tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47617502979776940042024-03-05T22:07:17.155+00:00The Spirit Level DelusionChristopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-65145891017050311512019-03-11T15:05:00.001+00:002024-01-02T11:54:16.950+00:00Welcome<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgifTvLzM7OzVeR17IAGvNv5xIqt02UzsqIbF1ssE9o_1HaZmFuJPcKheOhMi8OtG2aLUxx9HvE6t8hjwH0eFq2Xt6ig41jWr3n8ZZGgLYLJnkXuApBSCUYJQKqbWVBK0edvlsWRr8tNoA/s1600/The+Spirit+Level+Delusion+front+cover.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471925455743686994" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgifTvLzM7OzVeR17IAGvNv5xIqt02UzsqIbF1ssE9o_1HaZmFuJPcKheOhMi8OtG2aLUxx9HvE6t8hjwH0eFq2Xt6ig41jWr3n8ZZGgLYLJnkXuApBSCUYJQKqbWVBK0edvlsWRr8tNoA/s320/The+Spirit+Level+Delusion+front+cover.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 320px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 198px;" /></a><br />
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This website exists as a forum for additional notes and discussion related to the book <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span>. Some of this information takes the form of extended footnotes, which can be accessed at the right-hand side of this page.</div>
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The meat of the argument is, of course, in the book itself—which is available <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Delusion-Fact-Checking-Everything/dp/0956226515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1272529304&sr=1-1-spell">here</a> (UK), <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Level-Delusion-Fact-Checking-Everything/dp/0956226515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1272529304&sr=1-1-spell">here</a> (USA) and <a href="http://www.timbrobokhandel.se/">here</a> (Sweden). If you haven't read it, my articles in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127862421912914915.html">Wall Street Journal</a> </span>and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/8934/">Spiked Review of Books</a> </span>give a brief overview.<br />
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Please scroll down for more recent entries, including <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-spirit-level-ten-years-on.html" target="_blank">an attempt to replicate <i>The Spirit Level</i>'s findings after ten years</a>, a fact-checking of the response given by <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>'s authors to my <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/04/20-questions-for-richard-wilkinson-kate.html">20 Questions</a>, a <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/08/reply-to-prospect-magazine-article.html">rebuttal</a> to their article in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Prospect</span> magazine and some <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/08/spirit-level-has-been-debunked-more-or.html">highlights</a> from Kate Pickett's interview on BBC Radio 4's <i>More or Less</i>.<br />
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You can also read (for free) the new chapter included in the second edition of the book, which deals with Wilkinson and Pickett's response to criticism. <b><a href="http://www.velvetgloveironfist.com/pdfs/SpiritLevelDelusion_Chapter10.pdf">Download Chapter 10 as a PDF</a>.</b></div>
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<i>"A devastating critique"</i><br />
—<i><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21564421?fsrc=rss%7Cspr" target="_blank">The Economist</a></i><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">"If you haven’t read a book that made you laugh out loud on the bus or the Tube in a while, try Christopher Snowdon’s superb release, The Spirit Level Delusion. But the book’s subtle humour is not the reason I am recommending it. The Spirit Level Delusion is, above all, a book that delivers and goes well beyond the promise of its subtitle – 'fact-checking the left’s new theory of everything'... It may well be that the next big battle for a free society will be fought against the new anti-wealth egalitarianism. Christopher Snowdon has provided defenders of freedom with powerful ammunition."</span><br />
— <a href="http://blog.iea.org.uk/?p=3980">Kristian Niemietz, Institute of Economic Affairs</a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"Snowdon picks so many holes in the theory that were it a building it wouldn’t be passed as structurally sound by the most crooked of third world local government surveyors... Next time someone starts spouting off about “equality” – a goal that has dug more graves than all the gods in history combined – send them a copy of Snowdon’s excellent book and make sure they read it from cover to cover." </span></div>
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— <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100046805/does-recycling-cause-suicide-or-why-the-spirit-level-is-wrong-and-more-equal-societies-are-not-happier/">Ed West, <i>The Telegraph</i></a><br />
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<i>"The myth of inequality as the root cause of just about all social ills is dismantled... Snowdon’s thorough appraisal of available data and literature, and examination of alternative causes – all underpinned by acerbic wit – sees to that." </i><br />
<i>— </i><a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CGAQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jma2014.fr%2Ffichiers2013%2F37%2Fsoda-tax-bstv-jma.pdf&ei=iNaAU6OgJsew7AaCr4GoBw&usg=AFQjCNGzs32bSIJYgts7QnebxueY1ai7Yw&sig2=BxXIAoDBsPSDgrwHjSprXA&bvm=bv.67720277,d.ZGU" target="_blank">Sam Hamilton</a><i><a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CGAQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jma2014.fr%2Ffichiers2013%2F37%2Fsoda-tax-bstv-jma.pdf&ei=iNaAU6OgJsew7AaCr4GoBw&usg=AFQjCNGzs32bSIJYgts7QnebxueY1ai7Yw&sig2=BxXIAoDBsPSDgrwHjSprXA&bvm=bv.67720277,d.ZGU" target="_blank">, Medical Writing</a> </i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"The Spirit Level Delusion not only successfully and dramatically undermines much of the evidence in The Spirit Level, but also takes on the other fashionable opponents of economic growth... His engaging discussion unpicks the evidence of the anti-growth brigade and demonstrates that it is selective and partial. This book is excellent “tube reading”.</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">— </span><a href="http://www.cityam.com/lifestyle/books/drama-the-deep-south">Philip Booth, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">City AM</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
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See also: <a href="http://ipa.org.au/publications/1824/does-more-equal-really-mean-all-better-"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Institute of Public Affairs Review</span></a> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.gerryhassan.com/?p=1274">The Scotsman</a></span>.</div>
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Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-55858692217985226202019-03-09T13:02:00.000+00:002019-03-09T19:37:08.285+00:00The Spirit Level ten years on<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhks3riJmt_mFlTdT1-3EHzMKTEY8ZiGMGSFDtXdG7EOhivdEk8L88_tTXsJkaE90Oz4u9yh10bwCGAXCvEj30Uhrb7doSCPKbZaojYMJw6ueF8mJl4lOPE6B-RUvr1YSc6IPrPPJg1HXU/s1600/katepickett.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="702" data-original-width="894" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhks3riJmt_mFlTdT1-3EHzMKTEY8ZiGMGSFDtXdG7EOhivdEk8L88_tTXsJkaE90Oz4u9yh10bwCGAXCvEj30Uhrb7doSCPKbZaojYMJw6ueF8mJl4lOPE6B-RUvr1YSc6IPrPPJg1HXU/s320/katepickett.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kate Pickett and some science</td></tr>
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<i>The Spirit Level</i> turned ten this month. A minor publishing sensation when it was published in March 2009, it used a series of scatter plots to make the case that income inequality is a major driver of a range of health and social problems. The authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, argue that these problems are directly linked to the rate of inequality and will rise or fall as inequality rises and falls.<br />
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I argued in <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Delusion-Fact-Checking-Everything/dp/0956226515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1272529304&sr=1-1-spell" target="_blank"><i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i></a> (2010) that most of Wilkinson and Pickett's statistical correlations were the result of selection bias in the countries, criteria and datasets used by the authors. They looked at the 50 richest countries in the world (on the basis that these societies were wealthy enough to not benefit from further growth whereas outcomes in poorer countries would be confounded by the effect of GDP). However, they only used 23 of these countries - often fewer - in their analysis. The poorest of them was Portugal but several countries with a higher GDP than Portugal were excluded for no good reason. When I added these countries, many of the associations with inequality disappeared (see footnote 1).<br />
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I won't go into the other flaws in the book here, suffice it to say that if <i>The Spirit Level</i> hypothesis is correct, it should apply across space and time. Most of the data used by Wilkinson and Pickett (henceforth W & P) was published between 2000 and 2004. If their correlations are proof of a golden rule about inequality - 'a theory of everything', as <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11518509" target="_blank">the BBC</a> put it - similar associations with inequality should emerge if we use data from 2010 to 2014 or any other period. In principle, it should be possible for the authors to publish a new edition of their book every few years showing consistent trends.<br />
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They did publish a sequel to <i>The Spirit Level</i> last year (I reviewed it <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/07/23/the-inequality-syndrome/#.W37JwX4nbuQ" target="_blank">here</a>), but there was no attempt to create their graphs with new data. And so, on the tenth anniversary of the book's publication, I thought it would be interesting to put some of their most striking claims to the test, applying W & P's own methodology to up-to-date statistics.<br />
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I gathered recent income inequality statistics from the <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2018_human_development_statistical_update.pdf" target="_blank">UN's Human Development Report (2018 edition)</a>. This is the same source used by W & P in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. For reasons that are never made clear, W & P preferred to use the 80/20 measure rather than the more usual Gini coefficient when comparing countries. Both measures give broadly the same results, but the Human Development Report no longer uses the 80/20 measure so I have used the Gini instead.<br />
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As you might expect, there have been changes in the rates of inequality in the last 10-15 years. The Scandinavian countries continue to have some of the lowest rates although inequality has risen in all of them except Finland. Inequality in Japan is significantly higher than was reported in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. Rates have also increased in Israel, Ireland, Spain and the USA, but fallen in the UK, Singapore and Belgium (see footnote 2).<br />
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<b>Life expectancy </b><br />
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The Human Development Report (HDR) was also the source of life expectancy figures used by W & P. These formed the basis of perhaps their most famous claim, which Richard Wilkinson had been making since 1992, that life expectancy is directly linked to income inequality and that, therefore, inequality is bad for health.<br />
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As I noted in <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, W & P opted to use the 2004 edition of the HDR for their life expectancy figures despite using the 2006 edition elsewhere. I believe this is because they would have been unable to find a statistically significant association with inequality had they used the figures from the more recent edition (p-value = 0<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">.116996</span>). Using the 2004 data, they were able to achieve statistical significance in the graph shown below (p-value = <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">0.031, r2 = 0.20)</span>, although the association disappears when countries such as South Korea are added to the analysis.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiz7ohEy6AtnNQgsclgMVNjVBSEJdVmF5MyESVchwi1yHMQTKKX7wbtOeTOC_9jUTjN7sGjEHOmduSztfoXu0MMfRgFE2vIX4LdMVoZlS4SGQzfC-8vg5TvfwZryFxtNG7z_9FtbPzYng/s1600/SpiritLevel-jpg_0+%2528dragged%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiz7ohEy6AtnNQgsclgMVNjVBSEJdVmF5MyESVchwi1yHMQTKKX7wbtOeTOC_9jUTjN7sGjEHOmduSztfoXu0MMfRgFE2vIX4LdMVoZlS4SGQzfC-8vg5TvfwZryFxtNG7z_9FtbPzYng/s400/SpiritLevel-jpg_0+%2528dragged%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, I showed that no such correlation existed if one used later editions of the HDR. Using the most up-to-date figures for inequality and life expectancy, we can see that there is still no correlation, even if we confine the analysis to the 23 countries selected by W & P (R=0.02, r2=0.0004, p-value=0.93).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2eZfKpni2u4q74p53C6IlpgmjK6BUGTLgvZuNfojV4dVbGwi9bfsv3PvzR_fDuFe1HSfopX0aCBCu9V6BLbxRj-AeryR3LHJwDvw6Qe-VSw9il1siiC1bPw54H0oE1SrVNyQpYzG0wW4/s1600/Life+expectancy+SL+countries.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="510" data-original-width="795" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2eZfKpni2u4q74p53C6IlpgmjK6BUGTLgvZuNfojV4dVbGwi9bfsv3PvzR_fDuFe1HSfopX0aCBCu9V6BLbxRj-AeryR3LHJwDvw6Qe-VSw9il1siiC1bPw54H0oE1SrVNyQpYzG0wW4/s400/Life+expectancy+SL+countries.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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If we add the four countries that are unequivocally richer than Portugal and were excluded from <i>The Spirit Level</i> for no good reason (South Korea, Hong Kong, Slovenia and the Czech Republic (now known as Czechia)), there <i>is</i> a statistically significant association with inequality but it is in the opposite direction to that predicted by <i>The Spirit Level</i> hypothesis, with greater inequality correlating with longer life expectancy (r2=0.145, R=0.385, p-value=0.0495).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy8FlN44KWI3PE5mcrU02SwfYo2NtSWOjntLFy_IUoFJnfk0vVHIAsPs5wW7W3hjjdMYg4FQn5NO8ghRk3NSkTLPGjLem9D8ewfjzW5vMOYTtLZC5oDrWV6kB4UN11QWebX1U_QxZ-FXQ/s1600/Life+expectancy+full+.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="801" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy8FlN44KWI3PE5mcrU02SwfYo2NtSWOjntLFy_IUoFJnfk0vVHIAsPs5wW7W3hjjdMYg4FQn5NO8ghRk3NSkTLPGjLem9D8ewfjzW5vMOYTtLZC5oDrWV6kB4UN11QWebX1U_QxZ-FXQ/s400/Life+expectancy+full+.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>Obesity </b><br />
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After discussing life expectancy, W & P dedicate a chapter to the purported link between inequality and obesity. Again, they produce a graph showing a statistical correlation (see below). The correlation is highly dependent on the low rate in Japan and the high rate in the USA. It strangely excludes Singapore, which has a low rate of obesity and a high rate of inequality. If Singapore and the other two rich Asian countries are included, the positive association disappears (see <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBn_M2fY0iPqVN4wXGy4BO3-T_Qa5BUMPZIUbW4MssrvlNr_1AXgYMzW3rNcgl0TubMkpRe0j-7KmnIzCgxvy51IFai_xb0C6tMC7Q6Md9N1WIfy2FVZWPO4WHKa8hq9CUmH4uLpw4vaE/s1600/obesity+SL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBn_M2fY0iPqVN4wXGy4BO3-T_Qa5BUMPZIUbW4MssrvlNr_1AXgYMzW3rNcgl0TubMkpRe0j-7KmnIzCgxvy51IFai_xb0C6tMC7Q6Md9N1WIfy2FVZWPO4WHKa8hq9CUmH4uLpw4vaE/s400/obesity+SL.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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There are also question marks over some of the obesity estimates used by W & P. Internationally comparable obesity statistics were hard to come by when W & P wrote their book and they had to resort to a range of largely self-reported figures, some of which dated back to the mid-90s. Methods have since improved and it is possible to get a more accurate picture. In the graph below, I use figures from the <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><a href="http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.BMI30Cv?lang=en" target="_blank">World Health Organisation</a>, except for Hong Kong and South Korea for which figures from <a href="https://www.chp.gov.hk/en/healthtopics/content/25/8802.html" target="_blank">Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection</a> and the <a href="https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/factbook-2013-100-en.pdf?expires=1552051379&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=42A4CC0C7B4F97688A26DACDE681D7D0" target="_blank">OECD</a> are taken respectively. </span><br />
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<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">Limiting ourselves <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">to W & P's 23 countries, there is no statistically significant relationship (r2=</span></span></span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label9">0.0461, </span>R=</span></span></span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">0.2147, p-value=0</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">.33).</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwiFTd8L6jndNQqdsqxgUptdN8M2CovwrkPU9FjwCmO6fPSPNfV_l6NoCwDV03GPrqcj9CnxCkpyNCsLxWTcP7qXTEhDUQ77xJVvN-b_CFq2LIZmKHgSXe6-FllnO51O9b2AIOlygg1vU/s1600/Obesity+SL+countries.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="513" data-original-width="790" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwiFTd8L6jndNQqdsqxgUptdN8M2CovwrkPU9FjwCmO6fPSPNfV_l6NoCwDV03GPrqcj9CnxCkpyNCsLxWTcP7qXTEhDUQ77xJVvN-b_CFq2LIZmKHgSXe6-FllnO51O9b2AIOlygg1vU/s400/Obesity+SL+countries.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">With all the countries included, the correlation is weaker still (r2=</span></span></span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label9">0.008, R=0.09, p-value=0.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">65).</span><br />
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<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><b>Mental health disorders </b></span><br />
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<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">Internationally comparable figures for mental illness prevalence were also patchy when W & P wrote their book. The graph they use to show that inequality drives mental health disorders (see below) suffers from multiple flaws. It only shows twelve countries, it excludes Singapore (again) despite W & P having included it in an earlier version of the graph (published in Oliver James' book <i>Affluenza</i>) and it cherry-picks figures from several different surveys which produce notably different results and are not comparable (see pp. 38-40 of <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>). </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqRypXkto_tYWtUbqPvsdtvZE1CzTNz5LAVEKvmAESCOa75He9Rg409s7BZO14dvWt2CXCmDsjTpkYbyQO47UE6GYetdWz85r6ZahdRkhN4ydRFwwqjswvmSJT_9e16l4hVEMAaFjPYBE/s1600/mental+health.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqRypXkto_tYWtUbqPvsdtvZE1CzTNz5LAVEKvmAESCOa75He9Rg409s7BZO14dvWt2CXCmDsjTpkYbyQO47UE6GYetdWz85r6ZahdRkhN4ydRFwwqjswvmSJT_9e16l4hVEMAaFjPYBE/s400/mental+health.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
In the graphs below, I use figures from <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health#prevalence-of-mental-health-and-substance-use-disorders" target="_blank">Our World In Data</a> based on statistics from the <a href="http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool" target="_blank">Global Health Data Exchange</a> (no figures are available for Hong Kong). Gathering reliable data on the prevalence of mental health disorders continues to pose problems (which the authors discuss <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health#data-availability-on-mental-health" target="_blank">here</a>) but this dataset is much better than the pick-and-mix selection presented in <i>The Spirit Level</i> (and reproduced in <i>The Inner Level</i> - such is the importance of this purported finding to their hypothesis).<br />
<br />
Using the latest inequality figures and the best prevalence data on mental disorders, there is absolutely no association between the two variables. This is true regardless of whether we use W & P's 23 countries (<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">r2=</span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label9">0.069, </span>R=-0.26, p-value=0.75)</span>...<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg05mOcUAlLTVF-o5-Huh6Pi8QC6buu77aITy24yPkKyYXdZU9YZJujhoAUcAyUL6C0A2x6SgDKlGH5nA4ptfYocXAFjL3mOFWg9DFGGk4PjQdWjpxbiX1XNchBXfWpCf8qJ44UIetydbI/s1600/mental+health+Sl+countries.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="513" data-original-width="792" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg05mOcUAlLTVF-o5-Huh6Pi8QC6buu77aITy24yPkKyYXdZU9YZJujhoAUcAyUL6C0A2x6SgDKlGH5nA4ptfYocXAFjL3mOFWg9DFGGk4PjQdWjpxbiX1XNchBXfWpCf8qJ44UIetydbI/s400/mental+health+Sl+countries.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
... or use the slightly expanded cohort (r2=0, R=0, p-value=1).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjceQo6p3o6BUBDIV7iTLn8X8nxAvZ25qmdCISxVXxzhMWG02fWj5NRv3NlVyyT2HtUbByHv8jz5zvuIWUdU4aM5WTqwygEJHtJyPgY6izen2BkK-t2__rdPKHmkrSbrFQdclRhjt9PKJc/s1600/mental+health+full.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="787" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjceQo6p3o6BUBDIV7iTLn8X8nxAvZ25qmdCISxVXxzhMWG02fWj5NRv3NlVyyT2HtUbByHv8jz5zvuIWUdU4aM5WTqwygEJHtJyPgY6izen2BkK-t2__rdPKHmkrSbrFQdclRhjt9PKJc/s400/mental+health+full.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>Homicide </b><br />
<br />
A further claim in <i>The Spirit Level</i> is that inequality drives violence - murder, in particular. <br />
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<br />
As with W & P's claim about obesity, the statistical evidence for this claim relies heavily on the USA being an outlier. There is no correlation among the other 22 countries
and, as I showed in <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, there is no correlation when the full complement of rich countries is included.<br />
<br />
Using recent homicide statistics from the <a href="https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims" target="_blank">UN Office on Drugs and Crime</a>, we can see that there is no statistically significant association between inequality and homicide, even if we confine our analysis to W & P's 23 countries (r2=0.14, <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">R= 0.37, p-value= 0</span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">.08). The inclusion of the other countries makes the correlation even weaker (r2=</span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label9">0.06</span>, R=</span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">0.25, p-value=0.</span></span></span></span></span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">21).</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY5xY_Z0g8k4g25Fv66xx1ETZ0ZRZHdzsAtCcqTpkVrhXHbEK57m5MPddSPjrXVMJsDWPqYIGrhfrM0ojtvG2cJNfy2gij8zcnpViHpblTn7hENqFbzTTF8c-xQc9tyy-06hSkyO1FRTw/s1600/Murder+SL+countries.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="506" data-original-width="793" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY5xY_Z0g8k4g25Fv66xx1ETZ0ZRZHdzsAtCcqTpkVrhXHbEK57m5MPddSPjrXVMJsDWPqYIGrhfrM0ojtvG2cJNfy2gij8zcnpViHpblTn7hENqFbzTTF8c-xQc9tyy-06hSkyO1FRTw/s400/Murder+SL+countries.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Incidentally, although the USA continues to be a huge outlier among rich societies for homicide, its murder rate is lower than it was when W & P wrote <i>The Spirit Level</i>, <a href="https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2013/11/homicide-and-teen-births.html" target="_blank">contrary to their implicit prediction</a>. Faced with growing inequality and a falling murder rate, W & P clutched at the straw of a slight upturn in the homicide rate in 2005-06. The murder rate had risen from 5.5 per
100,000 to 5.7 per 100,000 and W & P cited this as evidence that the effect of inequality was finally manifesting itself. I was a false dawn, however, and by 2014 <a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/tables/table-1" target="_blank">it had dropped to 4.7 per 100,000</a>. Although it has since jumped to 5.3 per 100,000, it remains lower than it was when W & P claimed that there is a 'reasonable match' between the rate of homicide and the rate of inequality. As the graph below shows - with homicides in red - there isn't (see footnote 3).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbgfeId22SFIF-M0Q8V5NEU_IDnlWnO61YFFPzZZo90FBa-6ViJA4v-fhXeVkGATSHFNndkpj0-qcM-cwhzWGuvw8SWHPTKyoPBGIg0TXwUPuqpAhsAEgh2v_P2beBxVfVuLmzzfOCKKw/s1600/Screenshot+2019-03-09+at+14.31.51.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="758" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbgfeId22SFIF-M0Q8V5NEU_IDnlWnO61YFFPzZZo90FBa-6ViJA4v-fhXeVkGATSHFNndkpj0-qcM-cwhzWGuvw8SWHPTKyoPBGIg0TXwUPuqpAhsAEgh2v_P2beBxVfVuLmzzfOCKKw/s400/Screenshot+2019-03-09+at+14.31.51.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>Teen births </b><br />
<br />
W & P made the same rash mistake when discussing teen births in the USA. Their hypothesis suggests that teen pregnancies and teen births should be getting more common as income inequality grows. Alas for them, teen births had fallen to an all-time low when they started writing their book, but they took solace from another small upwards blip and announced that, in addition to the murder rate rising, 'in 2006, the teenage birth rate also started to rise again'. The birth rate for teenagers aged 15-19 rose from 40.5 per 1,000 females to 41.9 births per
1,000. It was the first rise in fifteen years but it was not the herald of an inequality-induced epidemic of teen pregnancies. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm" target="_blank">By 2017, the rate had fallen to just 18.8 per 1,000</a>. <br />
<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span>
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<i>The Spirit Level</i> found a correlation between income inequality and teen births. Using recent teen birth figures from the <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.ado.tfrt" target="_blank">World Bank</a> and looking at W & P's 23 countries, there is still a statistically significant relationship (r2=<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label9">0.247</span>, R=<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">0.497, p-value=</span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">0.016). </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTAThCaYfqZncyzZy14NdEyvXJ8rpFfDcOKjZh5WrshwQfrwWgaLsofwd65m0ZKbIFHGC2jSNcHw2GlZ5NE1cWMpTyfI9Q5DDxQwEr5PY7PPhzN5DZ9CuPa6ptu8mDpAvBqJXiFuJIySc/s1600/teen+births+SL+countries.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="510" data-original-width="792" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTAThCaYfqZncyzZy14NdEyvXJ8rpFfDcOKjZh5WrshwQfrwWgaLsofwd65m0ZKbIFHGC2jSNcHw2GlZ5NE1cWMpTyfI9Q5DDxQwEr5PY7PPhzN5DZ9CuPa6ptu8mDpAvBqJXiFuJIySc/s400/teen+births+SL+countries.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">However, this seems to be due to the selection of countries. When the
four wealthy countries that were excluded from <i>The Spirit Level</i> are added, the correlation disappears</span> (r2=0.06, R=<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">0.24, p-value=0</span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">.219).</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCnTkFc5gR1pO9iIK2S2m-kvUdtrW57K2ZgB0pnetWjA2Ir2ucnP8Vc5lcJMAdAazR9Q9cz_bh6j19WDP_ztq6ecMG4BSiv7uIQKx2cOxvurBgmJk-82FyXPuyK-y-71t5VyMfQTvN0Zo/s1600/Teen+births+full.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="791" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCnTkFc5gR1pO9iIK2S2m-kvUdtrW57K2ZgB0pnetWjA2Ir2ucnP8Vc5lcJMAdAazR9Q9cz_bh6j19WDP_ztq6ecMG4BSiv7uIQKx2cOxvurBgmJk-82FyXPuyK-y-71t5VyMfQTvN0Zo/s400/Teen+births+full.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<b>Infant mortality </b><br />
<br />
Finally, I looked at another correlation in <i>The Spirit Level</i> that seemed reasonably robust at first glance. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdksFNmJ_WMZCqVuZV1X1uh-qWselZZTzXvg9BGjncGXpgnIMJEEPuwOuBhfIYg1iFNpDxInhxlWan4KtivD7RqHu673f1c_rVqkEghjBzN1biv1NA0t8uvaL1dF-RejL9xr38ONr2_Ao/s1600/SpiritLevel-jpg_0+%2528dragged%2529+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdksFNmJ_WMZCqVuZV1X1uh-qWselZZTzXvg9BGjncGXpgnIMJEEPuwOuBhfIYg1iFNpDxInhxlWan4KtivD7RqHu673f1c_rVqkEghjBzN1biv1NA0t8uvaL1dF-RejL9xr38ONr2_Ao/s400/SpiritLevel-jpg_0+%2528dragged%2529+5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
As I showed in Chapter 5 of <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, this is another example of a correlation that disappears when the full complement of countries is analysed. In that chapter, I was less interested in the statistical claim than the causal mechanism. There seems to be no practical way in which the 'psychosocial' impact of modest differences in income inequality could cause the birth defects and congenital abnormalities that are at the root of most infant deaths in rich countries.<br />
<br />
Looking at the evidence anew, I use infant mortality figures from the most recent HDR (except for Hong Kong where the figure comes from Hong Kong's <a href="https://www.healthyhk.gov.hk/phisweb/en/healthy_facts/health_indicators/current_sit/" target="_blank">Department of Health</a> because no figure is given in the HDR). There is no statistically significant relationship with inequality regardless of whether we study W & P's selection of countries (r2=0.15, R=<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">0.39</span>, <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">p-value=0.07) </span>or the expanded cohort <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">(r2=</span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label9">0.045</span>, R= </span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label2">0.21</span>, p-value=</span><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1"><span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">0.29)</span></span>.<br />
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<br />
In summary, most of the biggest claims made by Wilkinson and Pickett in <i>The Spirit Level </i>look even weaker today than they did when the book was published. Only one of the six associations stand up under W & P's own methodology and none of them stand up when the full range of countries is analysed. In the case of life expectancy - the very flagship of <i>The Spirit Level</i> - the statistical association is the opposite of what the hypothesis predicts. <br />
<br />
If <i>The Spirit Level</i> hypothesis were correct, it would produce robust and consistent results over time as the underlying data changes. Instead, it seems to be extremely fragile, only working when a very specific set of statistics are applied to a carefully selected list of countries.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Footnote 1</b><br />
W & P's justification for leaving so many countries out of the analysis is twofold. Some countries don't have inequality data and some countries are tax havens (and therefore have distorted inequality data). The first justification is bullet-proof and the second is at least arguable, but in their efforts to avoid tax havens, they simply assume that all countries with a population of under three million is a tax haven. This makes no sense. Not only does it allow two countries that are arguably tax havens to be included (Ireland and Switzerland), but it excludes countries like Slovenia that are clearly not tax havens. Slovenia is one of the most equal countries in the world and therefore should be a star performer. It should at least be in the analysis. There is no justification at all for excluding Czechia, Hong Kong and the Republic of Korea.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Footnote 2</b><br />
Inequality figures for New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore are not
included in the UN report. Gini coefficients for these countries come
from <a href="https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm">the New Zealand government</a>, <a href="https://www.mof.gov.sg/Portals/0/Feature%20Articles/Income%20Growth,%20Distribution%20and%20Mobility%20Trends%20in%20Singapore.pdf">Singapore's Ministry of Finance</a> and <a href="https://www.oxfam.org.hk/content/98/content_38422en.pdf">Oxfam</a> respectively. These estimates are similar to estimates from other sources. All Gini coefficients are post-tax and benefits.<br />
<br />
The
change in Japan's rate of inequality since 2006 is the most striking
difference between the two sets of figures. However, it has always been
debatable whether its rate of inequality was as low as it was shown in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. Some datasets showed Japan to have quite an average rate of inequality even in 2006. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Foot note 3</b><br />
