Rob's Blog

I’ve just finished reading The Spirit Level Delusion by Christopher Snowdon. It arrived two days after I ordered a signed copy direct from the author.

It’s a critique of The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They are epidemiologists who have made scatter graphs of various variables against inequality, each point plotted belonging to a country. Lines of best fit are made and the gradient of the line used to make such claims as, “average life expectancy is three or four years shorter in unequal societies”.

The Spirit Level Delusion also takes on other anti-consumerist classics, such as Affluenza, The Selfish Capitalist and Happiness.

The first six chapters take on the key claims in The Spirit Level. Alternative scatter graphs are plotted, showing that quite often it depends on exactly which year’s data is used or which countries are included and excluded. In other words, the theory is not very robust.

In other cases, more is going on. Chapter two takes on the claim that unequal countries have a higher level of mental disorders. It turns out that the rates of disorder are not significantly different in between countries anyway. And the secondary claim, made by Oliver James in Affluenza, that mental health deteriorated over the years as inequality increased in rich countries is made to look silly when Snowdon points out that this is largely due to vast changes in psychiatry during the 70s and 80s. DSM-III and IV were published, hefty tomes listing symptoms against disorders. The idea was to standardise diagnosis. But lots of questionable research was done in which people were plucked at random out of the population and asked questions like “has there ever been two weeks or more when you lost interest in most things like work, hobbies, or things you usually liked to do”. These studies oddly enough were able to show that 25% of the population suffered from some mental disorder. It’s enough to make one question the existence of mental illness, but according to Snowdon, James just assumes it’s all to do with Regean and Thatcher.

In chapter five, the claim that infant mortality is higher in unequal nations is challenged by pointing out that in rich countries infant mortality is entirely due to complications at the time of birth. The differences are again tiny; add a few poor countries to the scatter graph and they disappear entirely. What differences there are between rich countries are explained by such things as the USA’s tendency to have more premature babies, itself largely caused by differences in medical practice.

A similar pattern emerges in chapter 6. The Spirit Level Delusion argues that people in more equal countries are more civic minded. They give more of their GDP to poor countries and recycle more. But hang on, aren’t these things government policy more than individual choice? Yes, Wilkinson and Pickett have proved that governments who redistribute wealth more also donate more foreign aid.

Chapter 7 is one of the most fun chapters; it takes on the anti-consumerist movement in general, going all the way back to Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published in 1958. He argued that we were rich enough already; and that all growth was now fuelled by over-production that could only be consumed by convincing people they needed things they did not through advertising.

For Wilkinson and Pickett, it is crucial that the reader becomes convinced that the only consequence of economic growth in the West is a rampant and futile consumerism. If people only spend to compete for status, the products themselves have no intrinsic value and it will be no loss, therefore, if economic growth is brought to a halt and people can buy fewer of them.

Wilkinson and Pickett see themselves standing at the end of an era, beyond which the old ways cannot produce further gains. The fact that Galbraith said much the same thing half a century earlier should give us pause for thought. In 1958, Galbraith cited vacuum cleaners, televisions and wall-to-wall carpets as the unnecessary wants of an affluent society. While none of these are any more essential for survival today than they were fifty years ago, it would take a brave politician today to tell the electorate that they would be happier without them.

[...]

The belief that if something is not essential, it cannot be useful, makes a Calvinist virtue of having only the bare necessities. In doing so, it sets capitalism an impossibly high benchmark. Unless a product keeps body and soul together, or produces lasting happiness, it is deemed frivolous, even decadent. The people, meanwhile, are encouraged to set their horizons low. They need little more than food on the table and a roof over their head. So long as everyone has the essentials, no one will suffer materially. So long as no one has much more than the essentials, no one will suffer from the psychosocial traumas of inequality, greed and anxiety.

Good grief, what a dismal view of the world. Snowdon goes on to point out that in fact consumers do not shop endlessly in the vain belief that it is the only way to be happy: this is merely a conceit of condescending and out of touch elitists — for that is what the anti-consumerists really are. Neal Lawson describes how he is woken by his Blackberry, rises from his Habitat bed, steps on to his John Lewis carpet and wraps himself in his White Company towel. Says Snowdon, “what are supposed to be endearing admissions of weakness sound more like the hypocrisy of champagne socialists.” Futhermore, “occasional sneering references to cheap flights for the masses (thereby forcing people like Lawson to travel to increasingly remote destinations to avoid them) betray this implicit snobbery.”

In chapter eight Snowdon describes how the anti-consumerists propose we will achieve the transition to zero-growth and high equality. Even higher and more progressive taxes are at the sane end of the spectrum. Rationing, usually in the form of carbon rationing, is suggested. Snowdon notes how what once was seen as an unfortunate side-effect of post-war rationing, deprivation, is now marketed as a feature: the deprivation will make us happier. At the other end of the spectrum we have James Oliver in Affluenza having the government value every house in the country and then “knock a nought off”. The chapter finishes with a scatter graph of equality vs. tax as a percentage of GDP. You can imagine what it looks like.

The final chapter summarizes the problems with The Spirit Level. I learned about a whole new kind of bias, immortal time bias (popes live longer than artists because you have to be old to be the pope), and a whole new fallacy, the ecological fallacy. This is really the main problem with The Spirit Level. You simply can’t separate out all the variables when comparing statistics from different countries. To demonstrate, Snowdon shows a scatter graph that proves recycling causes suicide.

Incidentally, Wilkinson and Pickett concede that suicide rates are higher in more equal countries. In chapter 3 Snowdon describes their strange theory that this is because people kill themselves rather than killing others. In chapter 4 he shows that there is no relationship between suicide and murder. In the final chapter he quips, while discussing the strange correlations that can be found, “it is conceivable, for instance, that socialist policies are a factor in lowering aspirations and increasing the suicide rate.” This sounds rather plausible. But we must be careful not to play into their hands: it is better to make the case that growth, by making the poor richer, is an end in itself. Snowdon makes this case many times, arguing for instance that when we notice the first class passengers disembarking the flight looking refreshed and the economy class passengers looking tired, the solution is certainly not to abolish first class in the hope that it will make the economy class passengers feel better about their discomfort.

Ultimately, ecological epidemiology tells us that Asian countries have low crime rates; Scandinavians are more trusting than Europeans and Americans are fat, and on evidence like this Wilkinson and Pickett would have us destroy the economy.

The Spirit Level Delusion is a great manual for fighting back against the demands for equality over all else. One thing it doesn’t do is attack the way inequality is measured. I still hold that however much more money the top 20% earn than the bottom 20%, in developed countries the bottom 20% still drive around in cars and go on foreign holidays. I think that in reality growth makes people more equal, even as “income inequality” increases. Nonetheless, Snowdon’s careful dismantling of the Spirit Level statistics on their own terms is helpful. And I think his arguments in general will be very useful in the years ahead. I don’t imagine for a minute that the Tories are immune to talk of equality — their “social justice” sounds like the same sort of thing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Authorised Theft, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.