This response to the chaos in New Orleans led to widespread criticism and condemnation within the US. Many alleged that the lack of trust between law enforcement and military forces on the one hand and the mostly poor, black citizens of New Orleans on the other, reflected deeper issues of race and class. During a widely televised benefit concert for victims of the hurricane, musician Kanye West, burst out: ‘I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for food.” You see a black family, it says, “They’re looting.”’ As troops were mobilized to go into the city, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said: ‘They have M16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.’
The lack of trust on display during the rescue efforts in New Orleans was also roundly condemned internationally. Countries around the world offered aid and assistance, while their news coverage was filled with criticism. We can contrast the way in which troops in New Orleans seemed to be used primarily to control the population, with the rapid deployment of unarmed soldiers in rescue and relief missions in China after the devastating earthquake of 2008, a response widely applauded by the international community.
THE EQUALITY OF CONDITIONS
A very different vision of America is offered by one of its earliest observers. Alexis de Tocqueville travelled throughout the United States in 1831.23 He met presidents and ex-presidents, mayors, senators and judges, as well as ordinary citizens, and everywhere he went he was impressed by the ‘equality of conditions’ (p. 11), ‘the blending of social ranks and the abolition of privileges’ – the way that society was ‘one single mass’ (p. 725) (at least for whites). He wrote that ‘Americans of all ages, conditions, and all dispositions constantly unite together’ (p. 596), that ‘strangers readily congregate in the same places and find neither danger nor advantage in telling each other freely what they think’, their manner being ‘natural, open and unreserved’ (p. 656). And de Tocqueville points out the ways in which Americans support one another in times of trouble:
Should some unforeseen accident occur on the public highway, people run from all sides to help the victim; should some family fall foul of an unexpected disaster, a thousand strangers willingly open their purses . . . (p. 661)
De Tocqueville believed that the equality of conditions he observed had helped to develop and maintain trust among Americans.
WHAT’S TRUST GOT TO DO WITH IT?
But does inequality corrode trust and divide people – government from citizens, rich from poor, minority from majority? This chapter shows that the quality of social relations deteriorates in less equal societies.
Inequality, not surprisingly, is a powerful social divider, perhaps because we all tend to use differences in living standards as markers of status differences. We tend to choose our friends from among our near equals and have little to do with those much richer or much poorer. And when we have less to do with other kinds of people, it’s harder for us to trust them. Our position in the social hierarchy affects who we see as part of the in-group and who as out-group – us and them – so affecting our ability to identify with and empathize with other people. Later in the book, we’ll show that inequality not only has an impact on how much we look down on others because they have less than we do, but also affects other kinds of discrimination, such as racism and sexism, with attitudes sometimes justified by statements like ‘they just don’t live like us’.
De Tocqueville understood this point. A lifelong opponent of slavery, he wrote about the exclusion of both African-Americans and Native Americans from the liberty and equality enjoyed by other Americans.23 Slavery, he thought, could only be maintained because African-Americans were viewed as ‘other’, so much so that ‘the
European is to other races what man himself is to the animals’ (p. 371). Empathy is only felt for those we view as equals, ‘the same feeling for one another does not exist between the different classes’ (p. 650). Prejudice, thought de Tocqueville, was ‘an imaginary inequality’ which followed the ‘real inequality produced by wealth and the law’ (p. 400).
Early socialists and others believed that material inequality was an obstacle to a wider human harmony, to a universal human brotherhood, sisterhood or comradeship. The data we present in this chapter suggest that this intuition was sound: inequality is divisive, and even small differences seem to make an important difference.
INCOME INEQUALITY AND TRUST
Figures 4.1 and 4.2 show that levels of trust between members of the public are lower in countries and states where income differences are larger. These relationships are strong enough that we can be confident that they are not due to chance. The international data on trust in Figure 4.1 come from the European and World Values Survey, a study designed to allow international comparisons of values and norms.5 In each country, random samples of the population were asked whether or not they agreed with the statement: ‘Most people can be trusted.’ The differences between countries are large. People trust each other most in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands; Sweden has the highest levels of trust, with 66 per cent of people feeling that they can trust others. The lowest level of trust is seen in Portugal, where only 10 per cent of the population believe that others can be trusted. So just within these rich, market democracies, there are more than sixfold differences in levels of trust, and, as the graph shows, high levels of trust are linked to low levels of inequality.
Figure 4.1 The percentage of people agreeing that ‘most people can be trusted’ is higher in more equal countries.
Figure 4.2 In more equal states more people agree that ‘most people can be trusted’. (Data available for only forty-one US states.)
The data on trust within the USA, shown in Figure 4.2, are taken from the federal government’s General Social Survey, which has been monitoring social change in America for more than a quarter of a century.24 In this survey, just as in the international surveys, people are asked whether or not they agree that most people can be trusted. Within the USA, there are fourfold differences in trust between states. North Dakota has a level of trust similar to that of Sweden – 67 per cent feel they can trust other people – whereas in Mississippi only 17 per cent of the population believe that people can be trusted. Just as with the international data, low levels of trust among the United States are related to high inequality.
