of understanding health inequalities was to understand what aspect of material circumstances led to more of this or that disease amongst less well-off people but and so we regarded measures of social status social class education all as a proxy for the real factors that lay behind it, which we had to identify. But what's become clear is that social status or social class is a powerful cause in itself

to do with, I think, feelings of superiority and inferiority, to do with different levels of stress and so on. And one of the things that Kate and I have worked on particularly, and we're doing a book on, is really the social anxieties, your worries about how you're seen and judged, which seem to be more powerful in more unequal societies. We're all more worried about, you know, how people rate us, whether they think were people to be paid attention to or whether we're nothing no good so you know that kind of and i find it

extraordinary that the field of epidemiology of people working on on health inequalities was so slow to recognize that the most powerful cause of chronic stress is our worries about how we're seen and judged and I think that the explanation of why we were so slow is that many people senior people are extraordinarily confident they have less of those anxieties and I one of the things I think brought Kate and I together over this is that we both, for different reasons, are rather aware of those kinds of anxieties. I think we've become more confident as we've got older and had more experience and so on. But, you know, mine, I I think came from doing badly at school and so

sort of worries about inferiority like that but I don't know quite where Kate's came from but I see them in little things like her preference for not making phone calls to strangers or that kind of issue so I think it's been easier for us to recognize the extent to which we're all worried about how we're seen and judged, and that social contact can be quite an ordeal, and that that is truer in more unequal societies. Yeah, and how we all are somewhere in the order wherever we are. wherever we are. And I think reading for me, seeing the US dot be so high on the unequal side and so high in the homicide rate and the teen pregnancy rate over and over again, I can't see that without feeling it personally. And then also knowing that California, one of the most unequal states, San Francisco, one of the most unequal cities, you know, there's there's a personal relationship.

So what I'm hearing is that epidemiology is not just numbers and facts that you're storytellers. You're bringing out the story behind and also bringing in a holistic view of psychology. And we bring in we bring in the story through the statistics. And Richard often says that statistics are like a social microscope or lens. So if you're a biologist, you use a microscope to look at tiny things. But if you're interested in whole populations, then you use statistics as your microscope or your lens to look at different patterns. And that is not going to tell you an untruth.

It is going to reflect the differences that people feel and experience about living in those different places. But the relationships still have to be interpreted. And how you interpret them will depend on your worldview and your personal experience. One of the things we have found, because we've done hundreds of talks now since our book was published to different kinds of audiences across the world, is how often you're speaking to an audience

and they're just nodding because they experience this in the place where they live. They know what you're talking about. They feel it. Particularly when you talk to poorer community groups, they'll say, didn't we know this before? Whereas sometimes if you're talking to, well, at least to some economists, they need a lot of convincing that inequality has damaging social effects.

Yeah. And one of the last chapters of the book is about research and politics. So can you talk a little bit about that, about how kind of proving it with the statistics, with this stuff can then lead to stronger arguments for policy change or things like that? Well, we've got a great colleague at the University of Liverpool, Alex Scott-Samuel, who says that most government policy is reliant on policy-based evidence-making rather than evidence-based policy-making as it ought to be. It's really difficult actually to bring evidence into policy-making because most politicians are there with an ideological point of view and they don't understand the nature of evidence. Remember how often we would be asked to go and speak to politicians

in some kind of political setting, and then we would find they had no setup for us being able to show them evidence. PowerPoint? Projectors? It's really extraordinary. Academics always use that sort of stuff. And politicians... Just talk. They just talk. Yes, they don't show evidence. politicians just talk they just talk yes they don't they just talk from their own opinion and we are used in an academic setting to if people in the audience

have questions you answer them politicians i've noticed have wonderful techniques for just ignoring questions they don't want to answer or if they feel might be hostile or switching them off sidestepping them but i think the main effect our book has actually is what we call um sort of stiffening the resolve of closet egalitarians that i think certainly when we were writing people didn't talk about inequality as a problem you know this was 2007 or 2008 when we were writing the book. And although many people for hundreds of years, I mean, since the French Revolution or before, have had an intuition that inequality is divisive and corrosive,

it's always been regarded as a sort of just a personal hunch. But as soon as the data comes available, so you can really compare income differences in different societies and see what inequality does, that private intuition becomes something that stands up in hard data. And I think it then makes people more confident to argue their corner. It becomes something politically stronger than it was before. So it can be used at all levels.