The period between 1910 and 1960 is a nice example of correlation not equalling causation. The two variables seem to be moving in broadly the same direction, initially rising and then falling sharply, with homicides slightly lagging behind inequality. In fact, inequality and homicide rise and fall for very different reasons. The murder rate rose during Prohibition, peaking in the early 1930s just before alcohol was re-legalised.<b> </b>Inequality rose until 1929 when the Wall Street Crash put it into reverse. The fact that these two events happened at around the same time is simply a coincidence (although the economic depression gave the government a reason to legalise - and thus tax - alcohol again). From the 1960s, the two trends go in completely different directions.<br />
<b></b><br />
<br />
<br />
All R-values are Pearson Correlation Coefficients. All thresholds for statistical significance tests are <span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">p < .05.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span id="ctl00_MainContent_Label1">Read the extra tenth chapter of <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i> for free <a href="http://www.velvetgloveironfist.com/pdfs/SpiritLevelDelusion_Chapter10.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. </span>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-61108187431582106122018-08-23T15:50:00.002+01:002018-08-23T15:50:56.549+01:00Review: The Inner Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate PickettWilkinson and Pickett have written a sequel to <i>The Spirit Level</i>, titled <i>The Inner Level</i>. <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-inequality-syndrome/21605#.W37JwX4nbuQ" target="_blank">You can read my review of it here.</a>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-17927597250360665052013-11-27T14:12:00.000+00:002013-11-27T14:17:30.734+00:00Homicide and teen birthsPart of <i>The Spirit Level </i>hypothesis is that teen births and homicide are somehow caused by inequality (chapters 9 and 10). However, Wilkinson and Pickett face a problem insofar as inequality has been rising in most countries for many years while rates of teenage births and murder have been falling. They attempt to square this circle on page 142 when talking about their worst performer, the USA.<br />
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Homicide rates in America, after rising for decades, peaked in the early 1990s, then fell to their lowest level in the early 2000s. In 2005, they started to rise again. Similarly, after peaking in the early 1990s, teenage pregnancy and birth rates began to fall in America, and the decline was particularly steep for African-Americans. But in 2006, the teenage birth rate also started to rise again, and the biggest reversal was for African-American women.</blockquote>
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The standard Gini measurement of inequality (see below) isn't very helpful to Wilkinson and Pickett in this instance since it shows inequality to have been rising pretty much continuously since the early 1990s which is exactly when the homicide and teen birth rates started to fall.<br />
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Faced with this obstacle, they resort to an <a href="http://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/07-17.html" target="_blank">obscure discussion paper</a> which paints a quite different picture of the US trend, with...<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...inequality rising through the 1980s to a peak in the early 1990s. The following decade saw an overall decline in inequality, with an upturn since 2000.</blockquote>
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This finding is contrary to all other evidence and has been <a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/thomas-edsall-on-richard-burkhauser-and-inequality" target="_blank">described</a> as "the equivalent of the sun orbiting the earth", but it nevertheless allows Wilkinson and Pickett to triumphantly conclude...<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
So there is a reasonable match between recent trends in homicides, teenage births and inequality—rising through the early 1990s and declining for a decade or so, with a very recent upturn.</div>
</blockquote>
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In other words, the 1990s saw falling inequality and therefore falling rates of teen births and homicide, whereas the Noughties saw rising inequality and therefore rising rates of teen births and homicide.<br />
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This is patently at odds with the facts. As I mentioned in <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, it is a stretch to say that the homicide rate "started to rise again" in 2005. In fact, there was a tiny blip in 2005-06 when the murder rate went from 5.5 per 100,000 to 5.7 (see below). After that, the downward trend returned. By 2011, it was 4.7 per 100,000. <br />
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Moreover—and the reason for this little blog post—I recently had cause to look up the <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db89.htm" target="_blank">US's teen birth rates</a> which last year "reached historic lows for all age and ethnic groups". Here too we see a little blip in the middle of the Noughties followed by a continued decline.<br />
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<br />
<i>The Spirit Level </i>was published in 2009 and so the data from the most recent years were naturally not included. Nevertheless, it was, at best, rash of its authors to present a slight upturn in the figures as the start of an inequality-fuelled rising trend. No matter which set of inequality figures one uses—and the Gini figures are <i>vastly</i> more credible—Wilkinson and Pickett's argument does not stand up.<br />
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We now know for certain that the small increase in the homicide and teen birth figures in 2005-06 was just a blip. The facts are quite clear. Inequality has been rising in the USA while the homicide and teen birth rates have been falling. There is simply no correlation between these variables. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-50121198206557072722012-11-13T02:25:00.000+00:002012-11-13T02:25:25.437+00:00The Spirit Level Delusion: Chapter 10As an addendum to <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i> I have also written an additional chapter discussing Wilkinson and Pickett's response to the criticisms <i>The Spirit Level</i> has received since it was published. As a courtesy to readers, this is available here as a <a href="http://www.velvetgloveironfist.com/pdfs/SpiritLevelDelusion_Chapter10.pdf">free download</a> (PDF).<br />
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Thanks,<br />
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CJSChristopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-3401845072228185072012-11-13T02:22:00.001+00:002012-11-13T02:23:08.220+00:00Prof. Colin Mills on The Spirit Level<a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0015/" target="_blank">Colin Mills</a>, professor of sociology at Oxford University, makes some very worthwhile observations about <i>The Spirit Level</i> <a href="http://oxfordsociology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/open-letter-to-prof-richard-wilkinson.html" target="_blank">on his blog</a>. Perhaps mischievously, Mills describes himself as "merely a sociologist" (Richard Wilkinson's qualifications are in history and sociology) and he confines himself to the chapter about inequality and health—Wilkinson's speciality. He notes that Wilkinson and Pickett misrepresent the evidence base, ignore studies which do not support their hypothesis and fail to adequately reply to their critics.<br />
<br />
On a personal level, I was interested to see that he spotted that Figure 2.5 of <i>The Spirit Level</i> indicates that there <i>is</i> a relationship between health and income in the US. This was one of the graphs that first got me interested in testing <i>The Spirit Level</i> hypothesis back in 2009. Wilkinson and Pickett do not comment on the obvious fact that all the states which score poorly on their 'index of health and social problems' have a lower-than-average per capita income. This is absolutely crucial in understanding why they find relationships, albeit often slight, with inequality elsewhere—<i>the least equal states are also the poorest</i>.<br />
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<blockquote>
But wait a minute. My first reaction when I looked at Figure 2.5 was that actually there is quite a clear relationship between aggregate income levels and health/social problem outcomes in US states. Richer states have better outcomes even without special pleading for the influential peculiarities of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana....<br />
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At this point I began to lose a little confidence as you appear not to be playing it straight with your readers, not all of whom, I assume, will look too closely at the figures or be alert to what could be considered a bit of textual <i>leger de main</i>.</blockquote>
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Indeed. I have briefly discussed this issue <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/us-states.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Mills has done what 99 per cent of <i>The Spirit Level'</i>s readers have not done (<i>and should not have to do</i>) and looked at the scientific literature which Wilkinson and Pickett so often misrepresent.<br />
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<blockquote>
But I do want to read the systematic reviews myself and not just rely on being told what they say. Just as well really, for if I had to rely solely on the 456 citations in <i>The Spirit Level</i> I would never have come across the two lengthy articles written by Lynch et al. in (2004) for the <i>Milbank Quarterly</i> entitled 'Is income inequality a determinant of population health?'. Luckily I have well informed colleagues who could point me in the right direction. Of course you know what Lynch et al. conclude from their careful scrutiny of "98 aggregate and multi-level studies examining the association between income inequality and health". For the benefit of those readers who can't penetrate the pay-wall let me quote from their conclusions (pp 81): <br />
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"Among affluent countries does income inequality help explain international differences in population health? The evidence suggests that <b>income inequality is not associated with population health differences</b> - at least not as a general phenomenon - among wealthy nations. Do levels of income inequality explain regional health differences within countries? In aggregate-level US studies, <b>the extent of income inequality across states and metropolitan areas seems reasonably robustly associated with a variety of health outcomes</b>, especially when measured at the state level. In multilevel US studies, using both individual and aggregate data, <b>the evidence is more mixed</b>, with state-level associations again being the most consistent. For other countries, <b>the aggregate and multi-level evidence generally suggests little or nor effect of income inequality</b> on health indicators in rich countries...but <b>there may be some effects in the United Kingdom</b>." [my emphasis].<br />
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Strange that you don't mention Lynch et al.'s papers (I know you cite them in your own review article but without, as far as I can see, any serious effort to explain why they get such different results to your own). Odd in several respects: firstly it was probably the most comprehensive independent (ie not counting papers written by yourselves) systematic review of the evidence on health then published when you were drafting <i>The Spirit Level</i>. Secondly, because it is not completely unfavourable to your position. After all it concludes that there is some evidence of an income inequality effect in US state level data (and possibly in the UK) - though their second paper which examines time-series data casts more doubt on the US case. I simply cannot understand why you fail to mention it, or if it is flawed in some way, rebut it, refer to your own rebuttal published elsewhere (if there is one) or the rebuttals of others (if there are any). Over and over again you tell us that the weight of the evidence is on your side and that there is a broad consensus amongst experts working in the field. But this simply isn't true, is it? At the very least your now perplexed readers could be forgiven if they find your omission, well, a little shifty.</blockquote>
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He also comments on Wilkinson and Pickett's misleading response to their critics, including John Goldthorpe (also a professor of sociology at Oxford University who, like Mills, identifies himself as politically left-wing).<br />
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My colleague wrote a somewhat critical review of the book which was published in a well known peer reviewed journal. After reading your "reply" I was again deeply puzzled. What you say has, at most, only tangential relevance to the substance of my colleague's criticisms. The casual reader of what you write would come away with the impression that some sociologist had made a rather footling objection to the effect that you hadn't paid enough attention "to the vast amount of careful work now available on social class classifications" [your words] - surely a case of the cobbler only having eyes for leather. But wait a minute, that is not at all the substance of the critique.
</blockquote>
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He also makes the point, which Peter Saunders makes in his critique <i><a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/category/item/beware-false-prophets-equality-the-good-society-and-the-spirit-level" target="_blank">Beware False Prophets</a></i>, that Wilkinson and Pickett conflate 'more equal' societies with classless societies, and yet their most equal country—Japan—is anything but classless.
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In Japan income inequality is less marked than in many developed nations and health outcomes are comparatively good. This would seem to conform to the Wilkinson-Pickett party line. But it is also the case that Japan is a highly status conscious (in the sociological sense) society. It is obligatory to acknowledge inferiority and superiority both in terms of behaviour and in terms of the use of honorifics. In any unfamiliar social situation the initial process of figuring out who is relatively inferior to whom is a source of considerable anxiety. <br />
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To put it simply, in Japan systematic inequality is strongly structured by considerations of social status, superiority and inferiority yet health outcomes are relatively favourable. If the relevant psycho-social mechanism is to do with social status (in any sociologically meaningful use of that term) then measuring status inequality by means of income-inequality puts Japan at the wrong end of the spectrum! This is much more than a petty point about occupational coding, but you wouldn't guess that if all you had to go on was <i>The Spirit Level</i>.</blockquote>
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Mills' whole post is worth reading in full <a href="http://oxfordsociology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/open-letter-to-prof-richard-wilkinson.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>
Well, by now if you haven't already lost patience and dismissed me as yet another enemy of equality, you are probably muttering that you have dealt with all this before if only I would care to read more of your own work. The thing is, I have read it, and I'm not the only one to notice in it a recurrent pattern. Time after time you tell critics that you have dealt with their objection in one or another of your publications but when I turn to them what I find is indeed a reference to your critics, but not an actual response to the exact criticism they make and often a discussion of some quite unrelated issue. Why you do this is, to me, quite baffling...
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So, in the end Professors Wilkinson and Pickett, you face a credibility gap. People like myself who want, broadly speaking, the same things as yourselves can find the time to ferret out, read and consider the evidence you don't tell us about. Joe Public, which I take it <i>The Spirit Level</i> is aimed at, has neither the time nor the access to the primary sources, let alone the training to make an informed judgement. They have to take what you say on trust. That is why university professors speaking with all the lustrous institutional prestige that implies have, in my opinion, a duty to be scrupulously honest, especially when writing for a popular audience. And when the brickbats come they should not be able to get away with emphasizing the popular nature of their writing whilst ducking behind the protective shield of peer review. What we all need are better reasons to believe. I'm not the only social scientist or social democrat who thinks you haven't yet given us nearly enough.</blockquote>
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<br />Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-59571368942898508232011-12-21T15:11:00.002+00:002013-12-17T12:53:56.919+00:00Inequality and anxietyRichard Smith has written an interesting article in <i><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2011.00425.x/abstract">Educational Theory</a></i> which looks at the causal mechanism Wilkinson and Pickett propose in chapter 3 of <i>The Spirit Level</i> to explain the correlations they show in the rest of the book. As Smith writes...<br />
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<blockquote>
The argument runs as follows. Unequal income leads to unequal status, and in a world where people are alert to and anxious about where they are positioned on the social ladder, this anxiety affects both mental and physical health. Psychological insecurity and distress rise; self-esteem falls.</blockquote>
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There is, however, a problem tallying this theory with the empirical evidence.<br />
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<blockquote>
A highly inconvenient fact for their thesis, and one that they fully acknowledge, is that over the time-scale under consideration self-esteem as well as anxiety ‘‘showed a very clear long-term upward trend. It looked as if, despite the rising anxiety levels, people were also taking a more positive view of themselves over time’’ (SL, 36). Surely, it would seem, anxiety about status should be reflected in lower, not higher, self-esteem. <br />
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Wilkinson and Pickett’s solution is to distinguish ‘‘healthy’’ self-esteem from the defensive kind found in those prone to violence, racism, and insensitivity to others. This latter kind is fragile and more akin to ‘‘whistling in the dark’’ (SL, 37); we might compare this analysis with Ruth Cigman’s discussion of ‘psychological fraudsters.’’ <br />
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In the context this looks like a rather desperate strategy on Wilkinson and Pickett’s part to save the explanation in terms of concern for status and self-esteem.</blockquote>
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I agree with Smith's analysis, but I think there is more to be said. Chapter 3 is crucial to everything that follows in <i>The Spirit Level</i>, but, despite being superficially plausible if read casually, what little evidence they present does not support their argument. Indeed, the evidence goes some way to refuting it.<br />
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They start the chapter with two graphs showing the rise in anxiety amongst US college students between 1952 and 1993 (based on research by <a href="http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~broberts/Twenge%202000.pdf">June M. Twenge</a>) (p. 34). These are the only graphs in the chapter and they show anxiety rising continuously since the early 1950s. Whatever else might have been responsible for this trend, it was not income inequality, as Wilkinson and Pickett acknowledge:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We are not suggesting that [these rises in anxiety] were triggered by increased inequality ... the rises in anxiety and depression seem to start well before the increases in inequality which in many countries took place during the last quarter of the twentieth century. (p. 35)</blockquote>
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Not only did inequality not rise until much later, but inequality actually fell in the first half of the period. What bearing do these graphs have on their inequality hypothesis? It is not at all clear, but Wilkinson and Pickett promise to explain, saying: "It is important to understand what these rises in anxiety about before their relevance to inequality becomes clear."<br />
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Their explanation begins with the discussion moving from anxiety to self-esteem (p. 36). Self-esteem appears to have risen over the period in much the same way as anxiety, but this anxiety, as Smith says, seems incongruous with rising self-esteem. Wilkinson and Pickett square this circle by arguing that this is really quasi-self-esteem, which reflects the way school-children are taught to have excessive faith in themselves, leading to narcissism. There is, they say, good self-esteem and bad self-esteem, and this is the latter.<br />
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Smith has doubts about this argument, but even if we take it at face value, the connection with inequality eludes us. Neither anxiety nor self-reported self-esteem are in any way correlated with changes in the Gini coefficient.<br />
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Wilkinson and Pickett then introduce some causes of psychological stress which include "low social status, lack of friends, and stress in early life." They offer some rather banal observations such as "friends make you feel appreciated" and "how people see you matters." (p. 39) This is all perfectly plausible, but so what? Do people have fewer friends in less equal societies? We are not told, but there is no particular reason to think so.<br />
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The next study Wilkinson and Pickett discuss leaves us none the wiser because that, too, does not address income inequality at all (p. 41). They then return to the issue of anxiety and seem to be on the brink of explaining its relevance to inequality.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Why have these social anxieties increased so dramatically over the last half century—as Twenge's studies showing rising levels of anxiety and fragile, narcissistic egos suggest they have? Why does the social evaluative threat seem so great? A plausible explanation is the break-up of the settled communities of the past. (p. 42)</blockquote>
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Again, this is more than plausible. The rapid rise in geographical mobility over the last half-century may well offer part of the explanation for the decline in social cohesion that has been documented by Putman and others. People who leave home are less likely to benefit from being around old friends and family. "Familiar faces," they write, "have been replaced by a constant flux of strangers. As a result, who we are, identify with, is endlessly open to question."(p. 42)<br />
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A lot of this appeals to common sense and is often based on sound sociological evidence, but still the link with income inequality is nowhere to be seen. It only arrives in the final pages of the chapter, and even then, speculatively. They repeat their admission that there is no correlation between rates of anxiety and rates of inequality...<br />
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<blockquote>
Although the rises in anxiety that seem to centre on social evaluation pre-date the rise in inequality...</blockquote>
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But they make the association all the same...<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...it is not difficult to see how rising inequality and social status differences may impact on them. (p. 43)</blockquote>
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This is no more than a hunch and no evidence is presented in its favour. In fact, is <i>is</i> difficult to see how inequality impacts upon "the rise in anxiety", because none of the variables they associate with anxiety seem to be linked with inequality, and "the rise in anxiety" itself is demonstrably not linked with inequality in the time-series graphs that kicked off the chapter. Nothing they say in the intervening pages explains why anxiety rose when inequality was falling and continued to rise (at the same rate) when inequality went up.<br />
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Further hunches follow:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Greater inequality seems to heighten people's social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. (p. 43)</blockquote>
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No evidence is presented for this assertion (the only references given are a quote from a nineteenth century philosopher and a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2420210206/abstract">study</a> which shows that people are judged on first impressions—neither mentions inequality).<br />
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<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Greater inequality is <i>likely</i> to be accompanied by increased status competition. It is not simply that where the stakes are higher each of us worries more about where he or she comes. It is also that we are <i>likely</i> to pay more attention to social status in how we assess each other. (p. 44) (my italics)</div>
</blockquote>
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They may believe so, but what they think "likely" can only be viewed as conjecture unless it is backed up with evidence. This, they fail to provide. Instead, they discuss the "stark contrast between the way people see and present themselves" in Japan and the USA. The Japanese, we are told, are more modest while Americans are "more likely to attribute individual successes to their own abilities." This leads Wilkinson and Pickett to jump to the heroic conclusion that:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As greater inequality increases status competition and social evaluative threat, egos have to be propped up by self-promoting and self-enhancing strategies.<br />
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... Not only do large inequalities produce all the problems associated with social differences and the divisive class prejudices which go with them, but, as later chapters show, it also weakens community life, reduces trust, and increases violence. (p. 45)</blockquote>
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If the comparison between Japan and the USA is supposed to seal the deal with the reader, it falls flat. As <a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/assets/Beware_False_Prophets_Jul_10.pdf">Saunders</a> and others have noted, it would be hard to find a more hierarchical and status-conscious society than Japan. The modesty Wilkinson and Pickett attribute to the Japanese applies to many Asian societies. Furthermore, Japan's high suicide rate is not indicative of a low-anxiety nation.<br />
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By contrasting Japan and America, Wilkinson and Pickett are comparing apples with oranges. They are very different countries, to be sure, but the difference is rooted in culture, not income inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett say that by focusing on these two countries, they can contrast "the most equal with almost the most unequal of the rich market democracies". "Almost" is the key word here. The <i>most</i> unequal country in their book is actually Singapore, but if they had compared Singapore with Japan, they would not have achieved the desired effect.<br />
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So, to recap, Wilkinson and Pickett's theory goes as follows: Those of us who live in rich societies are "much more anxious than we used to be" (p. 33) and this rise in anxiety has been mirrored by a rise in self-esteem. This self-esteem, however, is not real self-esteem but narcissism driven by stress. This stress is driven by feelings of inferiority and the "social evaluative threat" which are "likely" to be driven by inequality.<br />
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There are many problems with this torturous chain of reasoning, not least Wilkinson and Pickett's tendency to oversimplify complex ideas and treat contentious theories as fact, but leaving them aside, let us take the proposition that stress and anxiety are the root causes of many modern social and health problems. If inequality is, in turn, the root cause of this anxiety, there must be a correlation between inequality and anxiety over time, but no amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that no such relationship exists.<br />
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Chapter 3 involves so many digressions and non-sequiturs that the unwary reader can be forgiven for having forgotten this little fact by the time they reach the end, and yet those two graphs indicating no correlation between anxiety and inequality seriously undermine their hypothesis.<br />
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But those graphs tell us something more. Wilkinson and Pickett are forced to accept that the rise in anxiety between 1950 and 1980 cannot be blamed on inequality because inequality was flat or falling during this period, but they never ask the obvious question—if inequality was not the cause, what was?<br />
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If the anxiety data is to be believed—and Wilkinson and Pickett cast no doubt on it—something important clearly happened after 1952 (at the latest) which led to greater anxiety, but Wilkinson and Pickett display not a hint of curiosity as to what this might be. Had they not been so committed to their <i>a priori</i> hypothesis, they might have paid more attention to this mysterious third variable. As it is, they ignore it for the remainder of the book in favour of their hunch that inequality is somehow the culprit despite their own evidence.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-15711031267260576762011-12-04T15:27:00.002+00:002013-04-11T18:04:40.557+01:00Wilkinson in The GuardianLast week, Richard Wilkinson wrote an article for <i><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/01/happy-britons">The Guardian</a></i> in which he claimed that a large reduction in inequality took place in the 1930s which led to a large rise in life expectancy, despite economic hardship.<br />
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Rather surprisingly, health – and probably other indicators of wellbeing – continued to improve in the great depression of the 1930s. This is likely to have been partly because that period saw the most rapid sustained increase in equality on record.</div>
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There are two problems with this assertion. The first is that the Great Depression of the 1930s did not see "the most sustained increase in equality on record." The big fall in inequality began in 1939-40 as a result of the Second World War and continued through the austerity years of the 1940s. Rationing, conscription and full employment are the most plausible explanations for this decline. </div>
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As the <a href="http://www.economonitor.com/nouriel/2011/10/17/full-analysis-the-instability-of-inequality/">graph</a> below shows, this was an international phenomenon known as the Great Compression. A similar graph appears in the revised edition of <i>The Spirit Level </i>(p. 296) clearly showing little change in British inequality in the 1930s. (Both graphs show the share of income held by the top 1% of earners. Other <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/09/paul-krugman-in.html">measures</a> tell the same story.) It is puzzling that Wilkinson, whose bachelor's degree was in economic history, can confuse the Great Depression with the Great Compression.</div>
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The second problem is that Wilkinson's only piece of empirical evidence linking reduced inequality with better health during this period comes from life expectancy data (he offers no evidence at all to support his hunch that "probably other indicators of wellbeing" also improved). Life expectancy is indeed a good proxy for health, but there was nothing remarkable about the improvements seen in the 1930s. As the graph below shows, life expectancy increased throughout the century at a steady rate. There is <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf">no historical correlation</a> between inequality and health (nor with any of the other criteria studied in <i>The Spirit Level)</i>. </div>
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Life expectancy neither rose more sharply when inequality was low, nor declined when inequality was high. Because of the sustained rise in life expectancy, it is possible to point to any event in the 20th century (except for the two world wars) and say that it <i>coincided</i> with a rise in life expectancy. It would be fatuous, but it would be factually correct. But if you were to say that x <i>caused</i> a rise in life expectancy—as Wilkinson is doing here—you would rightly be accused of mistaking correlation for causation and committing a basic <i>post hoc ergo propter hoc</i> error.<br />
