When we first wrote The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better For Everyone, we had no idea it would become a bestseller. The book was filled with graphs and statistics, for one thing. But in the 15 years since it was published, we’ve been invited to give well over 1,000 lectures and conferences to tell people about our research. Our findings were clear then and are still true now. When economic inequality gets worse, so does our health and wellbeing. Inequality can affect a society’s death rates, its levels of chronic disease, and the amount of violence (including murders) it experiences. What we weren’t prepared for when we first wrote the book was how much worse things could get.
Today, inequality seeps into almost every facet of life. Children in the most unequal societies are more likely to experience bullying, do less well in school, and have fewer opportunities for social mobility. Research since the book came out has added gambling, domestic violence and the mistreatment of children to the list of problems all correlated to higher levels of inequality. We know that people in more economically unequal societies become more status-obsessed and consumerist, which fuels environmental breakdown. At the same time, social cohesion – the likelihood of people participating in society through things such as neighbourhood associations, political parties, volunteering and clubs – is lower where inequality is worse.
