FORUM: Wealth gap makes us all the poorer

Published: 23 June, 2011
by ANDREW JOHNSON

HE probably won’t like the comparison, but Professor Richard Wilkinson, the architect of a ground­breaking report into social inequality, seems more like a veteran movie star than veteran academic.

That is, at 68, he has the craggy good looks, charisma, gravelly voice and presence one expects more from someone like Harrison Ford rather than a retired professor of epidemiology.

The Spirit Level, his book on economics (written with his partner Kate Pickett) has sold 100,000 copies in Britain alone. The book has been published in, or is being prepared for, a further 20 countries. It has galvanised debate and has become a must-read for economists, politicians (David Cameron quotes it) and social equalities campaigners around the world. And he recently chaired a Fairness Commission in the neighbouring borough of Islington. 

The Spirit Level has caught attention because it looks at social inequality purely from a scientific point of view. Wilkinson and co-author Pickett don’t do ethics or morals. 

What they have done is use evidence and data to show that the greater the gap between rich and poor in society the greater the problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, crime and health there are. 

And Britain has one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor of any developed country. “I was very surprised by the coherence of the picture,” he says. “Sometimes our book is called the theory of everything because we deal with drug abuse, literacy scores, teenage births, obesity, mental illness, imprisonment, violence – endless things like that. But it’s not a theory of everything. It’s a theory of those social problems that get more common as you look further down the social scale.”

It’s not just the poor who suffer. The middle classes end up working ridiculously long hours, he says, because the more unequal a society is then the harder it is to keep up with the Joneses; because at the core of consumerist society is status. We are judged by the things we have rather than who we are.

“It’s funny, although I think so many people have that intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive I never thought I’d see it in the crude figures, in the data,” he says. “I didn’t think the difference in inequalities in the Scandinavian countries and Britain and Portugal or any of the other rich developed countries, would make a real difference.”

Wilkinson was educated at a Quaker school in Reading which he left at 16 after not doing terribly well in what were then O-levels. 

“In terms of my family I would have been expected to go to university. But I did very badly at school and left thinking I wouldn’t,” he says.

A four-year stint as a labourer in a garage then gave him his first insight into the effects of social inequality.

“I remember a man who came to work every day in a pinstripe suit and white shirt before getting into his oily overalls,” he says. “Presumably he was a bit embarrassed about doing a manual job. You hear of unemployed people who don’t tell their wives they are unemployed. There is terrible shame and it’s very closely related to the status competition that drives consumerism. Where there are bigger material differences then we judge each other more by status. People use their money to show who they are. Whether it’s unemployed kids who spend hundreds of pounds on a mobile phone (I met a kid who did that because he said the girls wouldn’t talk to you unless you had the right stuff) or whether you’re talking about a super rich banker who has to show it off in terms of a Rolls and fine place in the country and all the rest, they are just as worried by status.”

He returned to education, gaining his 

A-levels at Reading Technical College before studying economic history at the London School of Economics. 

He then became a sociologist and from this epidemiology, which is basically the study of health in society. 

His work on social inequality truly began in the late 1970s.

“I was one of the first people to get into epidemiology from social sciences rather than medicine,” he says. “I started studying health inequalities – the big social class differences in death rates. I suppose in a way what health inequalities did was make us aware how significant health was to social and economic factors. Then we started to recognise how powerful the psycho-social influences on health were.”

What he means by this is that the poor suffer greater levels of anxiety and depression and this has an adverse effect on their physical health because of blood pressure and cardiovascular problems. 

Wilkinson’s big insight was then to wonder if more than health was affected by social inequality.  “We started to look at a few things from physical health to mental health and obesity, teenage births, drug taking – things still related to health – and finding that they all had this pattern of being worse in more unequal countries. We suddenly realised that this was a feature of most of the problems that had become more common at the bottom of the social ladder.

“When I say that, of course violence exists among the richest, and drug abuse and depression, but they all become gradually more common as you look further down the social ladder. Almost all those problems seem to be not just worse but much worse in unequal societies. 

“One of the surprising things is that it’s not just the poor who do worse in unequal societies. Inequality makes most difference to the poor. But even middle class people, on reasonable incomes, well educated, would live a little bit longer in more equal societies. 

“Their children would be less likely to get involved in drugs or become teenage parents; the are less likely to be victims of violence. 

“The benefits of greater equality are smaller at the top and very large at the bottom. But we all benefit. We don’t know about the super rich because they are a fraction of one per cent of the population and we don’t have data on them. But we can say 95 per cent of the population would benefit and maybe more.”

Wilkinson, who lives in York, has published numerous books on the subject. It was an article he wrote in New Society in 1977 that led to the publication of the Black report into social inequality by the then Department of Health and Social Security in 1980.

Perhaps it is credit crunch, the rise of the super rich and the huge bonuses bankers have paid themselves that has led to people sitting up and taking notice of the The Spirit Level and its really capturing the world’s attention.

It was that book that led to Wilkinson being asked to chair the Islington’s Fairness Commission which has finally reported on the scale of inequalities in the borough. 

Wilkinson admits he was reluctant at first, but mainly because of time constraints and also that the discovery of the cause of the disease doesn’t mean he knows the cure. “Understanding a problem has very little to do with how you put it right,” he says.

He is also busy with lectures and talks and sharing his findings through The Equality Trust, which he co-founded. 

He says he stopped counting the number of lectures he has given on the back of it when he reached 500. 

He has spoken to the EU, Unicef, all the political parties, and legions of charities and community groups. 

It’s tempting to suggest that there are two types of people – the egalitarian and the individual. But Wilkinson dismisses this. “You and your friends relate to each other best as equals. You stop playing the social status game,” he says. “You suggest maybe it’s human nature, but actually hunting and gathering societies were extraordinarily egalitarian, based on food exchange and gift exchange. There were societies where the only person who would not eat the meat was the person who killed that animal. It was his gift to the rest of the community. Really inequality starts to grow, you get class societies, with the beginning of agriculture. 

“But for the 90 per cent of our existence as anatomically modern human beings – brains the size of ours and looking as we do now – we’ve been extraordinarily egalitarian. Inequality is recent.”

• Professor Richard Wilkinson is the Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, having retired in 2008. He is also an honorary professor at University College London. His book The Spirit Level, written with Kate Pickett, was published in 2009. He chaired the Fairness Commission in Islington.