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Wilkinson is so committed to the theory that inequality is the main driver of social outcomes that he is compelled to view any period of history which saw a decline in inequality as a time of national revival, regardless of what the history books say. In <i>The Spirit Level</i>, he and Pickett display nostalgia for wartime Britain, austerity Britain and the 1970s, despite these being notoriously miserable times to be alive. It is appropriate that the grim 1930s be added to that list.<br />
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The main aim of Wilkinson's article is to dismiss the academic field of happiness studies. More of that in January when the Institute of Economic Affairs publishes a monograph on that subject...Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-67072057660578933772011-05-25T15:29:00.001+01:002011-06-12T15:30:59.059+01:00Does the Better Life Index support The Spirit Level?Yesterday, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the <a href="http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/">Better Life Index</a>. This project aims to measure the quality-of-life in countries using eleven criteria.<br />
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<blockquote>Since it was founded in 1961, the OECD has helped governments design better policies for better lives for their citizens. More recently, the OECD has been keenly involved in the debate on measuring well-being. Based on this experience, these 11 topics reflect what the OECD has identified as essential to well-being in terms of material living conditions (housing, income, jobs) and quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance).</blockquote><br />
Having gone to all this trouble to create a reliable index of well-being, it's worth asking whether the OECD data supports <i>The Spirit Level</i>'s hypothesis that "more equal societies almost always do better"?<br />
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No, it doesn't. The poorest country—Portugal—does worst, but the data points appear to be scattered randomly.<br />
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In fact, if we drill down into the data we can see that not only is well-being not better in "more equal" countries, but the OECD's figures do not support <i>The Spirit Level'</i>s key argument—that "more equal" countries have stronger social support networks which lead to a healthier and happier population.<br />
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<i>Quality of social support network:</i><br />
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<i>Life expectancy:</i><br />
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<i>Self-reported health:</i><br />
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<i>Life satisfaction:</i><br />
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There is no association between inequality and any of these variables. Indeed, with the exception of self-reported health—which seems to show the opposite of what <i>The Spirit Level</i> says—the regression lines are about as straight as you could expect from a randomly assorted set of data.<br />
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Taken together, the OECD's Better Life Index appears to support the view of a previous effort by <i>The Economist</i> to devise a <a href="http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf">quality-of-life index</a>, which concluded:<br />
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<blockquote>There is no evidence for an explanation sometimes proffered for the apparent paradox of increasing incomes and stagnant life-satisfaction scores: the idea that an increase in someone’s income causes envy and reduces the welfare and satisfaction of others. In our estimates, the level of income inequality had no impact on levels of life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is primarily determined by absolute, rather than relative, status (related to states of mind and aspirations).</blockquote><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(Note on data: The first graph shows an index of all the OECD's criteria with each given equal weight. Singapore and Hong Kong are not OECD members so they do not feature in the list. Their absence can only benefit <i>The Spirit Level</i>'s case here because<i> </i>these unequal countries tend to perform well under most criteria.<i> </i>As per </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The Spirit Level</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">, tax havens and countries without equality data are excluded. All other counties with wealth greater than Portugal are included. The OECD produces well-respected inequality figures but these are not used in <i>The Spirit Level </i>(perhaps because they show Japan to be quite unequal). I have used <i>The Spirit Level</i>'s preferred inequality figures here and throughout <i><a href="http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf">The Spirit Level Delusion</a></i>.)</span>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-33778326224317329852011-02-01T19:30:00.001+00:002012-11-13T02:27:57.072+00:0020 questions for Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[Wilkinson and Pickett (W & P) have now responded to these questions. This post has been updated to show their answers, with my replies below. These are a set of straight-forward questions on simple points of fact that were raised on this blog in April 2010. Some websites have portrayed W & P's replies as being a response to the evidence and arguments in the book The Spirit Level Delusion. They're not. They have never responded to those, but their replies here are of interest all the same.]</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">1. Why do you exclude the Czech Republic, South Korea and Hong Kong from your analysis when all these societies are wealthier than Portugal?</span><br />
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Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">There are different ways of measuring average income in different countries; the choice of measure makes small differences in precise ranking of countries by wealth. We chose countries ordered according to the Atlas Method, because this is used by the World Bank to classify countries into Low, Medium and High Income categories. Our source is the World Development Indicators Database, World Bank, April 2004*. From this list we selected the 50 richest countries, excluded those with populations less than 3 million and those without income inequality data from the United Nations. Our aim was to examine the impact of inequality on health and social problems among rich countries, where average levels of income are not related to health, happiness or well-being. Our selection criteria also mean that we only consider the older, rich, developed, market economies, and so allows us to compare like with like. The countries which our critics suggest we should fail to meet the criteria.</span></blockquote>
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This is a key question and unfortunately W & P only reiterate what they said in the Appendix of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. I have never challenged their assertion that only wealthy Western industrialised nations should be included in the analysis. The question is which countries are "rich". Any cut-off point will be open to debate, but picking the top 50 for no other reason than that it is a round number is unnecessarily arbitrary.<br />
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W & P say that they selected the countries by picking those which appeared "on the flat part of the curve at the top right in Figure 1.1 on p. 7, where life expectancy is no longer related to differences in Gross National Income" (<i>The Spirit Level, </i>p. 280). This is simply not true. The image below is a close up of the countries in Figure 1.1. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and South Korea (Hong Kong is not shown) are all on "the flat part" and are all shown as being richer than Portugal and yet they are not included.<br />
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All I do in <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i> is include countries of similar or greater wealth that should—by W & P's own criteria—have been included in the first place. I have not added poorer countries in, rather I have included rich developed societies that W & P excluded without good reason.<br />
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The World Bank gives figures for the Atlas method (in US dollars) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity">Purchasing Power Parity</a> (in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_dollar">international dollars</a>). The latter is more appropriate for international comparisons—the whole point of international dollars is to facilitate international comparisons. Even using W & P's arbitrary top 50 cut-off point, the World Bank's figures for 2005 show:<br />
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(9) Hong Kong: $34,900<br />
(45) Slovenia: $22,140<br />
(46) South Korea: $22,010<br />
(48) Portugal: $22,070<br />
(50) Czech Republic: $19,560<br />
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And the figures for 2008 show:<br />
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(16) Hong Kong: $43,960<br />
(44) South Korea: $28,120<br />
(46) Slovenia: $26,910<br />
(55) Czech Republic: $22,790<br />
(59) Portugal: $22,080<br />
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Whichever data set is used, there is no justification for including relatively poor countries like Greece and Portugal while excluding several nations which are manifestly comparable.<br />
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If we wish to "compare like with like", it is particularly important to include Asian countries other than Japan, because they demonstrate that the supposed benefits of Japanese equality are actually the result of social and cultural factors unique to Asian societies. Although very unequal, Hong Kong and Singapore perform well under almost every criteria although the W & P hypothesis predicts that they should perform worst. This reveals a puzzling lack of a dose-response relationship.<br />
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[*Although published in 2004, the figures refer to 2002 - CJS]<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">2. Why do you exclude Singapore from your graph of mental illness when you included it in the same graph when it was published in Olivers James' </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Affluenza</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Comparing the prevalence of mental illness in different societies has long been thought to be problematic because of cultural differences in labelling mental illness or in help-seeking behaviours. To overcome these limitations, the World Health Organization established a consortium to provide international comparisons of the prevalence of mental illness. As referenced in The Spirit Level, we use these WHO estimates for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. We added in estimates from Canada, the UK and Australia because they used almost exactly comparable methods (diagnostic interviews of random samples of the population) to the WHO studies. We did not include a survey of mental illness from Singapore in either of our peer-reviewed publications on this topic, or in The Spirit Level, because the WHO surveys included questions on illegal drug abuse and, in 1988, the death sentence became mandatory in Singapore for manufacturing, importing, exporting or trafficking drugs in small quantities. Possession of small quantities was taken as prima facie evidence of trafficking. We therefore consider that self-reported estimates of mental illness in Singapore survey will be under-estimates. However, even if Singapore is included, there is still a statistically significant association between income inequality and mental illness (r=0.58, p=0.04).</span></blockquote>
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This doesn't answer the question of why they included Singapore in the graph they created for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Affluenza</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Selfish Capitalist</span>. Drugs are illegal in all the countries studied in their graph and admitting to having used a substance in a confidential mental health questionnaire is not grounds for prosecution for possession, regardless of the severity of the punishment.<br />
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Rates of anxiety and mood disorders found in the <a href="http://www.sma.org.sg/smj/3906/articles/3906a4.html">Singapore study</a> indicate that the position of Singapore in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Affluenza</span> graph is about right (ie. about the same as France). <br />
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We will come back to the reliability of their mental illness graph in question 14.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">3. Why do you say that the USA’s decline in homicide ended in 2005 when 2008 saw the lowest number of homicides since 1965? As you must know, America's murder rate has halved in the last two decades despite rising inequality.</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We started writing The Spirit Level in January 2007 and delivered it to our publisher in February 2008, so clearly we could not have accessed homicide data from 2008 – typically official statistics are published 2-3 years post-collection. At time of writing (mid-2010), the most up-to-date data are for 2008.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The homicide rate in the USA has indeed declined, on average over the past two decades, whilst income inequality has been rising. But, as we discuss in The Spirit Level, and show here, there is a match over time between bottom-sensitive measures of income inequality and changes in homicide rates.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> contains references to several articles published after February 2008, but we shall let that pass. On this occasion, I accept that my criticism was too hasty. I accept that W & P would not have had the homicide data for 2008 before <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level </span>was published in hardback. Presumably they will correct their claim that the murder rate started to rise again in 2005 in the future editions?*<br />
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The substantive point remains, however. America's murder rate is at its lowest level since 1965 and it was very premature for W & P to suggest that the 2005-06 blip represented the start of an upward trend. This seems a small point but it important to their overall argument. The reason W & P are so keen to claim that the murder rate began rising in the 2000s is that the huge decline in American homicide coincided with growing equality. The sharp but inconvenient decline in the murder rate (and of crime generally) from the early 1990s does not sit easily with their theory that inequality is the root cause of homicide. As shown in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span> and elsewhere, W & P's evidence for linking the two is extremely tenuous.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>* (UPDATE 2011: The second edition has appeared and they have not.) </i> <br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">4. Why did you use older data for your life expectancy/inequality graph than you used elsewhere in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Spirit Level</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">? Is it because more recent data show no correlation with inequality?</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">To avoid the effects of random fluctuations in inequality measures in each country, we took the average of inequality measures published in four consecutive years of the UN Human Development Report. We then matched outcome data (including life expectancy) as nearly as possible to the same time frame as the measures of inequality. When looking at life expectancy against National Income per head we again took the most up to date measures of those covering the same time frame. There are also many recent studies that demonstrate a relationship between income inequality and health, see for example the study of more than 60 million individuals by Kondo and colleagues.</span></blockquote>
<br />
This simply doesn't make any sense. W & P's national <i>income</i> data come from 2002, therefore it is logical to use life expectancy data from 2002. Instead they use data from 2004 (as published in the <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/">UN Human Development Report</a> (UN HDR) 2006).<br />
<br />
But when they look at <i>inequality</i>, they use life expectancy figures from 2002 (as published in the <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/">UN HDR 2004</a>), even though their inequality figures are averaged out from several different years. A better explanation is that the older edition of the report was preferred because it provided slightly better evidence of a correlation between inequality and longevity, albeit only when W & P's selection of countries were used.<br />
<br />
I am by no means the first person to have spotted Richard Wilkinson's tendency to be choosy about which sets of data he uses to make his case:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
"He [Wilkinson] gives no satisfactory explanation about why "the poorest 70%" should be chosen, and <b>the suspicion must be that the choise is derived from the data</b>."<br />
<br />
Ken Judge, 'Income distribution and life expectancy: a critical appraisal', <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/311/7015/1282.full">British Medical Journal</a></span>, 1995</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
"The strength of association between absolute income and life expectancy seems <b>quite sensitive to which countries are included</b>. What constitutes an appropriate set of countries of this sort is certainly open to debate. Nevertheless, we have shown that compared with Wilkinson's selection of 23 countries, the addition of the other 10 equally wealthy nations that constitute the full sample, significantly changes the results."<br />
<br />
J. Lynch, P. Due, C. Muntaner & G. Davey Smith, 'Social capital - Is it a good investment strategy for public health?', <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://jech.bmj.com/content/54/6/404.full">Journal of Epidemiological and Community Health</a></span>, 2000</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
"Although many aspects of this debate are still unresolved, it has recently become clear that the findings of that paper [Wilkinson, BMJ, 1992] <b>were an artifact of the selection of countries</b>... the evidence for a correlation between income inequality and the health of the population is slowly dissipating’<br />
<br />
Johan Mackenbach, 'Income inequality and population health', <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7328/1.full">British Medical Journal</a></span>, 2002</blockquote>
<br />
W & P also mention the <a href="http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/339/nov10_2/b4471">study by Kondo et al</a>., published in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">BMJ</span> in 2009. They have a particular fondness for this study, which measured self-reported health. They cited it during the Royal Society of Arts debate and referenced it in their <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/09/spirit-level-policy-exchange">response to Peter Saunders</a>. They also mentioned it in their <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575378630669014128.html?mod=WSJ_article_related">response</a> to an article I co-authored in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>. In the latter, they insisted that it "shows unequivocally that inequality is related to significantly higher mortality rates." <br />
<br />
In fact, the study concludes that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health, although the population impact might be larger if the association is truly causal... The findings need to be interpreted with caution given the heterogeneity between studies</blockquote>
<br />
This paper certainly gives more support to W & P's hypothesis than most, but it is anything but unequivocal. <br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">5. You use the high rate of teen births in Portugal (in 2002) as proof that inequality is related to teen births. Why do you not mention that abortion was illegal in Portugal until 2007?</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We do indeed show that teenage births are related to income inequality in rich countries, as have UNICEF. This is not dependent on Portugal; indeed if we exclude Portugal the relationship with inequality is slightly stronger, not weaker. In the USA, unlike internationally, data on teenage conceptions were available so we use those, rather than births, as they are unaffected by state differences in access to abortion, and we show the same robust relationship with inequality.</span></blockquote>
<br />
The relationship is <i>not</i> stronger without Portugal. Nor could it be, since Portugal is an unequal country with a high rate of teen birth (primarily the result of its high rate of teen marriages and low abortion rate). With Portugal dropped from the analysis, the r-squared drops from an already feeble 0.10 to 0.089.<br />
<br />
I do not suggest that the correlation is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">dependent</span> on Portugal, only that a ban on abortion is going to have a major effect on the birth rate and is an example of the kind of real-world differences that are routinely ignored in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. Throughout <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, W & P refuse to acknowledge social, demographic, historical and cultural differences between nations unless those differences can be used to plug gaps in the theory.<br />
<br />
For example, when Finland is seen to have a high rate of homicide, they are quick to point out that it has a high level of gun ownership, but, absurdly, they do not give the same benefit of the doubt to (unequal) places like Israel and the United States.<br />
<br />
In the case of Portugal, two major, common sense explanations for the high level of teen births are staring them in the face (the other being Portugal's high rate of teen marriages) but since the high Portuguese figure superficially supports their hypothesis, these confounding factors are never acknowledged.<br />
<br />
As I acknowledge in <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, the UNICEF report mentions inequality as one possible explanation for teen births but it makes it clear that it is not the primary cause. As Peter Saunders has shown, English speaking countries tend to have higher teen births. The UNICEF document makes it clear that cultural differences provide a better explanation for teen birth rates than inequality. The low rates of teen births in Singapore and Hong Kong (not shown in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">T</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">he Spirit Level</span>) give further support for this, as does the fact that the only non-Anglo nation with a higher rate of teen births is Portugal for the reasons given above.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">6. Why do you not include the crime rate in your index of health and social problems? Is it because the crime rate tends to be higher in 'more equal' countries?</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">It has often been pointed out that homicides are one of the few crimes which can be compared reliably between countries. Comparisons of other kinds of crime are affected by differences in the law, in reporting, and by other extraneous influences. Car crime, for instance, is affected by the number of cars and rape is dramatically affected by reporting (see our answer to Q 19 below. While there are some research papers showing relationships between inequality and property crime, there are no sources of data (including those used by Snowdon) which deal adequately with these problems. Hence, we confined our attention to adult and juvenile homicide rates. There are more than 50 studies showing that inequality is related to violence, see for example the review by Hsieh and Pugh 25 and the recent study by Elgar and Aitken.</span></blockquote>
<br />
I mention the potential pitfalls of comparing recorded crime data in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span>, which is why I also show the results of the <a href="http://www.europeansafetyobservatory.eu/downloads/EUICS%20-%20The%20Burden%20of%20Crime%20in%20the%20EU.pdf">EU Crime Survey</a>. The Crime Survey uses the same methodology for all countries and is based on people's experience of crime, whether recorded or not. Both data sets indicate higher levels of crime—particularly property crime—in more equal societies.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">7. Why do you say that homicide is inversely related to suicide when there is no evidence for this?</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In fact, there are several pieces of research which show that homicide rates are inversely related to suicide, see for example (44) (45)</span></blockquote>
<br />
Having spent so long fact-checking <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, it came as no great surprise when I turned to the first <a href="http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/4/837.full">study</a> referenced by W & P and found that its conclusion read:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
The overall correlation between homicide and suicide rates was weak and statistically insignificant</blockquote>
<br />
It is certainly true that homicide rates are higher in Africa and the Americas (this is confirmed in the second <a href="http://pubget.com/paper/19574266">study</a> they reference—see below), while suicide rates are higher in Europe.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbioaYda4M22MIkkZE1w5rPM0xQzwPRJRG8eOpA7aljb-ypiItI8sOmzTRWl7u7lbTDpOm_o9zCbB9WXQIP3ZEvZarD4tGx_ABlM7CmcEvA_yG5lZe91PTRVfLMMuoywri7Jj-zgLIHU/s1600/homicide_suicide+%28continents%29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbioaYda4M22MIkkZE1w5rPM0xQzwPRJRG8eOpA7aljb-ypiItI8sOmzTRWl7u7lbTDpOm_o9zCbB9WXQIP3ZEvZarD4tGx_ABlM7CmcEvA_yG5lZe91PTRVfLMMuoywri7Jj-zgLIHU/s400/homicide_suicide+%28continents%29.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Perhaps W & P would argue that this graph shows that suicide is inversely associated with homicide. I think most people would say that it shows that there is simply a much higher homicide rate in Africa and the Americas. There <i>is</i> reason to believe that rising prosperity leads to lower homicide rates and higher suicide rates. But when we compare the wealthy countries that are the focus of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, there is no correlation between suicide and homicide (see <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span>, p. 82).<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">8. Why do you suggest that people in more equal countries give more to charity when the reverse is true?</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We do not say that people in more equal countries give more to charity - instead we show that more equal countries donate more in development aid to foreign countries. We do cite Eric Uslaner’s work which shows that people who have high levels of trust are more charitable. Snowdon presents data from the Charities Aid Foundation, which suggests that more unequal countries (especially the USA) have higher levels of individual charitable giving. However, as the Charities Aid Foundation points out, charitable giving in the USA is heavily influenced by tax policy, and may also be a response to the exceptional need created by the US lack of social security systems. Only 3% of US charitable giving goes overseas, so total US donations to overseas development are substantially lower than other rich countries.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Low levels of US government aid are partly a reflection of low trust in government (strongly related to inequality) and also of a lack of social security and welfare provision. Together these shift the onus of support to wholly inadequate private charitable giving.</span></blockquote>
<br />
On page 60 of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, Wilkinson and Pickett write that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
"Not surprisingly, just as <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">individuals who trust other people are more likely to give to charity</span>, more equal countries are also more generous to poorer countries."</blockquote>
<br />
Bearing in mind that, at this point in the book, W & P have just 'proved' that people in egalitarian societies are more trusting of other people, how else is the reader supposed to interpret this sentence, other than as a claim that people in more equal countries give more to charity?<br />
<br />
But they don't. They give less to charity, for reasons that are well-understood. The <a href="https://www.cafonline.org/">Charities Aid Foundation</a> (CAF) certainly <i>does</i> point out that the USA's tax system encourages donations to charity. Are Wilkinson and Pickett suggesting that this is a bad thing? It seems that way. (nb. Only Sweden, Finland and Austria do <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not</span> incentivise charitable giving).<br />
<br />
The CAF also notes that people in high-tax countries are less likely to give to charity. This is hardly surprising, since people are less likely to give to charity if (a) they have less disposable income, and (b) they live in a society which expects the state to take responsibility for such matters. I address both issues in my book and quote the CAF.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett reveal their political bias with their dismissive attitude towards voluntary, private charity and their preference for publicly funded, compulsory aid. They are fundamentally wrong about all their assumptions given above. Low levels of government aid are not a response to lack of trust in government—the government decides the level, after all. Instead, they are the result of lower levels of taxation and a historical emphasis on private philanthropy. W & P are also wrong to say that total US aid (private + public) is "substantially lower" than that of other countries. The USA is consistently in the top 10 in both per capita terms and in absolute terms.<br />
<br />
And they are wildly wrong when they make the unreferenced claim that only 3% of US donations goes overseas. This is just the kind of causal disregard for the truth that makes fact-checking <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level </span>such an exhausting affair. Of the <a href="http://www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2009/June/200906171016181CJsamohT0.6031.html">$307 billion</a> the US gave to charity privately in 2008, $116 billion went overseas. That is 38%, not 3%. And while Americans prefer private donations to state-funded aid, the USA gives far more than 0.7% of its GDP to the developing world. (0.7% being the United Nations target.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">9. Why did Kate make a video called ‘Why Cubans live longer than Americans?’ when all the sources show that life expectancy in Cuba is lower than in the USA?</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Kate was not consulted about the title for this online clip from a short interview. What she actually said was that countries such as Cuba, Costa Rica and some poorer European countries have life expectancy as high, or higher than, the USA. In fact, in the 2006 revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects report, for 2005-2010, infant mortality rates in Cuba were 5.1 per 1000 live births, compared to 6.3 for the United States, and life expectancy was in Cuba was 78.3 years, compared to 78.2 years in the USA.</span></blockquote>
<div>
<br />
It is difficult to believe that Pickett would have no say about the title of a <a href="http://bigthink.com/ideas/18465">video</a> she presented, or would have no power to rename or withdraw the video once it was given a misleading title. But whoever named it can hardly be blamed, since she does indeed claim that Cuba and Costa Rica have life expectancies that are "as high or higher than the United States."<br />
<br />
W & P's reference to the World Population Prospects report is another example of their habit of data-mining to find the 'right' figures. As they must know, that particular report gives a prediction, it is not a real figure. More reliable figures for life expectancy come from the <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/">UN HDR</a>—the preferred source used in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. All of these reports show life expectancy being higher in the USA than in Cuba and Costa Rica. The most recent edition shows that life expectancy is 79.1 in the USA and 78.5 in Cuba. Costa Rica's life expectancy is 78.7.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">10. Why do you write about "increased family break-down and family stress in less equal countries" when divorce and single-parent households tend to be more common in more equal countries?</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Although lone parent families are not more common in more unequal countries, changes in income inequality are correlated with rising divorce rates in US counties.</span></blockquote>
<br />
This evades the question. The facts show that divorce is more common in more equal countries, and the Scandinavian countries have amongst the highest rates of lone parent families (as do some Anglo-Saxon countries). It is simply untrue to say that there is "increased family break-down and family stress in less equal countries".<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">11. Why do you say that community life is weaker in less equal countries when these nations have more people involved in community organisations (charities, sports clubs, environmental groups etc.)?</span></div>