I mean, it can be used at the level of international politics because we're providing comparative information about how different countries do. It can be used at a national level to stiffen the resolve of politicians or policymakers or voters to pursue things that would actually lift or improve health and social outcomes in a society. It can be used at local level far more than I ever anticipated. And individuals can use it as a way to think about what they value, what they campaign for, what they advocate, how they vote. Yes and in terms of the book we're writing about these worries about how you're seen and judged and we can demonstrate that they're worse in more unequal societies. Again I think people regard that as, you know, one's social insecurity. People regard it as just a private problem.

You know, I have this sort of weakness. I always... And they write on websites, don't they? What's wrong with me? How bad I feel? Is it just me? And so I think people either regard it simply as their own private personal problem or perhaps they regard it as part of the human condition but they certainly don't see these

things as as worse in some societies and better in others or susceptible to policy changes so it's we we hope to be able to make some progress in that field, really bringing the externalities of inequality out there in the big society right into people's sort of intimate, personal world, their feelings about how they relate to other people and so on. Yeah, we interviewed someone named Dr. Keely McBride in San Francisco, a professor at USF, and she said that we need to make the personal economic political, kind of a play on the feminist, the personal is political. And just this idea that, yeah, a lot of people who think, why can't I get a job? Or why can't I move up? It's personal, it's personal. And so they don't look to the systemic reasons. Yeah, there's something wrong with me, I'm lazy, or I'm stupid, or I have some other problem. Yeah. And so would you say that this kind of information has helped people see, or help people question, is this just me?

I think it can. Of course, when you write a book, like we wrote, it reaches a particular audience. And many of the people who are suffering the most from the impact of inequality would never actually read a full length book full of graphs. And however easy we try to make that kind of story, it's hard for some people to engage with that. And so we do need to find other to to talk to people about the impact of inequality but in a way the main thing is building the sort of social movement that's able to start to to shift policy uh related to income differences basically the you asked me about politics earlier and uh in the end of the spirit level book we do talk about ways of reducing

income differences basically two ways you can redistribute people's incomes through taxes and benefits that's rather the pattern of the scandinavian countries but you can also start off with smaller differences in earnings and And of course, one of the major reasons why inequality has increased so much in many developed countries is that the rich have run away from the rest of us, you know, the bonus culture and those huge salaries at the top, and that disease has spread downwards a little bit. So more inequality. And I think that it does take a large social movement to make a major difference. And if you look at income differences in most of the developed world in the 20th century, the very high inequalities in the 1920s, but in the 1930s,

they start coming down in the United States under Roosevelt. But inequality has gone reducing almost continuously until the 1970s. And it's from about 1980 on that you get the modern rise of inequality with neoliberalism, Reagan and Thatcher. But if you look at a marker of the sort of strength of the social democratic movement, the strength of the labor movement, or what I call the countervailing voice in society, trade union membership as a proportion of the labor force, you find it's exactly the opposite of that U-shaped distribution of inequality during the 20th century. of inequality during the 20th century, inequality comes down when the labour movement is becoming stronger and inequality rises again when the labour movement gets weaker. And that's a very strong relationship and you see it in lots of different countries. And it tells us something about the scale of movement we need to really shift to a different kind of society that we have to do not just for

the sake of inequality, but also to move towards sustainability. But I don't think we're going to be able to recreate strong trade unions to the extent that we had them. I think we have to move to greater economic democracy, by which I mean not only employee representatives on company boards, hopefully larger and larger proportion over time until employees perhaps a majority control, but also giving more incentives to cooperatives and employee-owned companies, which increasingly evaluations show that they do better in productivity terms and socially they do better as well because they change the relationships between employees

no longer divided quite so rigidly in terms of order givers and line management and so on it becomes more of a community Did you see the report today from UK cooperatives? No. Oh, I got an email. Massive growth in cooperatives. Huge growth just over the last year.

