More equal societies do better at almost everything
Nov 06, 2009
from Ben Duncan's entry on Ben's Bookshop:
The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson is a statistical
romp through the data on a range of social ills: mental ill-health,
teenage pregnancy levels, poor life expectancy, levels of crime and
violence in society, and so on, and it finds something that is either
remarkable, or stands to reason, depending on your perspective.
In
short, Picket and Wilkinson conclude, the more equal a society is - the
smaller the gap between the richest and poorest, in other words - the
better that society performs, at pretty much everything, for pretty
much everyone.
For example, they look at levels of crime and violence, and find that
they are far more prevalent in countries like the USA, UK and Portugal
and far less common in, say, Japan and Norway. This seems to be exactly
as you'd expect if you were looking for a link between violence levels
and inequality - but shows that crime levels are relatively unaffected
by harsher punishments - indeed, they show, the reverse might even be
true.
Countries with a more lenient judicial system based on the
principles of restorative justice tend, if anything, to have lower
crime rates than those that impose long prison sentences - or worse -
for even fairly minor crimes.