<br />
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Robert Putnam’s measures of ‘Social Capital’ are based on membership of voluntary and community associations of the kind you mention. Both in his earlier study of the Italian regions and in his study of the American states he shows there is a very strong tendency for the more equal regions and states to have stronger community ties measured in this way. Looking at changes over time in the US as a whole he also says:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"Community and equality are mutually reinforcing... Social capital and economic inequality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950s and 1960s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century. ...those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and social capital coincided. Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital. By the end of the twentieth century the gap between rich and poor in the US had been increasing for nearly three decades, the longest sustained increase in inequality for at least a century. The timing of the two trends is striking: somewhere around 1965-70 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically." p.359</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sociologists distinguish between generalized trust (trust of people with whom we do not have an intimate relationships) and particularized trust (trust of people like ourselves). Generalized trust is related to social capital, and many researchers, including Putnam, have linked these measures of social capital to greater equality. Indeed, they have shown that it is inequality that affects trust, rather than the other way round.</span></blockquote>
<div>
<br />
Again, this does not answer the question. The international evidence shows that people in less equal countries are <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">more</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">likely</span> to be members of clubs, societies, sports associations, religious groups etc. The only exception is trade union membership, which is often compulsory or strongly 'encouraged'. The graph below shows data from the <a href="http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/">World Values Survey</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD2_4XppYOraB77Zfxlau9OZECR5q1yv18tShlBknRvteiBnLINweTaM51SUkEIvcAPvg8d3mjhUMMqNU2yfpvyQzN1enEx3ZMolXTP_yzK-X5umM1I2_mIRg-FWx7kiFPS7HDBK-rN8A/s1600/community.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD2_4XppYOraB77Zfxlau9OZECR5q1yv18tShlBknRvteiBnLINweTaM51SUkEIvcAPvg8d3mjhUMMqNU2yfpvyQzN1enEx3ZMolXTP_yzK-X5umM1I2_mIRg-FWx7kiFPS7HDBK-rN8A/s400/community.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
What Putnam shows is that membership of these kinds of groups has declined in the United States over the last fifty years (as it has elsewhere). But Putnam never endorses the theory that inequality is the cause of the decline in club membership or social capital.<br />
<br />
Indeed, W & P's selective quoting from Putnam's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Bowling Alone </span>is a good example of how they provide the illusion of an academic consensus where none exists. In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, they quote the same passage as the one quoted above, with the same sections deleted. The unwary reader might interpret this quote as evidence that Putnam believes that inequality leads to less social capital.<br />
<br />
But, as ever with W & P, it is what they do not show that is most instructive. The unabridged first line of this quote reads: "Community and equality are mutually reinforcing, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">not mutually incompatible.</span>" After the last line W & P quote, Putnam concludes: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">"This pair of trends illustrates that fraternity and equality are complementary, not warring values."</span><br />
<br />
As these words suggest, Putnam is not arguing that income equality necessarily increases social capital, he is merely arguing that the former does not <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">damage</span> the latter. This is obvious from the section heading which asks the question: 'Is social capital at war with equality?'<br />
<br />
Why would he ask that question? Because, as Putnam points out: "the abundant social capital of the 1950s was often exclusionary along racial and gender and class lines. Generally speaking the haves engage in much more civic activity than the have-nots." Because of this, it is sometimes argued that left-wing attacks on elitist social institutions weaken some forms of community life. Putnam argues that these fears are ill-founded, and he says the positive correlation between equality and social capital in the USA since the Second World War "powerfully contradicts the view that community engagement must necessarily amplify inequality."<br />
<br />
But Putnam is far more cautious in claiming a causal link between income equality and social capital than W & P. In fact, this brief passage is the only part of his 500 page book that evens mentions income equality (R. Putnam, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Bowling Alone</span>, 2000; pp. 358-60). When he sums up the evidence to explain why community life has broken down in the USA since the 1950s, he identifies four factors ('generational change', 'television', 'work' and 'sprawl' - p. 284). He does not include inequality.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">12. Do you accept that the World Values Survey data show no correlation between 'happiness' and inequality, but a strong correlation between 'happiness' and income?</span><br />
<br />
<i>[There are so many points to make about W & P's answer here that I have split it up]</i><br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We accept that there is no relation between inequality and WVS measures of happiness, but among the rich countries neither is there a relation between happiness and Gross National Income per head (see our figure 1.2 in The Spirit Level).</span></blockquote>
<br />
W & P's claim that there is no relationship between happiness (as measured by the <a href="http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/">World Values Survey</a>) and Gross National Income is incorrect. As can be seen from the graph below, there is a clear correlation, even at a very high level of economic development.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQvyV3yr4dm3fAxbFUvw2SCWXLgp_QzW7UA7nF_Px-kYy-yeakRwqbdT6mVrqhIkf9xbwJIw0e2Yd-fAbYANxOmHkUCERKsCFM929vAQEl3KIHjVLUY68TjkgFX9n_cELc7SX-rlirCE0/s1600/happy_gni+for+pub.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQvyV3yr4dm3fAxbFUvw2SCWXLgp_QzW7UA7nF_Px-kYy-yeakRwqbdT6mVrqhIkf9xbwJIw0e2Yd-fAbYANxOmHkUCERKsCFM929vAQEl3KIHjVLUY68TjkgFX9n_cELc7SX-rlirCE0/s400/happy_gni+for+pub.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
W & P never show this graph. Instead, they use a graph that shows rich and poor countries together (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Spirit Level</span>, p. 9), which obscures what is shown above. Consequently, they are able to begin their book by claiming that "happiness levels fail to rise further as rich countries get still richer". This is a crucial part of their argument, since it suggests that economic growth has "done its work"and can therefore be curtailed. It is, however, factually incorrect.<br />
<br />
The other important thing about the happiness surveys is that they show no relationship with inequality. This is a crucial observation, since it is powerful evidence that more equal societies are not happier.<br />
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During the Royal Society of Arts debate, Richard Wilkinson responded to this evidence by claiming that happiness does not have a social gradient and, therefore, would not be affected by levels of inequality. This is not true. Any number of studies have shown that the rich are happier than the poor eg. <a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/16/business/Easterlin1974.pdf">Easterlin</a> (1974). They have, however, now acknowledged this...<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In our debate at the RSA, Richard meant to say that happiness and income have a reverse social gradient, rather than no social gradient. The correlation between income and happiness among individuals within countries has been shown to be a relationship with relative income and social status. </span></blockquote>
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The correction is welcome* but the subsequent argument is weak. There are many reasons why the rich are happier than the poor. In part, their absolute income allows them to afford a better standard of living and, in part, their relative income allows them to compare themselves favourably to their peers. While both are important, the material benefits of absolute income receive short shrift in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. W & P focus only on relative income and claim that richer people are happier only because money buys status and status symbols. This is opinion, not fact.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">It has also been shown that additional income makes much more difference to the happiness of the poor than the rich. This would suggest that redistribution would improve over-all happiness. </span></blockquote>
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No. It suggests that additional income would improve the happiness of the poor. We should, therefore, pursue a system that will maximise increases in the incomes of the poor. There is no evidence that the zero-growth egalitarianism proposed by W & P will do that.<br />
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But the key argument in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> is that the poor would become happier if the rich become poorer, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">even if the poor got no richer in the process</span>. In other words, rounding up and deporting every millionaire in Britain would, in itself, be enough to improve social outcomes, even if no one got richer as a result. This is where W & P depart from the bulk of the scientific literature and, I would argue, from common sense.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Several economists who study happiness (e.g. Blanchflower and Oswald) show that, in sub-national analyses, more equal societies, for example more equal US states, are happier. </span></blockquote>
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The majority of happiness studies have shown that inequality has no effect on happiness, which is why the happiness studies are not mentioned in <i>The Spirit Level. </i>(See, for example, reviews by <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02359.x/abstract">Clark and Senik</a> (2010) and <a href="http://ideas.repec.org/p/edn/esedps/180.html">Hopkins</a> (2008).) Nor do <a href="http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/7487.html">Blanchflower and Oswald</a> say that more equal states or countries are happier. This is a complete misrepresentation of the literature.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">International comparisons of subjective variables, such as happiness, are notoriously unreliable (for example, self-reported health appears better in countries with higher death rates) This is why in The Spirit Level we concentrated very largely on objective measures of health and wellbeing.</span></blockquote>
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Since the happiness surveys show no correlation with inequality and a strong correlation with income, it is perhaps unsurprising that W & P now choose to distance themselves from them. It is a shame they felt the need to put this "notoriously unreliable" data at the heart of the first chapter of their book. Note also, that the trust survey—upon which they base so many of their arguments—is a wholly subjective and self-reported measure. They also put great faith in the Kondo study (see question 4) which studies self-reported health.</div>
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[*A "reverse social gradient" implies a reverse relationship ie. that the poor are happier. Since even W & P cannot believe this (surely?), I assume this to be a slip of the pen.]<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">13. On page 19 of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Spirit Level</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">, you say you included alcohol addiction as a 'health and social problem', but you never discuss it in the rest of the book. Is this because the highest rates of alcoholism are in Scandinavia?</span><br />
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Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">It is important to distinguish between alcohol use and alcohol abuse. Alcohol use is difficult to measure and often has no social gradient – consumption tends to be higher in higher social classes. This is in marked contrast to binge and problem drinking. We include alcohol abuse (as measured by surveys of mental illness that cover drug and alcohol addiction) in our Index of Health and Social Problems, and have previously demonstrated a significant relationship between deaths from alcohol-related liver disease and income inequality in US states.</span></blockquote>
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I agree about making a distinction between per capita alcohol consumption and overall alcohol consumption, but several international surveys of mental illness surveys have shown that the more equal Scandinavian countries have the highest levels of alcohol abuse. It would be interesting to see what W & P's alcohol abuse graph looks like. It does not appear in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> and the data is not included in their spreadsheet.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">14. Why do you show no data about the (high) prevalence of mental illness in Scandinavia?</span><br />
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Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The World Health Organization has not yet produced internationally comparable data on mental illness for Scandinavian countries, but we eagerly await such data. In the absence of robust estimates from the WHO, we know of no high quality data to justify the suggestion that Scandinavian countries have a higher prevalence of mental illness.</span></blockquote>
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W & P's mental illness graph provides one of the most egregious examples of data-mining in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. Much more evidence for mental illness prevalence exists than is shown in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> and, although W & P are implying otherwise, they do not confine themselves to "robust estimates from the WHO". The figures they use for the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (all less equal countries) come from other sources. When more than one source is available, W & P consistently pick the figure that best suits their hypothesis. As I explain in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span>, there are serious questions about the reliability of some of the figures from the WHO study, which the study's authors acknowledge.<br />
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I don't claim that rates of mental illness are necessarily "higher" in Scandinavia, but the available evidence suggests that they are as high as in the United States. For example, a large study of all four Nordic states concluded:<br />
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<blockquote>
Overall, it can be concluded that the prevalence rate of generalized anxiety disorder and major depression in different European countries, including Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, are as high as those found in the United States. (‘Prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder in general practice in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden’, P. Munk-Jorgensen, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17158488">Psychiatric Services</a></span>, 57 (12), December 2006; p. 1738-44)</blockquote>
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Similarly, a study of mental health in Norway compared rates of the most common mental disorders with those in the USA and found "almost identical rates for alcohol abuse, major depression, and social phobia in the two countries." (‘A Norwegian psychiatric epidemiological study’, E. Kringlen et al., <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/158/7/1091">American Journal of Psychiatry</a></span>, 2001, 158; pp. 1091-98)<br />
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Incidentally, the largest systematic review of the prevalence of mental disorders in the EU (Wittchen & Jacobi, 2005 - summarised <a href="http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/98391/E93348.pdf">here</a> (p. 47)), found the 12 month average to be 27%—ie. almost identical to estimates from the USA.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">15. If equality creates good health, why does Denmark currently have the lowest life expectancy of any country in your list?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">As with our other analyses, we (unlike our critics) do not pick and choose different countries to include or exclude according to whether or not their outcomes fit the inequality data. Denmark does indeed have much lower life expectancy than we would expect given its level of inequality. We have never claimed that income inequality is the only cause of worse health and social problems in a society. There will always be countries that do a bit better or worse on any outcome than we might predict given their level of inequality. Some researchers have attributed Denmark’s relatively poor health to its high levels of smoking.</span></blockquote>
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Denmark doesn't have a particularly high level of smoking (see page 24 of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">SLD</span>) and there is surprisingly little correlation between high smoking rates and low life expectancy when whole nations are compared. This only serves to highlight the problem of looking for the effect of one variable amongst aggregate data.<br />
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The simple fact is that the Scandinavian countries all have a very low level of inequality but vary wildly when it comes to life expectancy. Using data from the most recent <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/">UN HDR</a>, out of 28 countries Sweden comes 8th, Norway comes 12th, Finland comes 19th and Denmark comes 27th.<br />
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Japan comes 1st, and this is the jewel in W & P's crown since Japan has an even lower level of inequality (by their measure, at least). But very unequal Hong Kong comes 2nd. Of course, readers of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level </span>will not know that because—although W & P "do not pick and choose different countries to include or exclude according to whether or not their outcomes fit the inequality data"—Hong Kong is never shown.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">16. Why were Singapore and Hong Kong excluded from your graph on obesity?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The International Obesity Taskforce did not report data on obesity for Singapore in the 2002 report which was available when we were writing The Spirit Level. Hong Kong is not a nation state but even if it were it does not meet our inclusion criteria (see point 1).</span></blockquote>
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The Singapore figure was published in 2004. The <a href="http://www.iaso.org/iotf/">IOTF</a> currently cites this figure so presumably we can expect it to appear in future editions of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level.*</span><br />
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Hong Kong's somewhat unusual political status is no reason to exclude it. It is a country and both the World Bank and the United Nations treat it as such and collect data for it as a separate entity. It is certainly a separate and distinct <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">society</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>'s subtitle is 'Why More Equal <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Societies</span> Almost Always Do Better'. If US states fall under the category of separate societies, it is surely reasonable to include Hong Kong.<br />
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Why wouldn't Hong Kong meet the inclusion criteria? It has a population of over 7 million, it has sound data on inequality and came 16th in W & P's preferred list of rich countries.<br />
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<i>* UPDATE 2011: The second edition is out and it is still missing. </i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">17. Do you accept that the "correlation" between trust and equality rests entirely on figures from the four Nordic countries and that there is no pattern amongst the remaining 19 nations?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Absolutely not. These countries are NOT outliers, but lie on the trend line. However, even if they are excluded there is still a statistically significant correlation among the remaining countries (r=-0.46) as well as among US states where the correlation between trust and inequality is also highly significant (r=-0.7).</span></blockquote>
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Again, this depends on which data are used. W & P's trust data come from the 1990s. If you use World Values Survey <a href="http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalize.jsp">data</a> from the 2000s, it is clear that the Scandinavian countries are outliers. The correlation disappears when they are excluded (see below). Even if you prefer W & P's older data set, their correlation is extremely weak.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">18. Why do you say that young people "defer sexual activity" in more equal countries when there is no evidence for this?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We don’t say that people defer sexual activity in more equal countries – we simply discuss Professor Jay Belsky’s theory about quality versus quantity reproductive strategies which biologists have identified in many species.</span></blockquote>
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W & P certainly do discuss Jay Belsky's theory that—as they put it—"people who grow up learning 'to perceive others as trustworthy, relationships as enduring and mutually rewarding and resources more or less constantly available' would mature later, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">defer sexual activity</span>, be better at forming long-term relationships and invest more heavily in their children's development."<br />
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W & P precede this discussion by saying "there seem to be additional reasons why teenage motherhood is sensitive to degrees of inequality in society". They follow it by saying: "So there may be deep-seated adaptive processes which lead from more stressful and unequal societies." Apparently the reader should not infer from this that women in more equal societies defer sexual activity?! <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">19. If greater equality makes countries less violent and more law-abiding, why does Sweden have the highest rate of rape and theft of any country in your list? Why does Finland have the highest murder rate in Europe?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">As we discuss in The Spirit Level, there are multiple influences on health and social problems, and income inequality is only one factor (albeit a strong and robust factor, demonstrated in more than 50 studies) affecting murder rates. Finland has a higher rate of homicides than we would predict, given its level of inequality, probably because of its high level of gun ownership. If we control for gun ownership in US states, the relationship between inequality and homicides actually gets stronger. For crimes other than homicides, comparing crime data among different countries is problematic, due to reporting differences. It seems sensible to assume that rape is more likely to be reported in societies where women’s status is higher.</span></blockquote>
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It is not true that "more than 50 studies" have found a "strong and robust" association between inequality and homicide. Again, W & P mention a third variable (gun ownership) when they discuss Finland but do not give the same benefit of the doubt to Israel and the USA. In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, they do the same when trying to explain how the most equal state (Alaska) has one of the highest rates of homicide. They also make the questionable assumption that murders in America are carried out with legal firearms.<br />
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The assumption that Sweden has the highest rate of recorded rape because women are more likely to report sexual assaults is pure supposition.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">20. Since when has the definition of a tax haven been a country with fewer than 3 million inhabitants? Isn't this just an excuse to leave out Slovenia?</span><br />
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<blockquote>
Wilkinson & Pickett: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The cut off for a small country has to be defined somehow – countries with populations around our 3 million cut-off point include Slovenia, Namibia, Lesotho, and Botswana. Slovenia is the only rich country with close to 3 million inhabitants excluded from our analyses. What happens if we add it in? Not much – the correlation between income inequality and homicides is r=0.42 (p=0.04) with Slovenia in, and r=0.43 (p=0.04) with Slovenia out. For imprisonment, the correlation with Slovenia in is r=0.66 (p<0.001), with Slovenia out, it is r=0.65 (p<0.001)….etc</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br />
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No, the cut-off for a small country does <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not</span> have to be defined somehow. A cut-off is completely unnecessary. All we need to know is which countries are tax havens (is Switzerland not a tax haven?). All the 3 million cut-off does is exclude Slovenia.<br />
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And, yes, including Slovenia often doesn't make a great deal of difference. That's isn't the point. We don't pick and choose the countries on the basis of whether they will make a difference. We include them so we have the full range of rich societies upon which to base our conclusions. Since <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>'s conclusion is that "it falls to our generation to make one of the biggest transformations in human history" (p. 265), it would prudent to make sure the assumptions it is based on are not plucked out of the air.<br />
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It should also be noted that in one of their <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/335/7629/1080.full">published studies</a>, Wilkinson and Pickett "included only countries that had income inequality data and were among the richest 50 in the world and excluded those with populations of 50 in the world and excluded those with populations of <b>less than two million</b> to avoid possible tax havens." This allowed them to include Slovenia which, for the criterion studied in that paper, happened to strengthen the desired relationship. The switch from two million in this study to three million in <i>The Spirit Level</i> did not weed out any tax havens and served only to exclude Slovenia.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">And finally...</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span">A word about the scientific literature. W & P are fond of claiming that their work is backed up by 100s of peer-reviewed studies. In a recent </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_381234673">letter to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/28/claims-over-the-spirit-level">The Guardian</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span">, for example, they once again referred to "hundreds of other academic research papers which show similar patterns."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Do not be fooled. Very few of the studies referenced in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span><span class="Apple-style-span"> claim that health or social problems are caused by income inequality </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">per se</span><span class="Apple-style-span"> (as opposed to absolute income or other socio-economic factors). Of the few that </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">do</span><span class="Apple-style-span"> make such a case, many were written by Richard Wilkinson and/or Kate Pickett (they refer to no fewer than twelve of their own studies in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span><span class="Apple-style-span">).</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span">The bulk of the references are to newspaper articles, opinion pieces, other people's books, studies that discuss specific issues (eg. stress, violence, obesity) and the sources of the raw data (eg. UN, OECD). Often the studies referenced give equivocal support or contradict W & P (see Questions 4 & 7, for examples). The only area which has a significant body of scientific literature is health and inequality, and much of it disagrees with Wilkinson's hypothesis. As Wilkinson admitted in a recent interview with the magazine </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=658&issue=127">International Socialism</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span">, there is virtually no evidence from other academics to support the bulk of the claims made in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span><span class="Apple-style-span">.</span><br />
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<blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span">Wilkinson: <span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"There are about 200 papers on health and inequality in lots of different settings, probably 40 or 50 looking at violence in relation to inequality, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">and </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">very few looking at any of the other things in relation to inequality. In a way, the new work in the book is all these other variables—teenage births, mental illness, prison populations and so on</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">—and the major contribution is bringing all of that into a picture that had previously been just health and violence."</span></span></span></blockquote>
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These are, then, very much W & P's own ideas. Although <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> has launched their theories into the popular consciousness, they find little support in the scientific literature. It is no surprise, then, that their book has received a much cooler reception from academics (see below) than from <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/03/spirit-level-wilkinson-pickett">ex-politicians</a> and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-in-an-unequal-society-we-all-suffer-1651738.html">journalists</a>.<br />
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"The bottom line is that this is a well-written, stimulating polemic. It nevertheless suffers from the same problems as one-trick ponies: if the one trick does not impress you, the show is a failure. Wilkinson and Pickett’s trick simply does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. When assessing this book as a contribution to the debate on the “right” level of income differences in modern society, it is a highly interesting, sympathetic attempt at addressing some of the important problems of Western societies. Yet, when assessing this book from a scientific point of view, one is forced to conclude that it is a failure."<br />
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— Christian Bjornskov, Professor of Economics, University of Aarhus, <i><a href="http://nonicoclolasos.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/pdr-bjornskov-review-file.pdf">Population and Development Review</a></i>, June 2010</blockquote>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Wilkinson and Pickett have no time for nicely balanced judgements. They believe that the evidence they present shows beyond doubt that more equal societies ‘do better’, and they are also confident that they have the right explanation for why this is so... Their case is by no means so securely established as they try to make out... it has been called into question by other leading figures in the field – a fact that WP might have more fully acknowledged... WP’s inadequate, one-dimensional understanding of social stratification leads to major problems in their account of how the contextual effect is produced."</div>
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— John Goldthorpe, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Nuffield College, Oxford; ‘Analysing social inequality’ <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://esr.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/6/731.abstract">European Sociological Review</a></span>, 2009</blockquote>
