David Runciman writes:

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is.

(LRB 22 October 2009)

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate, from detailed analysis of around two hundred sets of data, that almost every modern social ill – obesity, long working hours, mental illness, violence, high prison populations, environmental degradation – shows a clear positive correlation with inequality. Strikingly, they also find that the harmful effects of inequality are not confined to the poor, but are distributed through every level of society. ‘One illusion that, cheeringly, they hope to dispel,’ wrote John Carey in the Sunday Times, ‘is that the super-rich are some kind of asset we should all cherish, rather than, from the viewpoint of social health, the equivalent of the seven plagues of Egypt.’

Allen Lane | hardback 331 pp. |ISBN: 9781846140396