And increasing evidence that cooperatives are productive, efficient. Yeah, and I believe particularly in recessions, they're better at uh coping with and cooperatives are just one sort of flavor of economic democracy so the whole social enterprise movement is growing and growing the sharing economy is but about half the members of the european community half the countries in the european community have some legislation for requiring employee representatives on remuneration committees or company boards. It's weak in many countries, but strong in Germany,

for instance, where the different requirements in terms of levels of employee representation in different sized companies, but when they get to 2000 employees, half the representatives on the remuneration committees have to be employee representatives. And of course, that means that they haven't had quite such a big rise in inequality. And so those firms not only do better, but they're fairer. And what about the idea of changing the goal of the economy? So the kind of gross national happiness versus gross domestic product and growth. I know that you both have been to Bhutan.

So what's your connection with that? Well, I mean, that's a growing worldwide movement. The beyond GDP movement, the gross national happiness movement, the well-being movement. So there are people across the world from all sorts of different disciplinary backgrounds who are recognizing that our traditional methods of measuring the progress of a society, GDP, is really awful. I mean, GDP measures terrible things as positives, doesn't recognize positive things as positive because they don't actually add cash into the economy, etc. And so it's a really broad movement and there's lots of different strands of it.

Lots of different measures being proposed as how you would measure societal progress. Gross national happiness is an incredibly interesting one. It's not really about happiness as we in the West define happiness. It is about well-being across the environment, culture, work, health and well-being. There's the Genuine Progress Indicator, which tries to do what GDP did, but taking out the bads and counting the positives. Some people think we should just measure life satisfaction across the population. The Office for National Statistics in the UK now measures well-being. We had the Sarkozy initiative in France where economists were invited,

world-leading economists were invited to propose a different set of measures. So I think that's really spreading. So I think that's really spreading. It hasn't yet gained enough traction in enough countries to really shift away from GDP. But some American states are now using GPI. The Genuine Progress Indicator. no longer use GDP and that they will look at something else. Butan kind of leads the world in thinking about how you conceptualize a different kind of progress. It's a big movement, I think. Yes, and I feel often there's still a misunderstanding even amongst environmentalists about it.

And for instance, the Genuine Progress Indicator, you know, measures like that of how well societies are doing, well-being and so on, used to rise with GNP per capita. But from usually sometime in the 1970s, they parted companies. So we go on getting apparently richer according to measures of GNP per capita. And yet, when you take out air pollution and having to have more police if there's more crime and take out car crashes all those things that are bad that add to economic growth you find that economic growth isn't producing improvements in those terms but that's still based on the idea that if we had more of of the goods that would be beneficial to us. But if you look at measures of

life satisfaction, or even life expectancy, you find it rises rapidly in the early stages of economic growth in the poorer countries. So developing countries need economic growth. But amongst middle income and richer countries, it levels off. And so Western Europe, the United States, most of the OECD countries, there is now no longer any connection between rises in real living standards, material living standards, incomes, and measures, as I say, either of well-being or life expectancy. And it's not only just when you look at it sort of at a point of time, cross-sectionally, looking at different countries, but even if you compare changes in life expectancy and changes in rates of economic growth over 20 or 40 years, you don't find relationships. And that's because having more

higher material standards is really important in poorer countries where people haven't got basic necessities. But for us in the rich world, having more and more of everything makes less and less difference. It's no longer crucial to our well-being to have a higher material standard. It's not just a matter of taking out the bads. It's that our material standards are high enough. And actually, the way we should now be improving the real quality of our lives, now that that's no longer an effective method, is by improving the quality of the social environment.

You know, what really matters to people, if you look at the work that's been done on happiness, is social involvement, the quality of your relationships, how many friends you've got, whether you're involved in community life. And interestingly, the same is true in health. There have been many, many studies of the effect of friendship on health, and a review of 150 of those concluded that whether or not you have friends is at least as important, perhaps marginally more important than whether or not you smoke to your survival over follow-up period.