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"The evidence in The Spirit Level is weak, the analysis is superficial and the theory is unsupported."<br />
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— Peter Saunders, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex, <i><a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/pdfs/Beware_False_Prophets_Jul_10.pdf">Beware False Prophets</a></i></blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"The book will probably irritate most economists, including those like me who are sympathetic to its basic stance... source of irritation is the authors’ apparent belief that the application of regression methods to economic and social statistics is as novel to social science as it apparently is to medicine. The evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams with a regression line drawn through them. If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers... An obvious conclusion is that there are many societies which perform well in terms of their own criteria. America, Sweden and Japan are just different from each other. Their achievements are not really commensurable. But Wilkinson and Pickett are not content with this relativist position."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
— John Kay, former Director of Institute of Fiscal Studies and Professor of Economics at London Business School, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/77b1bd26-14db-11de-8cd1-0000779fd2ac.html">Financial Times</a>,</span> 2009</blockquote>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br />
</span><br />
<b>UPDATE</b><br />
<br />
Sanandaji et al. have also written a detailed response to Wilkinson and Pickett's rebuttal of their criticisms. If you are interested in the debate about <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> (and, if you've got this far, you probably are!), I warmly recommend it. <a href="http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/2010/07/">Click here</a>.<br />
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Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-41777782335741433452011-01-28T13:06:00.001+00:002011-01-28T13:07:20.357+00:00Chopping and changingThe new postscript to <i>The Spirit Level</i> finds Wilkinson and Pickett accusing their critics of “selectively removing countries on the grounds that they were outliers.” Outliers do indeed play an important part in several of <i>The Spirit Level</i>’s graphs. The correlation between inequality and homicide rests entirely on the USA being an extreme outlier. The correlation between inequality and obesity depends entirely on Japan and the USA being outliers (as well as the exclusion of Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, all of which have similar rates of obesity to Japan). The correlation with trust depends entirely on the Nordic nations being outliers.<br />
<br />
The significance of this should not need underlining. To take homicide as an example, there is no evidence of a relationship between inequality and homicide when 22 countries of the countries are studied. The 23rd country—the USA—has a much higher rate and pulls the regression line upwards dramatically. Using this distorted regression line as evidence that inequality causes murder means ignoring the data from 22 countries in favour of data from just one. There are many reasons why the USA has a high murder rate, but if inequality was the root cause, we would expect to see it affecting the other countries. It doesn’t, and excluding the USA as an outlier demonstrates this.<br />
<br />
If we were presented with a graph showing low levels of participation in baseball in 22 countries but a much higher figure for the USA, few of us would conclude that there was a true causal relationship between inequality and baseball. Americans just play a lot more baseball. And yet, for several of <i>The Spirit Level</i>’s graphs, outlying data of this type are used as proof of a causal relationship despite the great majority of the countries being totally unaffected by the supposed cause.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett feign ignorance about the importance of outliers. In their postscript, they portray testing for outliers as an underhand trick to exclude unfavourable data. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. The point of testing for outliers is not to “selectively remove countries” and then present the result as the ‘real’ graph, but to see if the relationship holds up without the outlier being present. In <i>Beware False Prophets</i>, Peter Saunders explains how and why statisticians use box plots to identify outliers. He then shows, as I do in this book, that the trend line for homicide is being thrown out by a single extreme outlier.<br />
<br />
It is fantastically implausible to think that Wilkinson and Pickett are not aware of the importance of outliers in statistics. In fact, we know that they are because when they find a reasonably strong statistical relationship (for rates of imprisonment) they write: “Even if the USA and Singapore are excluded as outliers, the relationship is robust among the remaining countries.” They make no such guarantee of their other graphs, for the simple reason that they are not robust.<br />
<br />
One of the dangers of not testing for outliers is that your trend line will become skewed and no longer reflect reality. Wilkinson and Pickett focus on their trend line to such an extent that they forget what the actual data are telling them. In the last chapter of <i>The Spirit Level</i>, Wilkinson and Pickett claim that if Britain reduced income inequality to the same level as Sweden, Finland, Japan and Norway, its murder rate would fall by 75%. This prediction goes far beyond what the data show. (Even if the association was real, their correlation coefficient tells them that inequality accounts for less than half the difference, and yet they assume it accounts for 100% of the difference—a very basic error.)<br />
<br />
Worse still, they are basing their prediction entirely on their trend line, which tells them that Britain should have a much higher murder rate than it does. But that trend line has become hopelessly skewed by the USA. Britain actually has a lower murder rate than Sweden and Finland and has a lower murder rate than the average of those four ‘more equal’ nations. <br />
<br />
The irony of Wilkinson and Pickett accusing their critics of picking and choosing which countries to study will not be lost of readers of this book. Wilkinson was being criticised for his selective use of data long before<i> The Spirit Level</i> hit the shelves. Their justification for confining their analysis to 23 countries is because “these countries are on the flat part of the curve at the top right in Figure 1.1 on p. 7, where life expectancy is no longer related to differences in Gross National Income.” Quite so, and it was that very graph which first alerted me to the fact that Wilkinson and Pickett had excluded several countries. (The image below is a close-up of the richest countries in that graph with GDP increasing from left to right.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmD7UuAmEEXYdthPE1Le2FKk_aDuBO3Am9njPfXjbRlB5vLrIhvZZjfyX2YAWbwzMj8ZosFB86Ot4mhv-l9sQ2tH7qug5o7v8yJDeQtypoM6UNn1dkAmV83YSGR-H49mLPGAtwqmc2fxo/s1600/life+exp%253AGDP+close+up.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmD7UuAmEEXYdthPE1Le2FKk_aDuBO3Am9njPfXjbRlB5vLrIhvZZjfyX2YAWbwzMj8ZosFB86Ot4mhv-l9sQ2tH7qug5o7v8yJDeQtypoM6UNn1dkAmV83YSGR-H49mLPGAtwqmc2fxo/s400/life+exp%253AGDP+close+up.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
South Korea, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all appear on that graph as being as rich or richer than Portugal. It was not me, but Wilkinson and Pickett, who arbitrarily decided that Portugal was ‘rich enough’ to merit inclusion. All I have done in this book is include countries of comparable or greater wealth than Portugal as shown in Wilkinson and Pickett’s own graph. Without a convincing justification for why places like the Czech Republic and South Korea cannot be considered “rich market societies”, we must ask the next question: why do these societies conspicuously fail to fit Wilkinson and Pickett’s theory? The United Nations classes these countries as being of “very high human development”, why doesn’t <i>The Spirit Level</i>?<br />
<br />
Their insistence on never having “picked problems to suit our argument” is rather undermined by, for example, their focus on public foreign aid at the expense of private aid, or by their emphasis on imprisonment rather than crime. Their claim to “never pick and choose data points to suit our argument” is at odds with references 2 and 6 in <i>The Spirit Level</i> which show one year’s data being used for one graph and another year’s data being used for the next, even though the subject matter—life expectancy—is the same. <br />
<br />
As for using “the same measures of inequality” (as they said they did in an article in <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/08/in-defence-of-equality/"><i>Prospect</i></a> magazine), they address this early in <i>The Spirit Level</i>, saying:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>To avoid being accused of picking and choosing our measures, our approach in this book has been to take measures provided by official agencies rather than calculating our own.</blockquote><br />
This is no great claim to integrity. It would be very odd if they started developing their own bespoke measure of inequality. But if they really wished to “avoid being accused of picking and choosing” they would have used the same official measure throughout. In fact, they use no fewer than five different measures of inequality in <i>The Spirit Level</i>.<br />
<br />
Having correctly explained to the reader that the Gini coefficient is “the most common measure” which is “favoured by economists”, they proceed to ignore the Gini in favour of comparing the top and bottom 20% when making international comparisons. They then switch to the Gini coefficient when looking at US states and then use a completely measure when comparing working hours (p. 229). They then adopt a measure which compares the bottom and top 10% (p. 240) and, finally, in their new edition, measure inequality in reference to the top 1% (p. 296). <br />
<br />
The effect of this chopping and changing can be seen by comparing the graph on page 240 to the graph on page 296 (of the new edition). The first graph shows that inequality in the USA has fallen since its peak in the early 1990s; the second graph shows that inequality in the USA rose sharply in the 1990s and peaked at the time of the 2008 recession. Wilkinson and Pickett’s aim in the postscript is to demonstrate a correlation between inequality and the financial crashes of 1929 and 2008. They write that “both crashes happened at the two peaks of inequality”. Either they have forgotten, or they are hoping the reader has forgotten, that they wrote in the previous chapter that inequality in the USA “peaked in the early 1990s”.<br />
<br />
Whilst there is nothing wrong with using the share of wealth held by the top 1% as a measure of inequality, this is the only time it is used in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. This is unsurprising since under this measure Norway and Denmark are less equal than the USA. It does, however, demonstrate how Wilkinson and Pickett switch reference points to suit whatever argument they are making at the time.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-78720702961006138832011-01-27T11:41:00.000+00:002011-01-27T11:43:07.950+00:00A right-wing conspiracy?Having hastily reinvented themselves as bearers of the consensus (see <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2011/01/illusion-of-consensus.html">earlier post</a>), it is a simple matter for Wilkinson and Pickett to portray those who have put their claims to the test as deniers, right-wing extremists and paid lackeys of industry. It is an impressive trick for a long-standing member of the Socialist Health Association to write a book which concludes with a rousing political call-to-arms while forming two left-wing <a href="http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/">pressure</a> <a href="http://www.onesociety.org.uk/">groups</a> and penning articles in <i><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/29/social-mobility-inequality-conservative-thatcher">The Guardian</a></i> about how “broken Britain is Thatcher’s bitter legacy” to accuse other people of being “politically motivated”. This unlikely defence has, however, been remarkably successful.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett’s first response to the criticisms made in Peter Saunder’s <i><a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=195">Beware False Prophets</a></i> was from page one from the manual of knee-jerk student politics. They <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/09/spirit-level-policy-exchange">called him a racist</a> and described his publishers at the Policy Exchange, the manifestly moderate centre-right think tank, as being from the “far-right”. This was no slip of the tongue, since Wilkinson has <a href="http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/12/15/IncomeGapDoctor/print.html">repeated</a> the slur whilst touring his book in Canada (“then the attacks started coming from the far-right”). Wilkinson can hardly be unaware that the term “far-right” is used almost exclusively to describe neo-Nazis and fascists. That he immediately resorted to malicious defamation of a fellow Emeritus Professor, and former colleague at the University of Sussex, was an early sign that the debate about <i>The Spirit Level</i> was going to be ugly.<br />
<br />
It was also a sign that Wilkinson and Pickett would spread their net far and wide in seeking to disparage their opponents. In the new postscript, they write about “the bans on smoking in public places (implemented in Scotland, parts of the USA and Canada, Rome, Ireland, and England); which in each case have been followed by declines in death rates and have saved thousands of lives.” <br />
<br />
This requires a little background information. In recent years, a number of studies have been published purporting to show a large drop in the heart attack rate in the aftermath of a smoking ban. In Scotland, for example, it was claimed that the rate of acute coronary syndrome fell by 17% following the implementation of smokefree legislation. Oddly, however, the study was based on extrapolations from a selection of hospitals, rather than the admissions records for all Scottish hospitals, which were freely available. When the real figures from the NHS were examined, it became clear that <a href="http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2010/12/hows-that-scottish-heart-miracle-going.html">there had not been a drop of 17%, or anything like it</a>.<br />
<br />
Today, several years after the ban came into effect, it is quite apparent that the smoking ban had no apparent effect on the rate of acute coronary syndrome in Scotland. A number of other studies have claimed to find a drop in heart attacks following the enactment of smoke-free legislation, but whenever hospital admissions data have been publicly available there has, without exception, been no indication of a significant decline. A recent <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pam.20548/abstract">study</a>—the largest ever conducted on the subject—found that “large short-term increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a smoking ban are as common as the large decreases reported in the published literature”. The disproportionate number of studies finding a decline in numbers is, the authors suggested, the result of publication bias and retrospective data-mining.<br />
<br />
I was one of a number of journalists to write <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7451/">articles</a> about the Scottish ‘heart miracle’ and similar studies elsewhere. I was not alone. When the Scottish hospital records were released in 2007, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7093356.stm">the BBC reported it</a> with the headline ‘The facts get in the way of a good story’. <i><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3085272.ece">The Times</a></i> included in its end-of-the-year ‘Worst Junk Stats of 2007’ feature. Michael Siegel, a Professor at Boston University School of Public Health and a long-standing campaigner for indoor smoking bans, <a href="http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-data-from-scotland-show-that-pell.html">said</a> that "these data are just so unconvincing that even I cannot, with any conscience, look at them and opine that they show a significant short-term effect of smoking bans on heart attack admissions". He blamed the result on "unconscious bias".<br />
<br />
If this seems wildly off-topic, it is. Wilkinson and Pickett’s reason for going off on this tangent is to mark me down as some sort of tobacco industry lobbyist just for having written about such issues. They are wise enough not to risk libel by stating that explicitly, but the implication is allowed to hang in the air.<br />
<br />
Upon this thread of innuendo, Wilkinson and Pickett construct an elaborate fantasy involving two unassuming and impartial social scientists under siege from industry-funded “merchants of doubt” who are trying to “give the impression that crucial areas of science affecting public policy are controversial, long after the implications of the science were quite clear.” (Why the tobacco industry would want to discredit <i>The Spirit Level</i>, of all books, can only be guessed at. One would think they had bigger fish to fry, but conspiracy theorists are able to overlook such logical conundrums.)<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett’s combination of paranoia and self-aggrandisement falters for the simple reason that critics of <i>The Spirit Level</i> are not “free market fundamentalists” and they are certainly not all right-wing. The left-wing journalist Gerry Hassan has <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/gerry-hassan/fantasyland-of-%E2%80%98-spirit-level%E2%80%99-and-limitations-of-health-and-well-being-indu">written</a> about what he calls “the Fantasyland of <i>The Spirit Level</i>”:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Yet, it is almost impossible to compare these countries on equality; they are very different in their cultures, values and histories. Wilkinson and Pickett claim that ‘more equal societies almost always do better’—a universalist, sweeping statement—which cannot be substantiated by most of their data.... Part of the success of <i>The Spirit Level</i> is liberal guilt, part the retreat of the left, part wish-fulfilment and projection.</blockquote><br />
John Goldthorpe, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Oxford University, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11518509">said</a>: “As I read through the book, I have to say that my reaction was one of increasing dismay.” Also a left-winger, Goldthorpe’s <a href="http://esr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2009/10/22/esr.jcp046.full">review</a> of <i>The Spirit Level</i> can hardly be attributed to “free market fundamentalism.”<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Wilkinson and Pickett [WP] have no time for nicely balanced judgements. They believe that the evidence they present shows beyond doubt that more equal societies ‘do better’, and they are also confident that they have the right explanation for why this is so... Their case is by no means so securely established as they try to make out... it has been called into question by other leading figures in the field—a fact that WP might have more fully acknowledged... WP’s inadequate, one-dimensional understanding of social stratification leads to major problems in their account of how the contextual effect is produced.</blockquote><br />
John Kay, Professor of Economics at London Business School, prefaced his <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/77b1bd26-14db-11de-8cd1-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz1CC5jHIEk">review</a> of <i>The Spirit Level</i> by saying that he was “sympathetic to its basic stance.” Nevertheless, he found it difficult to take the book’s methodology and conclusions seriously when he reviewed it in the <i>Financial Times</i>: <br />
<br />
<blockquote>A larger source of irritation is the authors’ apparent belief that the application of regression methods to economic and social statistics is as novel to social science as it apparently is to medicine. The evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams, with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests. If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers.<br />
<br />
... An obvious conclusion is that there are many societies which perform well in terms of their own criteria. America, Sweden and Japan are just different from each other. Their achievements are not really commensurable. But Wilkinson and Pickett are not content with this relativist position.</blockquote><br />
Andrew Leigh <a href="http://previousleigh.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/look-at-the-changes-not-at-the-levels/">describes</a> himself as “about as anti-inequality an economist as you’ll find”. Formerly a Professor of Economics at the Australian National University, and now an Australian Labor Party politician, Leigh said of his own research into equality: “I had begun the project secretly hoping to find that inequality was bad, and wound up reluctantly reporting no such thing.” When asked his opinion of <i>The Spirit Level</i>, he wrote that “John Kay’s view in the <i>FT</i> comes closest to my own.”<br />
<br />
“He didn't read the book thoroughly, obviously,” was Kate Pickett’s response when told about Kay’s review. Another person who didn’t read it properly was Christian Bjornskov, Professor of Economics at the University of Aarhus, who reviewed it in <i><a href="http://nonicoclolasos.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/pdr-bjornskov-review-file.pdf">Population and Development Review</a></i>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The bottom line is that this is a well-written, stimulating polemic. It nevertheless suffers from the same problems as one-trick ponies: if the one trick does not impress you, the show is a failure. Wilkinson and Pickett’s trick simply does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. When assessing this book as a contribution to the debate on the “right” level of income differences in modern society, it is a highly interesting, sympathetic attempt at addressing some of the important problems of Western societies. Yet, when assessing this book from a scientific point of view, one is forced to conclude that it is a failure.</blockquote><br />
Robert Putnam, author of <i>Bowling Alone</i> and arguably America’s most prominent left-wing social scientist, has also expressed his discomfort with <i>The Spirit Level</i>. Putnam is quoted somewhat out of context by Wilkinson and Pickett to give the impression that <i>Bowling Alone</i> concludes that inequality erodes social capital. When asked his view of their work by journalist <a href="http://shaneleavy.blogspot.com/2011/01/spirit-level-vs-robert-putnam.html">Shane Leavy</a>, Putnam replied:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>I have a mixed view about <i>The Spirit Level</i>. On the one hand, I believe that inequality is bad for society in many ways, just as that book argues. On the other hand, Pickett and Williamson’s [sic] work has been heavily (and I believe correctly) criticized as methodologically flawed. (For example, they don’t really show that the relationship between inequality and other bad things is causal, though they assume it is.) I hope that they (or others) will pursue that basic hypothesis in ways that are more scientifically persuasive.</blockquote><br />
These criticisms, and others like them, are manifestly not politically motivated. While there was no shortage of positive reviews from journalists, particularly on the left (<i>The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, Socialist Review</i> all provided rave reviews), many respected academics from both left and right have expressed serious concerns. <br />
<br />
It suits Wilkinson and Pickett’s narrative to portray critics as being professional ‘merchants of doubt’ from the ‘far-right’. It helps to marginalise those who find fault with the book and deters their natural supporters from reading the critiques. It is, however, a fiction.<br />
<br />
Questions have been raised about the bold conclusions of <i>The Spirit Level</i> because it is riddled with methodological flaws, selection bias, obvious cherry-picking, flawed reasoning and wishful thinking. Far from being the subject of a co-ordinated attack by nefarious vested interests, <i>The Spirit Level</i> has been criticised by everyone from Swedish economists, Irish psychologists and British sociologists—as well as numerous journalists, bloggers and reviewers around the world—for the simple reason that they have read it. It has been a best-seller and has transcended what Wilkinson <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/14/the-spirit-level-equality-thinktanks">calls</a> the "left-wing ghetto". And amongst its large readership have been many rational people whose jaws dropped a little more at the turn of every page.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-21069342770268055552011-01-26T11:34:00.003+00:002011-01-27T15:39:35.243+00:00Ignoring crucial factsAny theory which explains the working of entire nations by looking at just one variable should strike us as being inherently questionable. We know that societies are moulded by a huge range of complex factors which come together over long periods of time. Some are accidents of circumstance, some are flukes of geography, history, climate or demography. Others are come about through the force of politics, religion or industry. However they come about, it is far from controversial to say that societies across the world are different for many reasons.<br />
<br />
<i>The Spirit Level</i> relies on the premise that countries are fundamentally the same, with income inequality being the main variable that distinguishes them. Wilkinson and Pickett effectively disregard other variables such as absolute income, culture, history, ethnicity, geography, law, politics and climate. Throughout <i>The Spirit Level</i>, it is taken for granted that such factors have little or no bearing on their findings and so there is no attempt to adjust the figures for confounding factors, or even discuss them. <br />
<br />
In the new postscript to the book, Wilkinson and Pickett group all these other variables together and dismiss them as “cultural differences” which, they say, have a negligible effect on their findings. To illustrate this, they say that Portugal and Spain perform very differently despite being culturally similar, while Japan and Sweden perform similarly despite being culturally different. This is not true. In most of the graphs, Portugal is actually closer to Spain than Japan is to Sweden.<br />
<br />
More telling wold be a comparison between Japan (the most equal country) with Hong Kong and Singapore (the least equal countries). Despite the huge disparities in income inequality, these three societies perform much the same across nearly all criteria (imprisonment being the main exception). The obvious explanation is that these Asian societies are culturally similar.<br />
<br />
Ignoring other variables and confounding factors would be a flaw in any study but when entire countries are under examination, this flaw becomes overwhelming. Tim Harford asked Pickett about their failure to consider other variables on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tgwz7"><i>More or Less</i></a>. Her response was revealing. She and Wilkinson did not “believe” that factors other than inequality have an effect on a country's performance, so they didn’t go to the trouble of studying them.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>TH: All of your studies are what are called bivariate analysis. In other words, they're all income inequality plotted against some other variable. Now, my understanding of best practice in social sciences is that you would always control for other variables. You would include 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 other variables and...<br />
<br />
KP: Well, you wouldn't do that arbitrarily. You would do that if you believed those variables were potential alternative explanations of the relationship you're looking at.<br />
<br />
TH: So, if I understand your statement correctly, you didn't include any multiple variable analyses because you just think that actually none of these variables are of interest—none of them are potential alternative explanations and you can just do the simple income inequality versus x analyses?<br />
<br />
KP: That's right, but of course, again, other researchers have conducted studies that do control for more, where, as well as examining the effect of income inequality at the level of the whole society, people include individual's own levels of income or levels of education in those analyses and, again, those bear out our findings in relation to health.<br />
<br />
TH: We come again to...you're basically rowing back from your analysis and saying...<br />
<br />
KP: No. Indeed I'm not...<br />
<br />
TH: "Don't look at our analysis, look at these other people because they support us."<br />
<br />
KP: We believe that to control for individual income is actually <i>over-controlling</i>, so we would not consider that best practice.</blockquote><br />
Wilkinson and Pickett may not <i>believe</i> that individual income explains any of the differences between the countries they study, but while this is taken for granted in <i>The Spirit Level</i>, it is not unreasonable to take the view that social outcomes in Portugal, for example, would improve if its national income was the same as Norway’s (which would require a threefold increase in wealth). <br />
<br />
Pickett is, however, correct in saying that other researchers have controlled for other variables. Shibuya <i>et al</i>., for example, controlled for income in their <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11777798">study</a> of inequality in Japan and concluded:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>After adjustment, individual income was more strongly associated with self-rated health than income inequality.</blockquote><br />
Fiscella and Franks controlled for income in their <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/314/7096/1724.full">study</a> of inequality in the USA and found:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In this nationally representative American sample, family income, but not community income inequality, independently predicts mortality. Previously reported ecological associations between income inequality and mortality may reflect confounding between individual family income and mortality.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>Absolute income is a crucial confounding factor in studies of income inequality. Much of the debate about inequality and health revolves around the question of whether we can truly disentangle the effects of inequality from the effects of low income. Wilkinson and Pickett completely overlook this issue, and they never remark on the important observation that the poorest countries in their list (Portugal, Greece and New Zealand) all happen to be ‘less equal’. Nor do they comment on the fact that the perennially underachieving US states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi also happen to be amongst the very poorest.<br />
<br />
From the outset, income is assumed to have no role to play in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. Having announced that economic growth has “largely finished its work”, Wilkinson and Pickett simply assume that further wealth would not benefit the citizens of the countries they study (another glaring <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy">ecological fallacy</a>, incidentally). It is assumed that absolute income has no effect because—as they show on page 12—life expectancy is no longer correlated with national income. But they do not test every criteria against income. If they did, they would find that several key outcomes are much more closely correlated with income than with inequality. This is true even of their cherished survey about trust, as the graphs below show. The first shows trust against national income; the second shows trust against income inequality.<br />
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Having breezily dismissed income as a third variable, Wilkinson and Pickett turn a blind eye to all other explanations for a country’s performance. Indeed, the only examples of them mentioning real-world differences occur when the ‘more equal’ countries fail to live up to their billing of ‘almost always’ doing better. For example, Wilkinson and Pickett are eager to explain Finland’s high homicide rate by pointing to its high level of gun-ownership while blaming the USA’s high homicide rate squarely on inequality. When Japan’s foreign aid contributions turn out to be “lower than expected”, they attribute it to the country’s “withdrawal from the international stage following the Second World War”. Britain’s “higher than expected” foreign aid spending, on the other hand, is explained by its “historical, colonial ties to many developing countries.” All of this may be true but Wilkinson and Pickett only seem aware of cultural and historical differences when it suits their argument.<br />
