Equality
From Understanding Society authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, income inequalities as such are a source of a variety of social problems in any society. They find that there is a strong negative relationship between income inequalities and social well-being, and that the relationship is causal. Income inequality erodes health and social well-being.
Further, they maintain that these relationships persist in affluent societies.
Their Index of Health and Social Problems comprises 10 equally weighted factors: level of trust, mental illness, life expectancy and infant mortality, obesity, children’s educational performance, teenage births, homicides, imprisonment rates, and social mobility.
The resulting scatter plot lines the countries up impressively:
Social problems and income inequality
The US is almost off the scale at the bad end, with Japan at the good end. Australia and New Zealand are at the wrong end of the middle cluster.
While the author of the post is not convinced, their thesis sounds good to me. But then it fits with my values and I’m not competent to unpick the sociology.
Nevertheless I was encouraged to find support in this New York Times article. The contention is that the thirst for fairness runs deep:
Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match. As Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has pointed out, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.
According to David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York,
“Chimps are very smart, but their intelligence is predicated on distrust.”
He thinks that the ability to throw stones at an alpha male at a distance may have been a critical adaptation in our evolution.
Dr Katarina Gospic of the Karolinska Institute’s Osher Center in Stockholm and her colleagues undertook an experiment which she says
indicates that the act of treating people fairly and implementing justice in society has evolutionary roots,“ Dr. Gospic said. “It increases our survival.”
Wilson thinks that equality within groups allowed us to dominate the earth. But equality is not absolute. For example, there is a sense of justice in the rewards that follow effort. Cross cultural studies indicate that there were gradients of wealth and power in traditional societies. A recent study of five such societies “found the average degree of income inequality to be roughly half that seen in the United States, and close to the wealth distribution of Denmark.”
Interestingly, another recent study found that when Americans were given the chance to construct their version of the optimal wealth gradient for America, both Republicans and Democrats came up with a chart that looked like Sweden’s.
They do seem to be on the wrong path, then.
I’m in full agreement with Pickett and Wilkinson, but I think the optimal wealth gradient experiment provides much better support for their argument than the evolutionary psychology stuff.
I distrust the form of such arguments from anthropology (because that is what they really are – I don’t see any actual reasoning that behaviour is “innate” because it manifested that way in prehistory).
The actual story is that with the agriculture came surpluses, and hierarchies to distribute and control them. “Primitive communism” among nomadic bands strikes me as a sort of pre-Lapsarian fall narrative.
I don’t think it has anything much to say about either possible or optimal social arrangements in the 21st century.
I suspect that both conflict and co-operation are anthropological universals, and that the balance between the two is dependent on culture and the sum of the choices (conscious and unconscious) that bring about social change.
Hi,
The “optimal wealth gradient” study in the US has been replicated in Australia by some local researchers as well as the original US authors. Here’s the paper: http://www.actu.org.au/Images/Dynamic/attachments/7282/ACTU-Report-Inequality-and-Minimum-%20Wage.pdf
It was a paper commissioned by the ACTU. Full disclosure: I work for the ACTU.
Thanks for the link, Matt C. On a quick skim, interesting material.
Mark, I think some of the experiments they do where they set up an artificial game-playing situation and monitor brain patterns must be somewhat artificial. It’s hard to imagine how such experiments would be organised.
Other than that I take the point about agriculture, and agree. On ‘primitive’ societies I think co-operation came to the for within groups, which immeasurably enhanced their survival prospects, whereas competition between groups was at times likely to cause conflict, but perhaps not as much as we might imagine because of the cost to each group. But I’m getting well outside my zone of competence in even saying that.
I think the case for arguing that there is a strong health gradient by income within countries is overwhelming.
As an income distribution pedant, however, there are lots of problems with this chart, the most notable of which is that Japan is not and never was a low income inequality country. Until the 1990s the income surveys for Japan left out all single person and self-employed households – or about 40% of the population. Studies that corrected for this estimated that Japanese inequality was above the OECD average. (I can send references if wanted.) It seems likely that Japan’s good health outcomes are likely to be better explained by diet than income distribution.
More recent data than that used by Wilkinson and Pickett complicate the picture quite a lot. For example, Denmark has worse health outcomes than other Nordic countries, but has had lower income inequality for a long period (they smoke a lot). Many of the countries shown here as having lower inequality than Australia don’t (e.g. Greece, Italy, Ireland and Spain, and more recently Canada). New Zealand has had higher inequality than Australia since the end of the 1980s. Overall, there is a lot more bunching in the middle of the income inequality distribution for countries than shown here.
I certainly agree that reducing the degree of inequality in health outcomes is very important, but I don’t think that international income inequality comparisons provide a sound basis for this argument.
Peter W, thanks for that. A couple of points.
I wondered about Japan’s positioning on the income inequality scale. It seems with reason.
Anecdotally from relatives who worked there, Japan seems to have a pretty effective health system. But the index is about more than health. There was an article in the AFR by their long-time Japanese correspondent, who happened to be in Tokyo when the recent tsunami hit. He said that Japanese people helping each other at times of crisis was (figuratively) in their DNA, as was their tendency not to panic, riot or anything similar.
Matt C: Figure 10 of that report you linked to was very interesting.
Predictable that just about everyone except the richest LNP supporters would support an increase in the minimum wage. But what was suprising to me was the support that raising the minimum wage across the rest of the community, even amongst LNP supporters who are less wealthy.
Doesn’t look like mob rule is working very well for Australia – seems like the rich LNPers are getting their way.
Actually Australia are relatively at the good end, in that we’re below the line. For our income inequality (which is only a subjective moral question*) we achieve the same objective index scores as France and Austria, better than Ireland or Greece.
* I accept the view that more equal societies are happier, but I understand this is contested.
Brian, I think that article is probably a useful corrective to claims that inequality and brutish competition is “natural” or “innate”, but only within the terms of that particular way (wrong imho) of seeing things.
As I often point out you will frequently see two or more bonobos carrying on together without being married.
Wow– first impression of the graph, we have, for our relatively high income inequality, pretty good social and health outcomes.
Puts the EU countries to shame.
Mind you the relationship between the two axis is arbitrary– things might look different if the income inequality axis wasn’t flattened out so much.
USA is an outlier– nothing unusual there.
There is another important problem with this comparison, in that the strong relationship in levels does not hold in the changes. That is, reductions in income inequality are not associated with significant improvements in health outcomes. Andrew Leigh had some useful posts on this back when he was blogging.
It is a pity that both Mark and Brian express support for Pickett and Wilkinson, because their work has been very strongly criticised (particularly from Snowdon, but also people like Andrew Leigh), showing their overall thesis to be unsustainable.