And it's not just in observational studies where you try and control out the effects of income and education that they might be influencing health. It's also if you do little experiments, so you make puncture wounds on the arms of volunteers and watch how quickly they heal. They heal more slowly if you have bad relationships or give people nasal drops with cold viruses in. So all the volunteers get the same measured exposure to infection, and ones with fewer friends are four times as likely to catch colds, even after you've measured the levels of antibodies to the various cold viruses beforehand. So the social environment, social relationships, are fundamental to health and happiness.

It's no longer a matter simply of material standards. Having time for friends, family, community, which is the most important thing, and one of the really powerful ways we can improve social connectedness, is through lowering income differences because they are divisive. There's lots of data, lots of studies now showing that community life weakens where there's more inequality and people trust each other less. There's more violence and so on. One way that expresses that rather well, I mean, there are studies which show that in more unequal countries, people are less helpful towards each other.

They're less willing to help old people and less willing to help disabled people. But if you go to places like Mexico or South Africa, where the income differences, the inequality is absolutely appalling, much bigger than in the United States or Britain. than in the United States or Britain. You find that there, of course, everyone has fences around their gardens, bars on their windows and doors, razor wire around the top or electric fences. And in South Africa, we saw a number of houses that have notices on these fences saying armed response.

You know, if you're seen trying to get in, you may be shot. And that, in a way, shows what inequality does, how you move from a society where the people are involved with each other, there's reciprocity, people more helpful, to a society where people actually are frightened of each other and you defend yourselves from each other. And another study which adds to that picture shows that as countries have become more unequal, a larger part

of the labor force is involved in what people call guard labor, police, security staff, prison staff, people like that, who, you who are really employed to defend some people from other people. It goes with gated communities and so on. We came quite far from the question there. But just to pull us back a little bit, it's quite clear that we can do much, much better at measuring societal progress or well-being than we've done in the past and it's also really really clear that the distribution of whatever it is you're measuring matters so if you're measuring well-being and you're saying the economy should be about maximizing optimizing human well-being that's great but you've also got to make sure that you're optimizing it for everybody not just for those yes but in a way what i was saying is is not far from the question because

it's about how you how inequality can improve the quality of the social environment and how as we move towards environmental sustainability we can actually get a higher quality of life through improvements in the social environment and social relationships and indeed i mean from our perspective that is so true that actually if you simply measured inequality as your measure of how a society is doing it would probably tell you as much as you needed to know as if you had a complex measure of genuine progress or gross national happiness or whatever. Kate and I are rather keen on using more objective measures, because I think the international differences in how people report happiness and so on.

Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that, because somebody had told me that when I ask about inequality, and when I kind of talk about the divide in a community, it may exacerbate it. And so it's actually better to bring people together to move towards something, such as a community where there's greater trust, or greater connection. Do you feel that way that talking about inequality can actually make people feel more aware of their status? Well, I don't think people feel worse when they feel more informed. I think they feel more engaged and capable of perhaps taking action. And actually it's validation of what it is that they're actually experiencing. and actually it's validation of what it is that they're actually experiencing. It's not that they didn't know that they had these feelings or didn't know that they have this status in their society. It's that they don't know necessarily what it means and that that can actually be seen in the data, can be seen in the outcomes.

I think the analogies with feminism in the 70s where the high rates of depression amongst women at home with small children and the sort of sense that it was a personal failing, a personal weakness or inadequacy which feminism helped to overcome. It's the same with the various social anxieties around inequality and i think that realizing that this is not just my private uh inadequacy or something but a problem we all share yeah i don't think i don't think our research can be presented to people and they go oh i didn't know i was suffering from that of course they know they're suffering from that, I didn't know I was suffering from that. Of course they know they're suffering from that. They just didn't know the label. That it's so widespread.

That it's so widespread and everybody else is suffering from it and that there are things they can do. I think it will lead people to be able to share and talk about that. I do worry, though, about how some people say to us when they read our research or hear these points of view, they say, why don't we just try to make people feel better? You know, why don't we just try to make them feel better about their status? Wouldn't that solve it? or doing something about offshore banking or doing something about living wage or doing something about economic democracy. All of those things are far easier than actually trying to change people's psychological evolved response to feeling disrespected or judged by other people.