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In reality, of course, they know perfectly well that other variables have been shown to explain differences between countries far more convincingly than inequality. In their 2006 review of the literature, they identified 21 studies which “started off with supportive findings but then lost them as a result of the various control variables.” Income is one of those variables, but other recognised confounders include spending on health care, <a href="http://ideas.repec.org/p/rtv/ceisrp/146.html">which has been found</a> to explain the correlation between inequality and infant mortality:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The association of higher income inequality and higher infant mortality disappears when we control for health care expenditure. Our results indicate that the correlation between infant mortality and income inequality arises as income inequality is high in countries where public investment in health care is low.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15082734">And</a>:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Although income inequality was positively associated with low birth weight and infant mortality, the association with infant mortality disappeared with the addition of sociodemographic covariates.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Levels of education have also been <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7328/23.full">shown</a> to explain correlations with inequality:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Multiple regression analysis of the 50 US states and District of Columbia for 1989-90 indicates that the relation between income inequality and age adjusted mortality is due to differences in high school educational attainment: education absorbs the income inequality effect and is a more powerful predictor of variation in mortality among US states.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>Race is another important variable which is never adequately addressed in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. For example, one of the few <a href="http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/pdf/publications/articles/066.pdf">studies</a> looking at inequality and obesity acknowledged that: <br />
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<blockquote>Race is known to be significantly correlated with weight status, and is also associated with inequality... As race is a potential confounder of the relationship of interest, we stratify all analyses by race as well as sex.</blockquote><br />
The results of this <a href="http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/pdf/publications/articles/066.pdf">study</a> are worth repeating, since the they is ignored in <i>The Spirit Level</i>, in favour of Pickett’s own research:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">We do not find a positive association between inequality and the likelihood of clinically relevant outcomes such as overweight and obesity. Indeed, the direction of association between inequality and weight status is generally <i>negative</i> among subgroups (though significant only for white women)... at least for non-Hispanic white women, living in a metropolitan area with greater income inequality is associated with lower BMI, lower odds for being overweight, and lower odds for being obese. [Emphasis in original]</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>Race has been shown time and again to be a major confounder in studies of inequality, to the extent that this one variable explains the entire correlation between inequality and poor health. This has been <a href="http://www.ler.illinois.edu/lubotsky/Deaton%20Lubotsky.pdf">shown</a> to be true in the USA:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In the results presented below, we show that, once we control for the fraction of the population that is black, there is no relationship in 1980 nor in 1990 between income inequality and mortality across either states or cities... That the estimated effects of income inequality are potentially confounded by the effects of race has been recognized since the first papers on the topic. Blacks have higher mortality rates than whites and, on average have lower incomes, so that in places with a substantial black population, both income inequality and mortality, tend to be higher. </div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>In <a href="http://hsb.sagepub.com/content/45/3/249.short">Canada</a>:<br />
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<blockquote>We replicate the finding that, net of the racial//ethnic composition of the population, the effects of income inequality are not significant.</blockquote><br />
And in <a href="http://jech.bmj.com/content/57/4/279.abstract">New Zealand</a>:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">There is no convincing evidence of an association of income inequality within New Zealand with adult mortality. Previous ecological analyses within New Zealand suggesting an association of income inequality with mortality were confounded by ethnicity at the individual level.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>The well-established importance of race as a confounding factor provided Wilkinson and Pickett with the excuse to land their lowest blow yet. In his book <a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/assets/Beware_False_Prophets_Jul_10.pdf"><i>Beware False Prophets</i></a>, Peter Saunders demonstrates that health and social outcomes are more closely correlated with the ethnic make-up of US states than with their levels of income inequality. For this, Wilkinson and Pickett accused him of a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/09/spirit-level-policy-exchange">“seriously racist slur”</a>. It was, they said, “racist because it implies the problem is inherently the people themselves rather than their socioeconomic position”.<br />
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It implied nothing of the sort. If Wilkinson and Pickett think it is racist to say that there are a host of cultural and historical reasons why blacks tend to do worse than whites in the USA, then there are plenty of black community leaders and black politicians who are racist. No serious discussion of modern-day America can ignore the legacy of slavery and segregation, as well as the more subtle forms of ongoing discrimination which continue to hold African-Americans back. Black Americans have, on average, higher rates of obesity, higher homicide rates and lower life expectancy. It should, therefore, be no surprise that states with large black populations tend to do worse under these criteria.<br />
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There is no doubt that racial inequality contributes to income inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett argue instead that income inequality is, at heart, the cause of racial inequality. Aside from being counterintuitive, this cannot be so because the correlation between race and health and social problems is stronger than the correlation with income inequality. <br />
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A significant clue lies in the pages of <i>The Spirit Level</i> itself. Wilkinson and Pickett’s discussion of mental health is a mass of contradictions. Having warned of the dangers of comparing apples and oranges, they proceed to do just that by cobbling together results from different studies which even they coyly admit are “not strictly comparable”. They attribute their failure to find a correlation between inequality and mental illness in the USA to the fact that mental illness does not have a social gradient, but this does not deter them from reporting a correlation between inequality and mental illness on an international level. <br />
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They then mention, almost in passing, that rates of mental illness are evenly distributed between different races. In light of their failure to find a correlation with mental illness in US states, this should have been a Eureka moment but, as Saunders writes:<br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">[T]hey fail to draw the obvious conclusion from their failure to find a relationship with inequality, which is that <i>they only get state-level correlations with income inequality when there are underlying correlations with race to generate them</i>. [emphasis in the original].</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>Since there is no relationship between race and mental health, they cannot find a relationship with inequality. But since there <i>are</i> relationships between race and many other criteria, they find correlations with inequality. But those correlations are statistical associations resulting from Wilkinson and Pickett’s failure to adjust for race. They are not causal. Inequality is a symptom, not the cause.<br />
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Wilkinson and Pickett never adequately address the question of causality. There are many important confounders such as income, race, education and material deprivation which are correlated with inequality, but are not caused by inequality. Conversely, many social problems such as crime, drug abuse and gang formation <i>do</i> cause inequality because young people growing up in environments with gangs, drug abuse and high levels of crime are less likely to succeed in society. We can address those issues by fostering job creation or crime reduction in neighborhoods with social problems. But, by Wilkinson and Pickett’s reckoning, inequality is the cause of these problems and not a symptom. This leads us to the improbable conclusion that societal malaise can be alleviated by reducing income in the surrounding neighbourhoods. <br />
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There is plenty of research—all of it ignored in <i>The Spirit Level</i>—showing that inequality does not have an independent effect on health and social problems once other variables have been controlled for. It should go without saying that countries differ from one another in many ways that have nothing to do with income inequality. That these differences will lead to different outcomes should be equally obvious. Wilkinson and Pickett justify their refusal to consider other variables in the postscript, saying “including factors that are unrelated to inequality, or to any particular problem, would simply create unnecessary ‘noise’ and be methodologically incorrect.”<br />
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With this one sentence, every historical, cultural, religious, political, legal, geographical, climatic and demographic difference between whole societies is dismissed as ‘noise’. Again, they are <i>assuming</i> that these factors are “unrelated to inequality” without putting that assumption to the test. It is no wonder Wilkinson and Pickett fail to identify confounding factors. They were simply not looking for them.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-85165713714562187332011-01-25T11:19:00.002+00:002011-01-27T15:37:35.606+00:00Misrepresenting the evidence<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>The Spirit Level</i>’s endemic misrepresentation of the academic literature (see <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2011/01/illusion-of-consensus.html">previous post</a>) is made no less worrisome by its authors apparent inability to distinguish between a study which agrees with their hypothesis and one which merely mentions the word ‘inequality’. In response to criticism from Sanandaji <i>et al</i>. that their book focused on their own work while ignoring heavyweight academics, Wilkinson and Pickett <a href="http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/2010/07/spirit-level-response.html">wrote</a>:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Other ‘heavyweight’ economists, including Nobel laureates, have also written about the significance of inequality for wellbeing and human capital formation.</div></blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">As proof, they cited a study by James Heckman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Heckman is the co-author of a <a href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp4001.pdf">study</a> titled ‘<i>The Economics and Psychology of Inequality and Human Development</i>’ but nothing in that paper—or in any of his work—implies support for Wilkinson and Picket’s inequality hypothesis. When Sanandaji asked Heckman about how he felt about having his study cited by the two social epidemiologists, he said bluntly: “This is a misrepresentation of my work.” As Sanandaji <a href="http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/2010/07/spirit-level-response.html">explains</a>:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Note Wilkinson and Pickett’s choice of words. They write that Heckman has “written” about inequality and health, which is of course technically true. But what they don’t tell the readers is that while he has indeed written about these variables, he has not found any evidence supporting the claims of Wilkinson and Pickett. It is becoming increasingly tiresome to point this out, but Wilkinson and Pickett again and again engage in extraordinary acts of dishonesty.</div></blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div>Whether it be contemporary academics like James Heckman and Robert Putnam or—almost unbelievably—outspoken opponents of socialism such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Wilkinson and Pickett routinely cite the work of other scholars in a context which suggests that they agree with their hypothesis.<br />
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In some cases, the studies cited say the exact opposite of what Wilkinson and Pickett claim. As discussed in Chapter 4 of <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, they attempt to explain the higher rate of suicide in more equal countries as a trade-off for a lower homicide rate. The problem with this is two-fold: less equal countries don’t have a higher homicide rate, and the countries studied in <i>The Spirit Level</i> show no evidence of an inverse relationship between homicide and suicide. <br />
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Responding to this on their website, Wilkinson and Pickett <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/04/20-questions-for-richard-wilkinson-kate.html">wrote</a>: “In fact, there are several pieces of research which show that homicide rates are inversely related to suicide.” But the first <a href="http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/34/4/837">study</a> they cite as supporting evidence states quite clearly:<br />
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<blockquote>Our analysis indicates, overall, the correlation between homicide and suicide rates across all nations is very weak and statistically insignificant.</blockquote><br />
The shard of truth here is that homicide tends to be more common in very poor countries, while suicide tends to be more common in richer countries. But, as shown on page 82 of <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, there is no correlation between homicide and suicide amongst the rich countries studied in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. And that, of course, is the relevant comparison when discussing Wilkinson and Pickett’s hypothesis. <br />
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Either Wilkinson and Pickett are relying on readers not checking their references or they genuinely believe that any study that mentions the word inequality in any context is supportive of their case. This was highlighted again when Kate Pickett was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tgwz7">More or Less</a> </i>programme.<br />
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It would be hard to find a less politically motivated radio show that <i>More or Less</i>—a programme dedicated to discussing the use and abuse of statistics in the modern media. Wisely deciding against passing judgement on such a voluminous topic in a half-hour magazine show, presenter Tim Harford opted for an interview with Pickett which, in its quiet way, was as devastating as anything written about <i>The Spirit Leve</i>l in 2010. <br />
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In this excerpt, Pickett uses the usual ‘consensus’ defence (see <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2011/01/illusion-of-consensus.html">previous post</a>), before being asked about a study she and Wilkinson reference in <i>The Spirit Level</i> to support their claim that “researchers at Harvard University showed that women's status was linked to state-level income inequality.” <br />
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<blockquote>KP: We wrote a book that's intended to be a synthesis of a very vast body of research. Not only our own, but those of other people... There is a consistent and robust and large body of evidence showing the same relationship.<br />
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TH: That's an interesting point that you make. Often, in response to critics, you have referred not to your own book, not to your own data but to other published research. I'd really like to focus on the research that's presented in your book. It's very easy to say there are 50 papers, there are 200 papers, that support our research but we don't really know how you've selected those papers.<br />
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KP: We actually have completed a systematic review of all of the studies of income inequality and health, and we reference that in our book. We do examine things systematically and certainly—when we are doing our own research, publishing in peer-reviewed journals—we have to be aware of all the literature in the field. But that doesn't mean that every paper in the field has good methods, comes to the right conclusion, studies the right thing.<br />
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TH: I absolutely agree. One of the papers that you refer to in support of your argument on women's empowerment and women's status which was published in 1999 by Kawachi and some other authors, you claim supports your findings on women's status and income inequality. I've looked at their abstract. It doesn't seem to attack that question at all. It's simply on another subject—a somewhat related subject but not on the subject of income inequality.<br />
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KP: They've definitely published and we may have inadvertently put the wrong reference into that document [<i>laughing nervously</i>]. But Kawachi and Kennedy have certainly published finding a relationship between income inequality and women's status. The paper is ‘Women's Status and the Health of Women and Men: a view from the States’ and it was published in <i>Social Science and Medicine</i> in 1999.<br />
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TH: That's the one I'm looking at.</blockquote><br />
The only claim in <i>The Spirit Level</i> that has generated anything approaching “a very vast body of research” is that related to health and inequality. Since their book was published, Wilkinson and Pickett have admitted that the correlation between life expectancy and inequality disappears when different measures of inequality are used. They have also said that “we accept that the inequality/health relationship is one of the weaker associations demonstrated in <i>The Spirit Level</i>.”<br />
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The best that can be said of the health-inequality hypothesis is that it remains unresolved and the scatter-plot presented on page 82 of<i> The Spirit Level</i> is unlikely to change that. Richard Wilkinson published a similar scatterplot in the <i>British Medical Journal</i> in 1992 and the peer-reviewed literature shows that he was accused of cherry-picking and data-mining at the time. It is no great surprise that he has received similar criticism now that he has filled an entire book with the same type of evidence.<br />
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But while there is an ongoing controversy amongst academics regarding the question of inequality and health, the bulk of <i>The Spirit Level</i> involves theories which have little or no support in the scientific literature. Wilkinson admitted as much in an <a href="http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=658&issue=127">interview</a> with the magazine <i>International Socialism</i>:<br />
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<blockquote>"There are about 200 papers on health and inequality in lots of different settings, probably 40 or 50 looking at violence in relation to inequality, and very few looking at any of the other things in relation to inequality. In a way, the new work in the book is all these other variables—teenage births, mental illness, prison populations and so on—and the major contribution is bringing all of that into a picture that had previously been just health and violence."</blockquote><br />
What, then, is left of the idea that <i>The Spirit Level</i> is a “synthesis of a very vast body of research”? Wilkinson himself concedes that “very few” studies have looked at anything other than health in relation to inequality. Although Wilkinson and Pickett now portray themselves as standing on the shoulders of giants, in almost every important regard they stand alone.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-80869556131343306362011-01-24T13:49:00.003+00:002011-06-24T11:34:38.588+01:00The illusion of consensusA key plank in Wilkinson and Pickett’s defence of <i>The Spirit Level </i>is the notion that they are merely informing the general public about issues that have long since been agreed upon by the academic community. Since most people will never read any of the studies in the field, this has been largely successful as a public relations exercise, but it is a gross distortion. <br />
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It also represents something of a U-turn for the two social epidemiologists. Wilkinson and Pickett’s sudden insistence that they are reflecting the scientific consensus is at odds with the way they promoted their book when it was first released. In an interview with the couple in March 2009, the <i>Guardian</i> journalist <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/equality-british-society">reported</a> that:<br />
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<blockquote>For a while, Wilkinson and Pickett wondered if the correlations were too good to be true. The links were so strong, they almost couldn't believe no one had spotted them before.</blockquote><br />
This could just about be excused as shoddy journalism were it not for Wilkinson and Pickett’s eagerness to take the credit for what they explicitly described as their “discoveries” in <i>The Spirit Level</i> itself. The book’s preface leaves the reader in little doubt that what they have discovered is genuinely new and exciting, hence the comparisons with Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur. “The reason why the picture we present has not been put together until now is probably that much of the data has only become available in recent years,” they write, adding that “it could only have been a matter of time before someone came up with findings like ours.”<br />
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The truth of the matter, as discussed in Chapter 1 of <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, is that there has been a large amount of research into the specific area of health and inequality spanning three decades. Richard Wilkinson has been a key figure in this field, but his views do not represent the consensus. Not could they, since there is emphatically no consensus. The only honest way to describe the state of the literature on health and inequality is to say it is mixed and conflicting. Researchers are broadly divided into three groups. There are those, like Wilkinson, who believe that there is a solid correlation between inequality and health outcomes and that this represents a causal link. There are those who believe there is a statistical correlation but that it is not causal, and there are those who believe there is no link at all. <br />
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Only the first of these positions is reflected in <i>The Spirit Level</i>, and the reader is given the false impression that academics have firmly established that inequality leads to poor health. Wilkinson and Pickett accuse their critics of not being familiar with the “extensive research literature”, but it is precisely because we <i>are</i> familiar with it that we know how grievously the pair misrepresent it in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. In the new postscript to the book (published November 2010), Wilkinson and Pickett say that “there are around 200 papers in peer-reviewed academic journals testing the relationship between income inequality and health”.<br />
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‘Testing’ is the key word here. There is no hint of how many of these studies have not found a relationship, nor of how many found a statistical relationship but concluded that it was not a causal. Their source for the ‘200 studies’ claim is, as so often in the book, one of their own papers. This article, from 2006, assessed 169 results from 155 studies on inequality and health (plus some other studies related to violence). By Wilkinson and Picket’s own reckoning, 88 of these were supportive of their theory (including 6 of their own studies) while 81 were either unsupportive or inconclusive.<br />
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Wilkinson and Pickett stress that many peer-reviewed articles have offered at least partial support to the relative income hypothesis. This is true—at least in the area of health—just as it is true that there are many peer-reviewed articles that beg to differ. Hence the long-running academic debate about inequality which <i>The Spirit Level</i> has done much to popularise but little to resolve. This debate has already been discussed in Chapter 1, but it might be useful to quote from some other researchers in the field:<br />
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<blockquote>All along, however, critical questions were being asked about the quality and interpretation of the data. In an early exchange, serious criticisms of the selection of countries, the quality of the data, and the lack of control for confounding in the BMJ paper of 1992 were only half countered. Although many aspects of this debate are still unresolved, it has recently become clear that the findings of that paper were an artifact of the selection of countries.<br />
<br />
—<i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_126908595">British Medical Journal</a></i><a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7328/1.full"> editorial</a>, 2002</blockquote><br />
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<blockquote>This paper extends previous studies by examining long time series for 12 of the world’s richest countries rather than one or two. Our findings are consistent with those of Deaton and Paxson (2001) and Lynch et al. (2004b), not with those of Wilkinson (1989, 1996) or Sen (1999). In our preferred specifications we find only small and statistically insignificant relationships between income inequality and mortality. This holds true regardless of whether we measure mortality using life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, homicide, or suicide.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V8K-4KVXHF8-1&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F31%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1617713316&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=57ebf6cf248d2b8d9b4f8567d04ef089&searchtype=a">Leigh & Jencks</a>, 2007</blockquote><br />
<blockquote>The study found limited evidence of an association between income inequality and worse self rated health in Britain, which was greatest among those with the lowest individual income levels. As regions with the highest income inequality were also the most urban, these findings may be attributable to characteristics of cities rather than income inequality. The variation in this association with the choice of income inequality measure also highlights the difficulty of studying income distributions using summary measures of income inequality.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_126908606">Weich </a><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_126908606">et al</a></i><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12011200">.</a>, 2002</blockquote><br />
<blockquote>Estimates of the effect of income on health (the absolute income hypothesis) are likely to be biased. Tests of the relative income hypothesis are contaminated by the non-linearity of the individual health income relationship any association between income distribution and population health could be entirely due to it, rather than to any direct erect of relative income on individual health.... However, whilst Rodgers (1979) found that income distribution had a significant negative association with life expectancy in almost all of his regression, we have found that the association is sometimes positive and sometimes negative and is never statistically significant.... The findings should however be a further warning against using aggregate level studies as evidence for the relative deprivation hypothesis.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0277953601000533">Gravelle</a>, 2000</blockquote><br />
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<blockquote>Income inequality was not associated with health status... Household income, but not income inequality, appears to explain some of the differences in health status among Canadians.<br />
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<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12893616">McLeod et al.</a>, 2003</blockquote><br />
<blockquote>Significant differences in income inequality across regions and considerable changes in health are found across years, however, the panel data estimating regressions find no significant association between any of the measures of income inequality and self-reported health. Therefore, it would appear that the relative income hypothesis does not exist over time and does not exist within Britain. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpla/0510007.html">Lindley & Lorgelly</a>, 2005</blockquote><br />
<blockquote>Across Canadian health regions, health status in populations was a function of absolute income but not relative income.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20504049">Vafaei et al</a>., 2010</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>It can be firmly concluded, however, that there is insufficient evidence supporting Wilkinson’s hypothesis once individual’s income and its differential impact are taken into account... There are substantial international variations in self-reported health, but they are not linked to the degree of income inequality... Wilkinson’s argument regarding contextual influences was based on a statistical artifact.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VH5-4SD6SR2-3&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2009&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1617725897&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3c6f443f616271654a513ac0a97e09d3&searchtype=a">Jen et al.</a>, 2009</blockquote><br />
<br />
Those with a healthy scepticism will have noticed that I have only quoted studies that support one side of the debate. It’s a slippery and misleading trick and it is exactly what Wilkinson and Pickett do throughout <i>The Spirit Level</i>. The difference is that I made it clear from the outset of this book that there are many conflicting studies. Readers of <i>The Spirit Level</i> would be hard-pressed to guess that there was any debate at all.<br />
<br />
In their new postscript and in response to an <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127862421912914915.html">article</a> I co-wrote for the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, Wilkinson and Pickett cite a <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4471.full">2009 review</a> of self-reported health studies in the <i>British Medical Journal</i> which, they <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575378630669014128.html">say</a>, "leave[s] little room for doubt as to the veracity of these relationships [and] shows unequivocally that inequality is related to significantly higher mortality rates." With so many studies to chose from, it is reasonable to expect Wilkinson and Pickett to cite one which strongly supports their position. But while the <i>BMJ</i> study is more supportive than most, it can hardly be called unequivocal. It begins by noting that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Empirical studies have attempted to link income inequality with poor health, but recent systematic reviews have failed to reach a consensus because of mixed findings.</blockquote><br />
And concludes:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health, although the population impact might be larger if the association is truly causal... The findings need to be interpreted with caution given the heterogeneity between studies.</blockquote><br />
It says much how about how weak the alleged ‘consensus’ is that the study Wilkinson and Pickett use as killer proof that inequality causes poor health did not find a strong relationship and acknowledged that the “modest” association was weak enough to imply a lack of causality. If this is “unequivocal” evidence, what is the rest like? <br />
<br />
Other researchers who have reviewed the evidence have not been so generous. For example:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Only individual-level studies have the potential to discriminate between most of the advanced hypotheses. The relevant individual-level studies to date, all on U.S. population data, provide strong support for the “absolute-income hypothesis,” no support for the “relative-income hypothesis,” and little or no support for the “income-inequality hypothesis.”<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/annual-reviews/income-inequality-and-health-what-does-the-literature-tell-us-kwlSMfbJDv">Wagstaff & Doorslaer</a> ('<i>Inequality and Health: What does the literature tell us?</i>')</blockquote><br />
<blockquote>The undeniable absence of a strong or consistent relationship between inequality and health stands in stark contrast to previous claims.... Contrary to the claims of previous researchers, there is no strong empirical support for the contention that inequality is a determinant of population health, let alone one of the most important determinants.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://z3950.muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_health_politics_policy_and_law/v026/26.3mellor.html">Mellor and Milyo</a> ('<i>Reexamining the Evidence of an Ecological Association between Income Inequality and Health</i>')</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>This article reviews 98 aggregate and multilevel studies examining the associations between income inequality and health. Overall, there seems to be little support for the idea that income inequality is a major, generalizable determinant of population health differences within or between rich countries.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15016244">Lynch</a>, ('Is income inequality a determinant of population health?')</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Much of the literature, both theoretical and empirical, needs to be treated skeptically, if only because of the low quality of much of the data on income inequality. Although there are many remaining puzzles, I conclude that there is no direct link from income inequality to mortality; individuals are no more likely to die or to report that they are in poor health if they live in places with a more unequal distribution of income.<br />
<br />
—<a href="http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jeclit/v41y2003i1p113-158.html">Deaton</a> ('Health, Inequality, and Economic Development')</blockquote><br />
The last quoted paragraph comes from a review of the literature conducted by Prof. Angus Deaton of Princeton University, one of the world’s most respected economists, whose summary of the evidence has twice as many citations in the scientific literature as Wilkinson and Pickett’s 2006 paper. Despite this, the postscript to <i>The Spirit Level </i>finds Wilkinson and Pickett stating that “it is now extremely difficult to argue credibly that these relationships don’t exist. Indeed, those who do so are almost always those who are making political attacks rather than any kind of academic criticism.” This statement goes beyond the merely misleading and enters the realms of flagrant dishonesty. In 2009, <i>The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality</i> evaluated the evidence for the inequality-health hypothesis and concluded:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The preponderance of evidence suggests that the relationship between income inequality and health is either non-existent or too fragile to show up in a robustly estimated panel specification. The best cross-national studies now uniformly fail to find a statistically reliable relationship between economic inequality and longevity.</blockquote><br />
Having to resort to the appeal to authority is regrettable, but since Wilkinson and Pickett are so eager to bill themselves as “epidemiologists with decades of experience in analysing the social determinants of ill health”, it behooves me to be said that each chapter of <i>The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality</i> is written by a team of distinguished professors who are regarded as international experts in their field. The implication that the work of these eminent scholars is “ill-founded and politically motivated criticism” is risible. Unlike Wilkinson and Pickett, none of these academics have formed any political pressure groups and do not have a long history of demanding radical wealth redistribution.<br />
<br />
As Sanandaji <i>et al</i>., have noted, the idea that Wilkinson and Pickett took their message directly to the public only after winning the academic debate is one of <i>The Spirit Level</i>’s most enduring myths:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The general public—the target audience for <i>The Spirit Level</i>—cannot be expected to be aware of the state of research in the field. Wilkinson and Pickett exploit the trust of their readers and give them the impression that their claims represent consensus science, when the opposite is closer to the truth.</blockquote><br />
Wilkinson and Pickett totally misrepresent the literature on inequality and health in <i>The Spirit Level</i>. They build the illusion of consensus around the one criterion that has generated substantial academic study (health) without ever acknowledging that the inequality-health hypothesis remains highly controversial and that Wilkinson's attempts to 'prove' it have attracted much criticism in the peer-reviewed literature spanning two decades.<br />
<br />
Having given a distorted and one-sided account of the research into health and inequality, they then lead the reader to believe that there is also a "vast literature" supporting their claims about other criteria. In fact, the amount of published research into these other criteria range from scant (eg. infant mortality, obesity, teen births) to none at all (eg. foreign aid, recycling, innovation). Wilkinson and Pickett's misrepresentation of the work of other academics will be the subject of the next post.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-13748053252305994902010-08-30T21:11:00.001+01:002010-08-31T21:20:43.241+01:00The Spirit Level has been debunked. More or less.The BBC Radio 4 show <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">More or Less</span> looks at the facts behind well publicised statistics. The show is presented by the author of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Undercover Economist</span>, Tim Harford and, as a regular listener, I was intrigued to hear that the first show of the new series promised to 'decode <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level </span>debate'. For a show dedicated to debunking junk statistics it was obvious subject matter, but I wondered how Harford could 'decode' such a voluminous topic over the airwaves in one show.<br />
<br />
In the end, he didn't need to. From the outset, Harford admitted there were too many competing claims to fit into a magazine show, and instead interviewed <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>'s co-author Kate Pickett, who did more damage to the reputation of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> in the space of ten minutes than any number of supposed <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/26/response-spirit-level-bad-social-science">"idea wreckers"</a>.<br />
<br />
The interview (listen <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tgwz7/More_or_Less_27_08_2010/">here</a> for the next couple of days, or <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless">subscribe</a> to the podcast) is essential listening if you've been following the controversy, as Pickett struggles to answer some fair and simple questions. Strangely enough, Wilkinson and Pickett's <a href="http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/">Equality Trust</a> website—which is normally so quick to let people know when <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> has been mentioned in the media—have yet to post a link to this interview. And since the audio file won't be available for much longer, I've transcribed some of the key moments for posterity...<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Falling back on other people's research</span><br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett's first line of defence is to claim that there are 100s of peer-reviewed studies which support their conclusion. As I have said before, this is just not true. Most of the studies they reference in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> do not even mention income inequality.<br />
<br />
In the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">More or Less</span> interview, Kate Pickett once again claimed there was a "vast body of research" behind <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. Tim Harford picked her up on it...<br />
<br />
<blockquote>KP: We wrote a book that's intended to be a synthesis of a very vast body of research. Not only our own, but those of other people... There is a consistent and robust and large body of evidence showing the same relationship.<br />
<br />
TH: That's an interesting point that you make. Often, in response to critics, you have referred not to your own book, not to your own data but to other published research. I'd really like to focus on the research that's presented <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">in your book</span>. It's very easy to say there are 50 papers, there are 200 papers, that support our research but we don't really know how you've selected those papers.<br />
<br />
KP: We actually have completed a systematic review of all of the studies of income inequality and health, and we reference that in our book. We do examine things systematically and certainly—when we are doing our own research, publishing in peer-reviewed journals—we have to be aware of all the literature in the field. But that doesn't mean that every paper in the field has good methods, comes to the right conclusion, studies the right thing.<br />
<br />
TH: I absolutely agree. One of the papers that you refer to in support of your argument on women's empowerment and women's status which was published in 1999 by Kawachi and some other authors, you claim supports your findings on women's status and income inequality. I've looked at their abstract. It doesn't seem to attack that question <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">at all</span>. It's simply on another subject—a somewhat related subject but not on the subject of income inequality.<br />
<br />
KP: They've definitely published and we may have inadvertently put the wrong reference into that document <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[laughing nervously]</span>. But Kawachi and Kennedy have certainly published finding a relationship between income inequality and women's status. The paper is <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10048835">Women's Status and the Health of Women and Men: a view from the States</a> and it was published in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Social Science and Medicine</span> in 1999.<br />
<br />
TH: That's the one I'm looking at.</blockquote><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Note:</span> On page 58 of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level, </span>it<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>states: "Researchers at Harvard University showed that women's status was linked to state-level income inequality. (36)"<br />
<br />
Reference 36 is the Kawachi study ('Women's status and the health of women and men: a view from the States', 1999). As its title suggests, this study compared women's status with health, not with inequality. Indeed, the authors found a correlation between women's status and health even after controlling for income inequality.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Failure to look at other variables</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> relies on the conceit that countries are fundamentally the same, with income inequality being the main variable that distinguishes them. This allows Wilkinson and Pickett to disregard other variables such as income, culture, history, demography, ethnicity, geography, law, politics and climate. Ignoring other variables and confounding factors would be a flaw in any study—as Harford points out, it breaks a basic rule of epidemiology—but when entire countries are being studied, this flaw becomes overwhelming. Pickett's response is revealing: she and Wilkinson do not "believe" that factors other than income inequality have an effect on a country's performance, so they don't bother looking at them.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>TH: All of your studies are what are called bivariate analysis. In other words, they're all income inequality plotted against some other variable. Now, my understanding of best practice in social sciences is that you would always control for other variables. You would include 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 other variables and...<br />
<br />
KP: Well, you wouldn't do that arbitrarily. You would do that if you <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">believed</span> those variables were potential alternative explanations of the relationship you're looking at.<br />
<br />
TH: So, if I understand your statement correctly, you didn't include any multiple variable analysis because you just think that actually none of these variables are of interest—none of them are potential alternative explanations and you can just do the simple income inequality versus x analyses?<br />
<br />
KP: That's right, but of course, again, other researchers have conducted studies that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">do</span> control for more, where, as well as examining the effect of income inequality at the level of the whole society, people include individual's own levels of income or levels of education in those analyses and, again, those bear out our findings in relation to health.<br />
<br />
TH: We come again to...you're basically rowing back from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">your</span> analysis and saying...<br />
<br />
KP: No. Indeed I'm not...<br />
<br />
TH: "Don't look at our analysis, look at these other people because they support us."<br />
<br />
KP: We <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">believe</span> that to control for individual income is actually <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">over</span>-controlling, so we would not consider that best practice.</blockquote><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Academic criticism</span><br />
<br />
Although well received by some journalists and politicians, <i>The Spirit Level</i> has received a much cooler reaction from academics. One of the few serious academics to have reviewed the book was John Kay, Professor of Economics at London Business School and former Director of Institute of Fiscal Studies. Pickett's response to Kay's review speaks volumes...<br />
<br />
<blockquote>TH: When John Kay reviewed your book in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/77b1bd26-14db-11de-8cd1-0000779fd2ac.html">Financial Times</a> </span>—and I believe John Kay would be broadly sympathetic to your idea that egalitarianism is important—he wrote: "The evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests. If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers." Do you think that's fair?<br />
<br />
KP: No, I don't think it's fair. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[Testily]</span> He didn't read the book thoroughly, obviously.</blockquote><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Outlandish claims </span><br />
<br />
In the last chapter of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, Wilkinson and Pickett make some extraordinary claims about what could happen if Britain reduced income inequality to Scandinavian levels. These include: teen births falling to a third of current rates, mental illness being halved, life expectancy rising by a year and the murder rate falling by three-quarters. Harford asks her about the last of these predictions.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>TH: Clearly your book is a systematical analysis and partly also a political book. You have a political case to make—there's nothing wrong with that. You have public policy actions that you would like to see taken. But do you think you may have overstated some of those? Let me give you an example. On page 268 of you book—towards the conclusion—you say that if Britain became as equal as Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland, homicide rates could fall by 75%. But as I'm sure you've had pointed out to you by now, the UK's homicide rate is already below the average of those four countries.<br />
<br />
KP: It's not actually. It's been pointed out that it's below Sweden. It's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not</span> below the average of those countries. Those claims [ie. in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>], they're based on regression models and of course they're only as good as they're model they're based on.<br />
<br />
TH: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[Incredulously]</span> But.. sorry... but <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">you've</span> made that claim!<br />
<br />
KP: Yes, yes, we do...<br />
<br />
TH: And you stand by it?<br />
<br />
KP: Yes. That Britain would become a much healthier and more socially better functioning place if it were more equal.<br />
<br />
TH: You said that if Britain became as equal as these four countries, homicide rates could fall by 75%. Do you not feel that's really overstating the case, or do you stand by that?<br />
<br />
KP: That's based on the model. I mean, I think we could try it and see.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[end of interview]</span><br />
<br />
TH: Kate Pickett, co-author of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. We did go to her Equality Trust website, by the way, and downloaded the data on homicide rates in the UK and in the relevant four countries and it does seem that I <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">was</span> right to say that the UK's homicide rate is already below the average of those four countries. You're listening to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">More or Less</span>...</blockquote>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-92103347398149463262010-08-14T08:01:00.000+01:002010-08-14T14:57:56.041+01:00Today's report in The GuardianToday's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/14/the-spirit-level-equality-thinktanks">report</a> in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Guardian</span> will no doubt draw the usual hate and bile from people who have no intention of reading my book. Still, a few quick points...<br />
<br />
Nobody asked me or paid me to write this book. I never set out write a critique of another book. While I was researching a completely different topic, I bought and read <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> because, as I said to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Guardian</span>, it was "influential and informing debate." Those are the kinds of books I like to read, whether from left or right. When I started fact-checking <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> I realised that it was too big a subject to squeeze into an article or blog post and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span> was born.<br />
<br />
When Dr Patrick Basham kindly offered to write the preface for the book, I published it in association with the Democracy Institute, of which he is the director. Had I known this would leave the book open to accusations of being written by a "wrecker" from a "rightwing thinktank" I wouldn't have bothered. You live and learn.<br />
<br />
I knew when I wrote it that the dogmatic right wouldn't be interested because they wouldn't have read <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level.</span> I knew the dogmatic left wouldn't be interested because they'd put their fingers in their ears if anyone raised difficult questions about such a politically useful text. But I also knew that there would be some people in between who had enquiring minds and a genuine interest in the issues. Perhaps I overestimated how many fell into that camp.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Guardian</span> quoted a few words from a twenty minute interview. No complaints, that's the way it goes...<br />
<br />
<blockquote>He [Snowdon] does not believe that The Spirit Level's claim that the psychological effects on society of income inequality are so great to cause widespread social ills. "I don't think people outside the intelligensia worry about inequality," Snowdon said. "The working class don't worry about how much Wayne Rooney is earning."</blockquote><br />
It's a crude example, but it serves to illustrate one of the fundamental problems with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. It cannot be stressed often enough that Wilkinson and Pickett's hypothesis rests on the psychological (or 'psychosocial') effects of living in a less equal society, not the material effects of poverty.<br />
<br />
When people say that they find <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>'s conclusions to be 'intuitively' true, or that they appeal to 'common sense', I wonder whether they fully appreciate that Wilkinson and Pickett are not blaming poverty, low income or low living standards <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">per se</span>. They are talking about something much less tangible—a sense, a feeling, a response—to other people's wealth. As someone who happens to be in the bottom 20% of earners myself, I don't personally feel traumatised by the existence of the super-rich. Perhaps that's just me, but there is also very little empirical evidence that the psychological response to inequality has a significant effect on people's day-to-day lives.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett would disagree, but the (left-wing) economist JK Galbraith understood this back in 1958 when he wrote <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Affluent Society<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">:</span></span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Envy almost certainly operates efficiently only as regards near neighbours. It’s not directed towards the distant rich.</blockquote><br />
In a later preface to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Affluent Society, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Galbraith</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> returned to the issue of inequality, making it clear that so long as people's own living standards were improving, they are not troubled by the thought of other people becoming still riche</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">r:</span></span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>When, as suggested in this book, men and women are employed and at continuously improving wages or salaries, they are not greatly concerned that others, with whatever justification or absence of justification, have more, even greatly more.</blockquote><br />
More recently, in<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Status Syndrome</span>, the (left-wing) epidemiologist, Michael Marmot discussed the stubborn refusal of ordinary Americans to become less happy even as their country became less equal. He made a telling comment about who is really 'stressed' by income inequality:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Changes in income inequality did not affect happiness levels of the poor. The subgroup of the population whose happiness declined when income inequality increased, were richer people who described themselves as on the left politically.</blockquote><br />
I discuss this issue in more detail in the later chapters of the book.<br />
<br />
No doubt there <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is</span> resentment at some of the grotesque disparities of wealth that exist (and have always existed), but that resentment would have to be truly monumental for it to be the main driver of an entire country's performance across so many criteria. Very few variables—let alone psychological variables—show up in aggregate data from whole nations. The psychosocial effect of income inequality is not one of them, and Wilkinson and Pickett have to perform all sorts of twists and turns to make their case to the contrary. At best, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> gives a cock-eyed view of the way the world is.<br />
<br />
The case for greater income equality remains an ethical, moral and political issue. It cannot be 'proved' by social science.<br />
<br />
<br />
My response to Wilkinson and Pickett's answers to my 20 Questions is <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/04/20-questions-for-richard-wilkinson-kate.html">here</a> .<br />
<br />
Some of the graphs from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span> are <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/05/graphs-and-sources.html">here</a>.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Links to other sites discussing the debate over <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level </span>can be found on the right-hand side of the page.</div><div><br />
</div>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-63891744520097237062010-08-11T03:27:00.000+01:002010-08-15T03:45:09.794+01:00Reply to Prospect magazine article<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span">This is my reply to an article in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Prospect</span> by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. That article can be read </span></span><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/08/in-defence-of-equality/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span">. The article that inspired it is </span></span><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/07/the-problem-with-the-spirit-level/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span">.</span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
I’m pleased to be able to agree with Wilkinson and Pickett (W & P) on one point. I’m not a public health researcher and was surprised to be described as such. That, sadly, is where agreement ends.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett once again imply that they are merely the messengers of a scientific consensus and that there are 100s of peer-reviewed studies saying the same thing. Can we please put this one to bed? Even if quantity was a substitute for quality, the argument does not apply here. There is a large body of conflicting research about health and inequality and a smaller body of research studying violence and inequality. Both are hotly debated, not least because it is very difficult to isolate the effects of income inequality from the effects of low income.<br />
<br />
Beyond this, Wilkinson and Pickett are out on their own, making claims that have virtually no support in the scientific literature. In contrast to what he says in the third paragraph of this rejoinder, Wilkinson recently told the magazine International Socialism:<br />
<br />
"There are about 200 papers on health and inequality in lots of different settings, probably 40 or 50 looking at violence in relation to inequality, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">and very few looking at any of the other things in relation to inequality</span>. In a way, the new work in the book is all these other variables—teenage births, mental illness, prison populations and so on—and the major contribution is bringing all of that into a picture that had previously been just health and violence."<br />
<br />
W & P confuse making assumptions based on other people’s research with having those people actually agree with them. For example, they cite studies that quite reasonably associate overeating with stress, but it does not follow that obesity rates vary internationally because the population is stressed about inequality. At best, this is speculation.<br />
<br />
W & P continue to cite perfectly sound studies showing there to be social gradients to health and social problems as evidence that inequality affects a nation’s overall performance. It does not. These are completely different issues.<br />
<br />
Which leaves us with W & P’s own evidence, which relies on comparing whole countries, a notoriously unreliable method which allows unlimited scope for misinterpretation. The criticisms recently made of this evidence by myself and others closely echo criticisms made in peer-reviewed journals when Wilkinson used similar methods in the past. They also echo criticisms made by the few serious academics who have reviewed The Spirit Level.<br />
<br />
Anyone who believes that W & P “never pick and choose data points to suit our argument” should compare references 2 and 6 in The Spirit Level (p. 271) and ask themselves why one year’s data were used for one graph and another year’s data used for the next. Anyone who believes that they use “the same measures of inequality” should turn to page 224 and ask why a dramatically different measure of inequality was preferred when working hours were studied (clue: <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/05/working-hours.html">see how it looks</a> when we use W & P’s more usual measure of inequality). Anyone believing that they have not “picked problems to suit our argument” might ask why they show how much overseas aid is given by a country’s government, but do not show how much is given privately (there is no correlation with inequality when the two are combined).<br />
<br />
As for always using the same group of countries, one of The Spirit Level’s most serious flaws is the baffling assumption that “rich market societies” come in batches of 50. If there is to be a cut-off point beyond which economic growth has “largely finished its work”, it should be based on something more than a round number. Without a convincing justification for why places like the Czech Republic and South Korea – let alone Hong Kong – cannot be considered rich market societies, we must ask the next question: why do these societies conspicuously fail to fit Wilkinson and Pickett’s theory? The United Nations classes these countries as being of “very high human development”, why doesn’t The Spirit Level?<br />
<br />
I hope that readers will take the time to look at these issues themselves, but, if not, they should at least take a deep breath and ask themselves which is more plausible – a theory that seeks to explain the workings of whole societies by reference to a single factor, or one that says that a country’s performance is the result of countless historical, geographical, political, legal, demographic and economic factors, of which the public’s response to income inequality may or may not be one.Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-56095675612585337342010-07-29T13:01:00.000+01:002018-07-05T15:12:25.061+01:00Are people in 'more equal' countries more likely to vote?In the latest edition of <i>The Spirit Level</i>, Wilkinson and Pickett put forward the idea that voter turn-out is higher in "more equal" countries.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
There is evidence from societies where voting is not compulsory (as it is for instance in Australia) that voter turn-out may be lower in more unequal countries. Whether or not this reflects a greater separation of interests and an increasing sense of 'us and them' between people at opposite ends of the social ladder, it certainly suggests that too much inequality is a threat to democracy.<br />
<br />
<i>The Spirit Level</i>, p. 295 (revised edition)</blockquote>
<br />
The reference given to support this claim is cited as 'B. Geysa, 'Explaining voter turnout: A review of aggregate-level research'. This study is available <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=explaining+voter+turnout+geysa&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=L0HgTca_B4eahQeOv_HLCg#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&source=hp&q=explaining+voter+turnout+aggregate-level&aq=f&aqi=g-b1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=164133a5b6804e31&biw=1309&bih=811">online</a>. Aside from getting the name of the author wrong (it's Geys, not Geysa), Wilkinson and Pickett totally misrepresent the study's findings. The word 'inequality' appears just three times in this 27 page review and although it briefly addresses the question of whether inequality might reduce voting turn-out, it clearly concludes that most studies have shown that it doesn't. At no point does it even vaguely imply that "voter turn-out may be lower in more unequal countries", let alone that this represents a "threat to democracy".<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett do not present a graph of their own as evidence, but thanks to <a href="http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/">recently published OECD data</a> on voter turn-out, we can put the hypothesis to the test. The graph below shows all rich OECD countries, excluding tax havens (as per <i>The Spirit Level</i>) and Australia (where voting is compulsory).<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
It would be hard to produce a straighter line. Even with a spirit level.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWmeyf1O1W89Y7NVHQcivzS5NDdGSp7VaI_XIufB_wmfRpQ6SVLpWhBqdZys6njGZy31QFmAiyVeFWXBLCix3R-9MDiYaGoTJFg8ns5CepjTe4xTNHJJrazqSUQaRoQtAQwM56DdQREGg/s1600/oecd+voting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWmeyf1O1W89Y7NVHQcivzS5NDdGSp7VaI_XIufB_wmfRpQ6SVLpWhBqdZys6njGZy31QFmAiyVeFWXBLCix3R-9MDiYaGoTJFg8ns5CepjTe4xTNHJJrazqSUQaRoQtAQwM56DdQREGg/s400/oecd+voting.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-23245723720702584462010-07-23T17:03:00.000+01:002010-08-02T16:46:39.927+01:00Fact-checking The Spirit Level debateThanks to all who organised and attended the debate at the <a href="http://rsaspiritleveldebate.eventbrite.com/">Royal Society of Arts</a> on 22nd July. Due to the structure of the event, Peter Saunders and myself did not get the chance to reply to Wilkinson and Pickett's presentation but, although I haven't yet listened back to the debate (I'll post the video link when it is available), there are a few basic factual errors that need clearing up...<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">1. Trust</span><br />
<br />
In response to my claim that the correlation between trust and inequality depends entirely on the Scandinavian countries, Pickett presented a graph which showed the same data (from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>) but with the Scandinavian countries excluded. A correlation remained, albeit weaker.<br />
<br />