In a way, if you like, a central part of that problem is that the strong tendency we all have to judge people from their position in society. Some people are brilliant and other people are stupid. That sort of idea. And with that goes the idea that people have a sort of natural endowment of talent and that determines where they end up in the social hierarchy. But most of the differences in ability go the other way round. The result of what position your family is in the hierarchy, yes, where you're brought up. That has a much more powerful influence on how you turn out than it doesn't work the other way around,

which is how most people imagine and is used as a justification of the social hierarchy all the time. This is a meritocracy. Yes, it's a meritocracy. You get what you deserve. But, of course, going with that is the evidence that actually social mobility is lower where there's greater inequality. You have less chance of moving up in a more unequal society. It's nothing to do with fairness or there's no justification. Yeah, so maybe it's about both inner and outer process, recognizing how I may feel in a certain situation when I'm feeling shame or pride, or when I'm judging someone else by their status, and being aware of that, being mindful of that,

and recognizing that and seeing how that might be part of my socialization, as well as seeing how that connects to the systemic issue of inequality. Yes, but I think the point I think is really worth emphasizing is that, you know, you can decide, okay, I should be nice to everyone, whatever their position and so on. But we do have that strong tendency to drudge people's internal worth, their personal worth from their external wealth. And to feel affronted if that is not recognized. Yes, and that is why low social status is is harmful and of course many people in in low status jobs born into them they lived in in poorer circumstances all their life even they interpret themselves in that light. I'm here because I'm stupid. Yeah, I can't do any better. I remember a friend I used to spend a lot of time with, talking to, who was an unskilled building worker,

and he didn't realize I'd had twice as many years of education as he had. He left school at the youngest possible age, whereas I'd done higher degrees at university. Ad nauseum. So what would you say, this show is called Upstream, what would you say are the root causes of inequality? If the research is there and the story is clear and people are closet egalitarians, then why does inequality persist? And in fact, why is it even growing today? I think that Paul Krugman says very clearly that the big changes in inequality of the 20th

century have been driven by politics. And as I said, the power of the labor movement or social democratic parties and ideology, the sort of countervailing ideology, as that just disappeared in the late 1970s, neoliberalism took over and it led to dramatic lowering of top tax rates, the privatization of utilities, and more recently to the dramatic cutting of welfare systems, public expenditure in different societies. But even that I don't think was the main process. It's the takeoff of unconstrained takeoff of top incomes before tax. An interesting publication from OECD shows that the countries which most lowered top tax rates have had the biggest rise in pre-tax incomes.

Now, you'd have thought if you're rich and I lower your tax rates, you're going to be happier with what you've got. You've got more of it left after tax. But it seems that when top tax rates were 80 or 90 percent, it wasn't worth your while to get your friends on the directorship to vote you a bigger salary. But as soon as you can keep most of it, it is worth your while doing that. And so the countries which have had the biggest lowering of top tax rates have had the biggest growth in pre-tax incomes,

and really a dramatic effect. And it's nothing to do with performance. The bonus culture is almost completely unrelated to company performance. But I think it's also worth really asking, where does political will come from? So clearly inequality is driven by politics, what politicians do. So where does their political will to create change come from? So clearly inequality is driven by politics, what politicians do. So where does their political will to create change come from? And there I think we draw hope from looking at all of the huge social change that's happened over the past 50, 60, 70 years, where nobody would probably have anticipated the fast and rapid changes we've seen in how people view other people from different ethnic racial groups, how people view women's roles, how they view those

who have different sexuality. So suddenly we find ourselves in the 21st century in most Western developed nations, thinking it's not okay to be racist. It's not okay to be a misogynist it's not okay to be homophobic of course there are still pockets and battles to fight but we've seen huge social change in those particular arenas none of that came about because a politician decided to push that or grant people those rights that all came about because grassroots movements called for it and called for it persistently so if we talk about what creates political will it is the will of the people that shapes political will and the the ability willingness of politicians policymakers to do what the people are calling for. And so I think what we're hoping and what we hope to see the shift being is that in a few years,

I don't want to put a number on it, it will be as socially unacceptable to be seen to be greedy and out for yourself and materialistic and just fighting for what you can get as it is now to be seen to be racist homophobic etc and indeed and this links up with the environmental movement because it's part of the change in attitudes we need to move towards sustainability and one of the reasons why greater equality is essential to sustainability is not just because the rich the world over have a much bigger carbon footprint. It's also because these worries about how you're seen and judged, one of the ways they express themselves is you try and express your worth through consumerism. The status consumption items, the clothes you wear, the labels, the car, what part of town, you know, we use our incomes to express our worth, to communicate our worth.

It's a very alien form of social communication, but you can see the effect of inequality on that in that people in more unequal societies work longer hours. They save less. They go bankrupt more. They get into debt more. They also spend more of their money on status goods. So if you live in a more unequal area, you're more likely to buy a flashy car, even when comparing people with the same level of income. That has a priority. And so status competition driven by inequality or intensified by inequality increases consumerism

and what we call materialism, but is actually this very alien form of social communication. Need more research in this area. We've got indicators that this is the case, particularly from the United States, much less from the UK, almost nothing from Europe, I don't think. And how does this connect to shame and pride? Shame and pride are absolutely essential to it. There's a psychologist who said shame is the social emotion. We are all worried about looking stupid or odd in front of other people the embarrassment the awkwardness so powerful people say it's what makes us conform that we want to be

acceptable and seen as sort of behaving properly think of the lovely woman in the divide who's the care worker in um the northeast who's on quite a low income the divide film and remember in the film she's opening her catalog bill so this is her her debt to a catalog company for buying goods and her friend is really shocked by how big the bill is and she's like oh they all need they need things you know her daughter wants a computer because all of her friends have got one they often need new shoes you know there's a huge push downwards on her financially to keep up status wise and so she's got this enormous debt because she wants the best for her kids and that's why presumably goes up with inequality and then credit credit cards come in to allow more consumption.

And so those issues to do with pride and shame are why low social status hurts, being regarded as inferior. And, you know, people talk about inequality simply as a matter of sort of how you cut up the cake between self-interested, asocial individuals. So it only really matters because we all want more, and so we should cut it up fairly is a sort of naive idea of inequality or why inequality matters.

But it's much more important in these psychosocial terms where it is to do with superiority and inferiority and these worries about how you're seen and judged and you know they go straight on into things like violence because why violence so many studies have shown is more common in more unequal societies is it's people it's triggered by people feeling looked down on and loss of face and humiliation. I was listening to the radio coming home. There's a programme about mental health on the radio every week, and they have awards every year.

And they were discussing somebody who'd been nominated for an award this year, and it was a social worker who'd worked with somebody who'd been in prison for a double murder, been in prison for over a quarter of a century. And he had nominated her because he said she was the first person he had ever encountered who treated him with respect and love. And that all his life, those two things had been missing. And you hear those personal stories again and again, but of course you can always dismiss a story as just an anecdote

but a story illuminates statistics so we need both we need to understand those stories and understand people's experiences in the light of what the data are telling us yes going with that nice stories in a way that inequality is about being valued um or people being devalued and that again is how it relates to pride and shame so what are the questions the inquiries that you're left with now that you're looking at you mentioned the the grant that you just got what are what are the things that you're interested in looking at now or the projects you're looking at? You mentioned the grant that you just got. What are the things that you're interested in looking at now or the projects you're working on? Well, we've touched a little bit on the book we're just finishing, which won't be out until sometime next year,

which is about the way in which inequality increases social anxiety. Just to fill in a little bit, as we become more worried about status and how we're seen and judged, you know, in societies where the rich are seen as hugely important and the poor are seen as almost worthless, there seem to be two responses to our increased worries. One is that you can be overcome with lack of confidence, low self-esteem, One is you can be overcome with lack of confidence, low self-esteem. You withdraw from social relationships because it's all rather strenuous.