This is true, but the two critical problems with their graph on trust remain: (1) As with all <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Spirit Level</span> graphs, it excludes several wealthy countries; (2) it relies on data from the 1990s which has been superseded by the 2000s data (which is used in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span>). When the most recent data is used there is clearly no correlation between trust and inequality.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGDmj7Izr_DVDGFSgf2_N2iyW1K3ZaSkgOCqbHh5_XGzHO2cYhGsEsIoLVRoPNz52pHFuUK-pzbhxXsIrfh7zMPM-CwNrAZgpqVkERzG7nctX589RPP5uNgTm_JyUU1SCv_0YBQXOwJ4Y/s1600/trust+w:out+scandinavia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGDmj7Izr_DVDGFSgf2_N2iyW1K3ZaSkgOCqbHh5_XGzHO2cYhGsEsIoLVRoPNz52pHFuUK-pzbhxXsIrfh7zMPM-CwNrAZgpqVkERzG7nctX589RPP5uNgTm_JyUU1SCv_0YBQXOwJ4Y/s400/trust+w:out+scandinavia.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Source: <a href="http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalizeStudy.jsp">World Values Survey</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">2. Happiness</span><br />
<br />
Richard Wilkinson dismissed the evidence showing that happiness is not correlated with income inequality—but is (positively) correlated with income—by saying that happiness does not have a social gradient.<br />
<br />
This is not true. Happiness certainly <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">does</span> have a social gradient. One of the best known demonstrations of this can be found in a paper by Robert Easterlin from 1974. It clearly shows happiness rising in line with income.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAValiLLEnOh-lcdnr4swG-1Hwa73M_lUoz2-yJFM2yFvlqvmlMGv2hiHFv5crXVSx-NIx7YpJfg8RUW_0qX7cts7u3hYALbAtCx5OCUZ3nwfma4_xBR402FTc33lOQ5QQxB9zLwo-76I/s1600/Easterlin1974.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAValiLLEnOh-lcdnr4swG-1Hwa73M_lUoz2-yJFM2yFvlqvmlMGv2hiHFv5crXVSx-NIx7YpJfg8RUW_0qX7cts7u3hYALbAtCx5OCUZ3nwfma4_xBR402FTc33lOQ5QQxB9zLwo-76I/s400/Easterlin1974.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
This particular article gave rise to the so-called '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox">Easterlin Paradox</a>' and is one of the most famous papers in economics. It is certainly the most famous study in the field of 'happiness studies', and as such it is hard to believe that Wilkinson can be unaware of it.<br />
<br />
<br />
Source: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/16/business/Easterlin1974.pdf">Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence</a></span>, Robert Easterlin, 1974<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">3. Health</span><br />
<br />
In response to our evidence showing no relationship between inequality and life expectancy, Pickett referred to a 2009 <a href="http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/nov10_2/b4471">study</a> from the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">British Medical Journal</span>. Wilkinson and Pickett also cited this study in their <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/09/spirit-level-policy-exchange">response to Peter Saunders</a> and in their response to a recent <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575378630669014128.html">critique</a> I co-authored in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Wall Street Journal</span>. In the latter, they said that the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">BMJ</span> study "shows unequivocally that inequality is related to significantly higher mortality rates."<br />
<br />
In fact, the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">BMJ</span> study concludes that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health, although the population impact might be larger if the association is truly causal... The findings need to be interpreted with caution given the heterogeneity between studies.</blockquote><br />
Unequivocal?<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">4. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> was written in 2007?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Kate Pickett referred to one of my <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/04/20-questions-for-richard-wilkinson-kate.html">20 Questions</a>, which reads:</span></span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Why do you say that the USA’s decline in homicide ended in 2005 when 2008 saw the lowest number of homicides since 1965? As you must know, America's murder rate has halved in the last two decades despite rising inequality.</blockquote><br />
All of which is true. Wilkinson and Pickett claim that the US homicide rate "started to rise again" in 2005 (p. 142). In fact, the murder rate fell in 2007 and 2008 and is now at its lowest rate since 1965.<br />
<br />
During the debate, Pickett explained that there was a simple reason for them ignoring the ongoing decline in the US homicide rate—their book was written in 2007! That got a good laugh, but it is not true. As can be seen from the references at the end of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, they were still writing—and finding new sources—well into 2008.<br />
<br />
For example:<br />
<br />
(95) S. Bezruchkra et al., 'Income economic equality and health: the case of postwar Japan', <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">American Journal of Public Health</span>, (February 2008)<br />
<br />
(298) K. Pickett & R. Wilkinson, 'People like us: ethnic group density on health', <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Ethnicity and Health</span>, (September 2008)<br />
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(379) W. Hutton, 'Let's get rid of our silly fears of public ownership', <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Observer</span>, (April 2008)<br />
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Clearly there was time to acknowledge the US homicide rate in 2007, if not 2008.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">5. Inequality in Japan</span><br />
<br />
During the Q & A session, I mentioned that there are questions over how equal the distribution of wealth in Japan really is. I pointed out that Gini figures from the OECD show Japan to be on a par with Spain and Portugal (this was a mistake on my part—I meant to say Spain and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Greece</span>). Pickett responded by saying that these figures are for Gini <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">before tax</span>.<br />
<br />
This, again, is not true. The OECD provides inequality data both before and after tax. The most recent data, from the mid-2000s, show:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Japan (before tax): 0.44<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Japan (after tax): 0.32</span><br />
<br />
Spain (before tax): 0.41<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Spain (after tax): 0.32</span><br />
<br />
Greece (before tax): 0.43<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Greece (after tax): 0.32</span><br />
<br />
Sweden (before tax): 0.43<br />
<br />
Sweden (after tax): 0.23</blockquote><br />
As the OECD states in a 2006 <a href="http://www.oecd.org/document/38/0,3343,en_2649_34321_37130854_1_1_1_1,00.html">article</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The Gini coefficient measure has risen significantly since the mid 1980s from well below to slightly above the OECD average and the rate of relative poverty in Japan is now one of the highest in the OECD area.</blockquote><br />
I have no firm view on which of the two sources (UN or OECD) have the most realistic figure for Japan, but as a point of fact the OECD figures I mentioned were <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">after tax</span>.<br />
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Source: <a href="http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=11112&QueryType=View">OECD</a>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-86910839967320268182010-07-23T13:09:00.000+01:002010-07-30T02:25:06.240+01:00The Spirit Level, the Policy Exchange and the race cardIt was enough to suggest a vast right-wing conspiracy. Last week, three debunkings of the left’s new favourite text <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> appeared in as many days—first from the <a href="http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/research/2010/07/new-research-the-spirit-illusion.html">TaxPayers’ Alliance</a>, then from <a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=195">Policy Exchange</a> and then in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127862421912914915.html">Wall Street Journal</a></span>. This coincidence (I assure you it <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">was</span> a coincidence) was enough to rouse <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>’s authors—social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett—into responding, to the Policy Exchange’s rebuttal at least. Disappointingly, this response was <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/09/spirit-level-policy-exchange">heavy on name calling and light on substantive arguments</a>.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett insisted that their book was the result of “decades of research”. True enough. Richard Wilkinson has doggedly pursued the theory that “unequal societies are almost always unhealthy societies” for the last 35 years. During that time, life expectancy has risen rapidly, despite growing inequality, leaving ultra-egalitarian Denmark with the lowest life expectancy of any country studied in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. That none of this has swayed Wilkinson from his hypothesis is a tribute to his indefatigability, but stamina alone is not enough. People have spent their lives on more quixotic endeavours than Wilkinson, but that should not necessarily recommend them to us.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett stress that many peer-reviewed articles have offered at least partial support the relative income hypothesis. This is also true—albeit only in the area of health—even if Wilkinson has written a large number of them himself, but there are also plenty of peer-reviewed articles that beg to differ. Hence the long-running academic debate about inequality which <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> has done much to popularise but little to resolve. <br />
<br />
Amongst that large body of scientific literature, there have been several suggestions of selection bias on Wilkinson’s part (that’s ‘cherry-picking’ to you and me) which have been echoed recently with regards to the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. Wilkinson and Pickett throw the same accusation at Peter Saunders, the author of the Policy Exchange critique, saying that he selectively removed a number of countries from his analysis. This would be a potent criticism had Saunders picked the most useful subset of countries and used them throughout. In fact, he only occasionally excludes a handful of outliers to show that Wilkinson and Pickett’s regression lines are being dragged this way and that by a few special cases, thereby creating the illusion of a sloping gradient where none exists. <br />
<br />
It is valid, indeed crucial, to demonstrate this point. <a href="http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence/obesity">Take their graph on obesity, for example</a>. Even the casual reader can see that the line goes upwards as a result of fat Americans and skinny Japanese. There is a conspicuous lack of a dose-response relationship when it comes to the other countries, but note the absence of Singapore and Hong Kong in this graph, both wealthy societies which marry extreme inequality with low rates of obesity (and low rates of most other health and social problems). Wilkinson and Pickett are no strangers to “arbitrarily cutting out certain countries” themselves.<br />
<br />
Conversely, Wilkinson and Pickett accuse Saunders of including too many countries (he shows 44 to Wilkinson and Pickett’s 23). This is a view I have a little more sympathy with. Places like Russia and Chile clearly have absolute poverty in a way that France and Norway do not. Since Wilkinson and Pickett accept that wealth improves countries up to a point, it could certainly be said that several of the nations included in Saunder’s analysis have not reached that point. However, as both <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion</span> and the TPA report show, one need only to include countries which are as wealthy or wealthier than Portugal to show that there is no relationship between inequality and most health and social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett have yet to justify their decision to exclude places like South Korea, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hong Kong.<br />
<br />
Wilkinson and Pickett then aim a blow below the midriff when they accuse the Policy Exchange of being “from the political far right” and accuse Saunders of a “seriously racist slur” for showing the tendency of US states with large African-American populations to have the most social and health problems. The correlation with ethnicity is strong—much stronger than the correlation with inequality—but Wilkinson and Pickett dismiss it as “racist because it implies the problem is inherently the people themselves rather than their socioeconomic position”.<br />
<br />
If Wilkinson and Pickett think it is racist to say that there are a host of cultural and historical reasons why blacks tend to do worse than whites in the USA, then there are plenty of black community leaders and black politicians who are racist. No serious discussion of modern-day America can ignore the legacy of slavery and segregation, as well as the more subtle forms of ongoing discrimination which continue to hold African-Americans back. There is no doubt that these factors contribute to income inequality, but to say they are caused by inequality is highly questionable.<br />
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The reasons why the black homicide rate is much higher, and black life expectancy much lower, than the corresponding rates for white Americans are many and varied but in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, they are—as ever—reduced to symptoms of inequality. This will not do. Income, inequality and ethnicity are so closely intertwined in the United States that it is difficult to see where one stops and the other starts, but Saunders argues persuasively that inequality is not the main driver. <br />
<br />
A significant clue lies in the pages of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> itself. Wilkinson and Pickett note with surprise that they can find no association between inequality and poor mental health (p68-69) and then mention, almost in passing, that rates of mental illness are evenly distributed between different races. This should have been a Eureka moment but, as Saunders writes, “they fail to draw the obvious conclusion from their failure to find a relationship with inequality, which is that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">they only get state-level correlations with income inequality when there are underlying correlations with race to generate them</span>” [emphasis in original]. Inequality is a symptom, not the cause.<br />
<br />
This highlights one of the main problems with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>. The myopic obsession with income inequality blinds the eye to the countless cultural, political, historical and demographic reasons why countries are as they are. Wilkinson and Pickett’s hypothesis requires one to believe that these are all rooted in inequality, but taking each in turn we can see how implausible that is. Their ‘theory of everything’, like all grand unifying theories, makes an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence. As was repeatedly demonstrated last week, the evidence provided in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> withers under the light of serious scrutiny. Crying ‘racist’ will not make it more robust.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[This article was first published by the </span><a href="http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/research/2010/07/factchecking-the-spirit-level.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">TPA</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> on 16.07.10]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[Peter Saunders has responded to Wilkinson and Pickett's attack <a href="http://www.petersaunders.org.uk/spirit_level.html">on his website</a>]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[Tino Sanandaji—one of the authors of the WSJ article—makes some additional comments <a href="http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/07/wilkinson-and-pickett-misrepresent.html">on his blog</a>]</span>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-78584016519787350432010-07-22T19:33:00.000+01:002011-07-02T20:04:43.075+01:00Correlation coefficients and p-valuesThe original edition of <i>The Spirit Level</i> did not show correlation coefficients or p-values for any of the graphs, but when I wrote <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i>, I included r-squared coefficients to show the strength of the associations.<br />
<br />
Later editions of <i>The Spirit Level</i> include an appendix which shows Pearson Correlation Coefficients and two-sided p-values. As the Pearson coefficient shows a different figure than the r-squared, I have included the Pearson coefficients and the two-sided p-values for <i>The Spirit Level Delusion</i> graphs below for anybody who should want to compare them.<br />
<br />
The first number is the correlation coefficient (the strength of the correlation). The figure in brackets is the p-value (the confidence that the correlation has not been caused by chance). Both numbers go from 0.00 to 1.00. For the first figure, the higher the number, the stronger the correlation. For the latter, lower numbers represent stronger associations. Statistical significance is usually represented by a p-value of at least 0.05, with 0.01 or less being preferred.<br />
<br />
Life expectancy (UN 2004): -0.4515 (0.03)<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Life expectancy (UN 2006): 0.16 (0.42)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Life expectancy (UN 2009): 0.22 (0.27)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Obesity: 0.01 (0.96)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Smoking: -0.31 (0.11)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Alcohol: -0.25 (0.21)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Infant mortality: 0.13 (0.51)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Trust: -0.29 (0.13)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Teen births: 0.32 (0.10)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Happiness: 0.05 (0.81)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Homicide: 0.30 (0.12)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Recycling/suicide: 0.64 (0.04)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Prison: 0.59 (<0.01)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Crime: -0.15 (0.45)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Victim of crime: -0.344 (0.21)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Recycling: -0.739 (<0.01)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Charity: 0.40 (0.25)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Foreign aid: 0.527 (0.01)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Single parents: -0.06 (0.285)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Suicide: -0.475 (0.01)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Unemployment: 0.033 (0.88)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Community life: 0.54 (0.03)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Alcohol/divorce: 0.35 (0.12)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Education: -0.154 (0.44)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Quality of life: 0.13 (0.51)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Homicide/suicide: -0.03 (0.86)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">% GDP in tax/inequality: -0.65 (<0.01)</div><div><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Happiness/income: 0.62 (<0.01)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Trust/income: 0.56 (<0.01)</div></div>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-24027039680885028302010-06-16T14:02:00.001+01:002010-08-30T14:13:43.024+01:00Overseas Aid<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[This footnote relates to Chapter 6 of The Spirit Level Delusion]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span><br />
Since <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level Delusion </span>was published, I have come across the <a href="http://www.hudson.org/files/documents/Index%20of%20Global%20Philanthropy%20and%20Remittances%202009.pdf">Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances</a> (2009) which provides overseas aid figures for 22 countries. Crucially, this index combines state aid with private donations. Shown as a percentage of gross national income, it is clear that more equal countries are neither more nor less generous to the developing world than the less equal countries. Wilkinson and Pickett are only able to argue otherwise by ignoring all private donations.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_JukoL0hEW188-COaN_7lMUjBmmh4_wGcdDlM7DuDDNWACTsPEsrb3c2qMRUtfCyQYT8kS4xG-qV_fcbMu17AAD6E4F09Qrv5TeVe1rc414nNvaQulc-Ynv1OonaxupM7kS3bzSRd28I/s1600/developing+countries+GNI+%25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_JukoL0hEW188-COaN_7lMUjBmmh4_wGcdDlM7DuDDNWACTsPEsrb3c2qMRUtfCyQYT8kS4xG-qV_fcbMu17AAD6E4F09Qrv5TeVe1rc414nNvaQulc-Ynv1OonaxupM7kS3bzSRd28I/s400/developing+countries+GNI+%25.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-49098246963766375132010-05-17T02:50:00.000+01:002010-05-16T18:52:12.647+01:00Case study: Life expectancy<div><br /></div><div>One of the central claims of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> is that 'less equal' countries have lower life expectancies than more egalitarian countries. Its authors claim that the psychological stress of living in a less egalitarian society affects the health of all—rich and poor—and that this manifests itself in lower life expectancies. </div><div><br /></div><div>To demonstrate this they show a graph that looks very much like this:<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM9jIPej9guQblnBko2EWTpMXLxYYf_fk0c1qWedZDYiTj2ASqwiiUrGj33fTIqkzN92yIJazF4qXKXLX9GguAT-cOQa3kux6vc-Er43NtmAnrY5V74RTQ85Q76Kksr3y5N7WDBf3E0Lg/s1600/lifeexpectancy+2004.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 256px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM9jIPej9guQblnBko2EWTpMXLxYYf_fk0c1qWedZDYiTj2ASqwiiUrGj33fTIqkzN92yIJazF4qXKXLX9GguAT-cOQa3kux6vc-Er43NtmAnrY5V74RTQ85Q76Kksr3y5N7WDBf3E0Lg/s400/lifeexpectancy+2004.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463300081355868594" /></a><br /><br /></div><div>Inequality is shown on the horizontal axis and is the difference between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% (eg. in Sweden, the richest 20% are 4 times wealthier than the poorest 20%). As you can see from the graph, there seems to be a downward trend in life expectancy from the more equal countries, especially Sweden and Japan, to the less equal countries. The low life expectancies of Denmark and Finland should make us wonder whether this graph really proves that egalitarianism results in good health, but a broad correlation remains nonetheless.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there are two major problems. Firstly, a number of wealthy societies are missing from this graph. In particular, where are Hong Kong, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Slovenia? All of them are wealthier than Portugal and should be shown. </div><div><br /></div><div>Secondly, there are questions over the data used to ascertain life expectancy. Wilkinson and Pickett use figures from the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/">United Nations Human Development Report</a></span>, a respected and accurate source, but they use data from the 2004 edition. This is an odd choice because elsewhere in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, the authors rely on the 2006 edition. They even use life expectancy figures from the 2006 report elsewhere (the graph on page 7) so we know they were aware of them. <br /><br />This is their reference for a graph they use to show life expectancy earlier in the book...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGR9jdDr4S4gVqCWWbZzY8kPtoyDSE0O6qBSRI0RIy7IqY7RSE_qrPR-VkLdd7whi32ZV8lm5wZQNIu1a4EFgehlRiOJt975tF1ZSI7S-VAC3y-q68rT2OkpUfW6umdZOq-Gi3pRlK2UY/s1600/2006+ref..jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 32px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGR9jdDr4S4gVqCWWbZzY8kPtoyDSE0O6qBSRI0RIy7IqY7RSE_qrPR-VkLdd7whi32ZV8lm5wZQNIu1a4EFgehlRiOJt975tF1ZSI7S-VAC3y-q68rT2OkpUfW6umdZOq-Gi3pRlK2UY/s400/2006+ref..jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465278036554504834" /></a><br /><br />But this is their reference for their graph showing life expectancy against inequality...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDhfWe0-C_J7OIonXyE81j5G5TY5FEOW-YLa0ERFtcLI_-kcIW7492cRtLNd0SDUBazvWV_3gNDWjdYenoyztKzhlhVMT_qnTiG0VsEixP_qfbQmu8XbTF4w5ZLjgVYYyHbd6p6Iq3lak/s1600/2004+ref..jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 33px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDhfWe0-C_J7OIonXyE81j5G5TY5FEOW-YLa0ERFtcLI_-kcIW7492cRtLNd0SDUBazvWV_3gNDWjdYenoyztKzhlhVMT_qnTiG0VsEixP_qfbQmu8XbTF4w5ZLjgVYYyHbd6p6Iq3lak/s400/2004+ref..jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465278821795826930" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>So why the use of old statistics and a carefully selected sample group? If we look at the data from the UN's 2006 report—and include all relevant countries—a very different picture emerges.</div><div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhWWT3luOSOmz4BTCTxWYY8WuswXhdB9fSDdvclFwcU9mq8IlUDG73vvJaGhv99qZ3W9gIs8u8fylU8eVMqnFJ8MtvBqKmRbsRJHGKhgBIfme9tsO54rHFEmGE-2gwvaQFeQ4ZdcEnlw/s1600/lifeexpectancy+2006.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhWWT3luOSOmz4BTCTxWYY8WuswXhdB9fSDdvclFwcU9mq8IlUDG73vvJaGhv99qZ3W9gIs8u8fylU8eVMqnFJ8MtvBqKmRbsRJHGKhgBIfme9tsO54rHFEmGE-2gwvaQFeQ4ZdcEnlw/s400/lifeexpectancy+2006.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463300214871468498" /></a><br /></div><div>The association between inequality and life expectancy has disappeared, replaced by a modest trend in the opposite direction. And to prove that the 2006 report is not an anomaly, here are the results from the 2009 report:</div><div><br /></div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJx8kt_7vEMyvKBwdnJ9BdPEYztGzhnpyuzeHSmmkEiVQxsClPqWUxgZd1UYuMvvosGR_pxkrviuRg-YW-RpRREi1gNMRlkD5U1rFfECxDEqtFOVQFUEoFG2zmPf-8LmT1BH1hgGg7tIg/s1600/lifeexpectancy+2009.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 259px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJx8kt_7vEMyvKBwdnJ9BdPEYztGzhnpyuzeHSmmkEiVQxsClPqWUxgZd1UYuMvvosGR_pxkrviuRg-YW-RpRREi1gNMRlkD5U1rFfECxDEqtFOVQFUEoFG2zmPf-8LmT1BH1hgGg7tIg/s400/lifeexpectancy+2009.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463300348027130738" /></a><br /></div><div>Again, there is no correlation. Indeed the three worst performing countries have a very equal distribution of wealth (Czech Republic, Slovenia and Denmark). </div><div><br /></div><div>It's worth noting that the inequality/life expectancy hypothesis is not new. It first came to prominence in a 1992 <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">British Medical Journal</span> article, written by none other than Richard Wilkinson. That article inspired a flurry of research and, in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, the authors refer to a “vast literature” on the subject. There is, however, no mention of how much of this vast literature was written by Wilkinson himself, nor that much of the rest was critical of his theory. </div><div><br /></div><div>His <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">BMJ</span> study was debunked at length in the same journal in 1995 by Ken Judge. Judge pointed out numerous errors in Wilkinson’s research, including the use of “inappropriate” data. He criticised Wilkinson for using the lowest 70% of families as a measure of inequality when a more conventional measure is the bottom 10% or 20% of individuals. “The suspicion,” wrote Judge, “must be that the choice is derived from the data” (ie. Wilkinson was cherry-picking).</div><div><br /></div><div>When Judge recalculated the data based on the more usual measure of income per head, the association between life expectancy and inequality disappeared. Judge concluded:<br /><br /><blockquote>In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that a predominantly monocausal explanation of international variations in life expectancy should ever have been regarded as plausible. It is much more likely that they are the product of many influences, which probably interact over long periods of time.<br /></blockquote><br />This was only common sense. Further studies conducted in Denmark and Japan failed to support Wilkinson’s hypothesis and although some studies showed an association between income inequality and life expectancy in the USA, other evidence showed that this was more likely to be due to education, underinvestment and other confounding factors. In 2002, a large study of wealthy European countries showed no association between inequality and life expectancy.</div><div><br /></div><div>In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">The Spirit Level</span>, Wilkinson and Pickett cite a 1996 editorial from the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">BMJ</span> which discussed the “big idea” that “the more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.” At that time, the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">BMJ</span> was broadly supportive of the theory but research into it was still in its infancy. Wilkinson and Pickett do not mention the editorial that appeared in the same journal six years later, which concluded: <br /><br /><blockquote>Now that good data on income inequality have become available for 16 western industrialised countries, the association between income inequality and life expectancy has disappeared.</blockquote><br />By the time <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> was published, the slender circumstantial evidence upon which Wilkinson had made his case had been obliterated with the passing of time. Rather than change the theory to fit the facts, he and Pickett ignored the facts and persisted with the theory. In practice, that meant using old data when they were quite aware that more recent data was available.<br /></div><div><br /></div>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4761750297977694004.post-20370855255389955472010-05-16T16:40:00.000+01:002010-05-16T18:39:22.836+01:00God and the moviesMaybe it's because I'm a bit of a statistics nerd, but once I start comparing countries, I find it difficult to stop. The fact is that associations are everywhere and the possibilities opened up by ecological epidemiology are endless. For example, here are two statistically significant associations showing belief in God and cinema attendance (against inequality).<div><br /></div><div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4U3an1hsWwjx24UPwLtZI5A47RWAK4TRZzRQQ5-hGOi39wEjv470aDTilt_hYXN4xvIySa15GMlUOTj-vKQgeTRyOdqwFZAzZVpVW1LGbo1XTOFwfOcUYQuZF0TW0oafQMg57yh5rIKU/s1600/god.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 258px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4U3an1hsWwjx24UPwLtZI5A47RWAK4TRZzRQQ5-hGOi39wEjv470aDTilt_hYXN4xvIySa15GMlUOTj-vKQgeTRyOdqwFZAzZVpVW1LGbo1XTOFwfOcUYQuZF0TW0oafQMg57yh5rIKU/s400/god.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465523183965294914" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Based on the </span><a href="http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">World Values Survey</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">. 'How important is God in your life?' Percentage answering 'very important'.</span><div><br /></div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCBR1eWpDbtd1ZThKEyJHC-Gj7eh1rljw4ox5JZu-IN8GENmzqjjjtiA-bhKKnZ11_KWaW4RJ48WmEXN28sE31CjipQI7FWrN9K5XwlFcVA-312vK3LX2bYsdEiLwaKNQ7E4g55R24-ZM/s1600/cinema.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCBR1eWpDbtd1ZThKEyJHC-Gj7eh1rljw4ox5JZu-IN8GENmzqjjjtiA-bhKKnZ11_KWaW4RJ48WmEXN28sE31CjipQI7FWrN9K5XwlFcVA-312vK3LX2bYsdEiLwaKNQ7E4g55R24-ZM/s400/cinema.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465524326673945458" /></a><br /><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Based on </span><a href="http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_cin_att-media-cinema-attendance"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Nationmaster</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> data.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>I show these graphs because they happen to show a strong correlations—stronger than most of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit Level</span> graphs. They are, as Wilkinson and Pickett might say, too strong to be the result of chance. But if they are not due to chance, how do we explain why people in less equal countries are more likely to believe in God and more likely to go the cinema? Does egalitarianism cause atheism? Does religion cause inequality? Or does going to the cinema make people believe in God? </div><div><br /></div><div>The possibilities are limitless. But even if you exclude chance as a possibility (and that would be very hasty), explaining them in terms of income inequality requires a vivid imagination and a near-obsession with wealth redistribution. </div><div><br /></div><div>As ever, our willingness to accept statistical associations depends on our susceptibility to the underlying message. Perhaps a socialist atheist would find these associations compelling. Or maybe a Christian film buff could use them as an argument in favour of capitalism. The rest of us might shrug our shoulders and say 'so what?'</div><div> <br /></div></div></div>Christopher Snowdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15963753745009712865noreply@blogger.com3