But the other is you respond in the opposite way. You talk yourself up. You go in for sort of self-advertisement, self-aggrandizement. Instead of being modest about your abilities and achievements, you find little ways of bringing them into conversation and making sure everyone around the table knows what a capable, successful person you are. And you see both these responses increased in more unequal societies. Well, there is a third option as well.

You can go under, you can claw up, or you can just try and find another way to make yourself feel better so we see the rise of um substance abuse gambling yes comfort eating um compulsive shopping in a way i think that's all the different kinds of ways in which you try and actually avoid going under yes and make yourself feel better about not being able to climb up in a way responses to anxiety to social anxiety but i think i think that's a much broader array of behaviors than we talked about in the spirit level do you have any other questions that you're thinking about right now or exploring? Definitely the link between inequality and consumption much, much more. In my work in Bradford, much more to do with the intergenerational perpetuation of inequality.

How do families pass on disadvantage or not? What shapes children's life trajectories? or not, you know, what shapes children's life trajectories. But as much as anything, since we published The Spirit Level, we've become more and more engaged in campaigning, activism, policy-related kind of work, trying to work at different scales to actually change the way people think and act about inequality. so we've served on fairness commissions in the uk we work with some international groups like the alliance for sustainability and prosperity richard advised on the inequality goal for the sustainable development goals and we try to do what we can nationally we founded the equality trust here in the uk to really campaign but basically we do vast amounts of speaking at mostly what we do is go and talk to people

and can you talk a little bit about the book a convenient truth and also the equality trust and what what you do with that work well the equality trust is the easy one it's just set up to campaign to reduce inequality mainly by making people aware of its damaging effects so it's a charity campaigning for greater equality it has a small number of staff and depends on largely on grants for its maintenance but we also have a large number of affiliated local groups who, you know, they don't belong to us, but they're affiliated and they campaign mostly on local issues. So if there's a local election coming up, they'll do hustings,

they might have a local campaign. I think there are, what, 20 or 30 local groups in Britain? I've lost count, so I wouldn't like to say. And a similar number, I think, of contacts internationally. So basically it seems to me that publicist opinion is moving in a more progressive direction. I suppose between the late 70s and the financial crash, everything was moving to the right.

And I think with the financial crash, it started to move back again. Obviously, political opinion is very divided. But I think the support for Sanders in the States and Corbyn in Britain shows the beginning of a broader progressive movement. I don't think they'll initially be politically successful, but I think it bodes well in the long run, whereas people on the right tend to be older, worse educated, and not to have made the changes

Kate was talking about earlier in overcoming the sort of homophobia and racism and so on to a lesser extent. So I think that both in terms of the age differences and these new movements and the need to make these changes to deal with environmental problems means that things are moving in our direction. And we wrote A Convenient Truth really to draw attention to that nexus, that connection between inequality, well-being and sustainability, and to set out

an agenda for change that was really focused on economic democracy as the key vehicle and to provide a list of points. So it's published by Fabian Society, which is a British left-wing think tank, but in conjunction with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, which is a German-based think tank. And you can download it for free. It's just a pamphlet on the Fabian Society

website. And who's the audience of the book? Well, as always, we hope everybody... I suppose the hope was to influence the british labor party because uh the fabian society it's it thinks it's the oldest um think tank in in the world it's democratic it has i don't know seven or eight thousand members and it's controlled democratically they elect the board and the board decides on the publication strategy. It produced the ideas that were really behind

and guiding the early Labour Party in Britain, and people like Bernard Shaw, Fabians. But it's certainly a non-academic audience that we're aiming at with this. We continue to publish academic papers in peer-reviewed journals that nobody reads but we try to keep on pushing stuff out in parallel that's written for a wider audience well thank you for the work that you're doing

thank you for listening to us for so long thank you you've been listening to an upstream interview with Kate Pickett and richard wilkinson for more episodes and interviews please visit upstreampodcast.org The smoke is rising in the whole place The fire's booming from the bones that break To the morning we run To shoreline

Calling us to speak outside Waves under the earth and throats Casting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea

Snowgates rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sense Plates under the earth and the rocks