The important message in these graphs of trust and inequality is that they indicate how different life must feel to people living in these different societies. Imagine living somewhere where 90 per cent of the population mistrusts one another and what that must mean for the quality of everyday life – the interactions between people at work, on the street, in shops, in schools. In Norway it is not unusual to see cafés with tables and chairs on the pavement and blankets left out for people to use if they feel chilly while having a coffee. Nobody worries about customers or passers-by stealing the blankets. Many people feel nostalgic for time past, when they could leave their doors unlocked, and trusted that a lost wallet would be handed in. Of all large US cities, New Orleans is one of the most unequal. This was the background to the tensions and mistrust in the scenes of chaos after Hurricane Katrina that we described above.
CHICKEN OR EGG?
In the USA, trust has fallen from a high of 60 per cent in 1960, to a low of less than 40 per cent by 2004.24 But does inequality create low levels of trust, or does mistrust create inequality? Which comes first? Political scientist Robert Putnam of Harvard University, in his book Bowling Alone, shows how inequality is related to ‘social capital’, by which he means the sum total of people’s involvement in community life.25 He says:
Community and equality are mutually reinforcing . . . Social capital and economic equality 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 co
nnectedness 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 . . . The timing of the two trends is striking: Sometime around 1965–70 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically. (p. 359)
In another article, Putnam says:
the causal arrows are likely to run in both directions, with citizens in high social capital states likely to do more to reduce inequalities, and inequalities themselves likely to be socially divisive.26
Taking a more definite stance in his book, The Moral Foundations of Trust, Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, believes that it is inequality that affects trust, not the other way round.27 If we live in societies with more social capital, then we know more people as friends and neighbours and that might increase our trust of people we know, people we feel are like us. But Uslaner points out that the kind of trust that is being measured in surveys such as the European and World Values Survey is trust of strangers, of people we don’t know, people who are often not like us. Using a wealth of data from different sources, he shows that people who trust others are optimists, with a strong sense of control over their lives. The kind of parenting that people receive also affects their trust of other people.
In a study with his colleague Bo Rothstein, Uslaner shows, using a statistical test for causality, that inequality affects trust, but that there is ‘no direct effect of trust on inequality; rather, the causal direction starts with inequality’.28, p. 45 Uslaner says that ‘trust cannot thrive in an unequal world’ and that income inequality is the ‘prime mover’ of trust, with a stronger impact on trust than rates of unemployment, inflation or economic growth.27 It is not average levels of economic wellbeing that create trust, but economic equality. Uslaner’s graph showing that trust has declined in the USA during a
Figure 4.3 As inequality increased, so trust declined.27, p. 187
period in which inequality rapidly increased, is shown in Figure 4.3. The numbers on the graph show for each year (1960–98) the relation between the level of trust and inequality in that year.
Changes in inequality and trust go together over the years. With greater inequality, people are less caring of one another, there is less mutuality in relationships, people have to fend for themselves and get what they can – so, inevitably, there is less trust. Mistrust and inequality reinforce each other. As de Tocqueville pointed out, we are less likely to empathize with those not seen as equals; material differences serve to divide us socially.
TRUST MATTERS
Both Putnam and Uslaner make the point that trust leads to cooperation. Uslaner shows that, in the USA, people who trust others are more likely to donate time and money to helping other people. ‘Trusters’ also tend to believe in a common culture, that America is held together by shared values, that everybody should be treated with respect and tolerance. They are also supportive of the legal order.
Trust affects the wellbeing of individuals, as well as the wellbeing of civic society. High levels of trust mean that people feel secure, they have less to worry about, they see others as co-operative rather than competitive. A number of convincing studies in the USA have linked trust to health – people with high levels of trust live longer.29 In fact, people who trust others benefit from living in communities with generally high levels of trust, whereas people who are less trusting of others fare worse in such neighbourhoods.30
Trust, or lack of it, meant the difference between life and death for some people caught up in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Trust was also crucial for survival in the Chicago heatwave of 1995. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, in his book about the heatwave,31 showed how poor African-Americans, living in areas with low levels of trust and high levels of crime, were too frightened to open their windows or doors, or leave their homes to go to local cooling centres established by the city authorities. Neighbours didn’t check on neighbours, and hundreds of elderly and vulnerable people died. In equally poor Hispanic neighbourhoods, characterized by high levels of trust and active community life, the risk of death was much lower.
RAIDERS AND MAVERICKS
Perhaps another marker of corroded social relations and lack of trust among people was the rapid rise in the popularity of the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) through the 1980s and 1990s. These vehicles are known in the UK by the derogatory term ‘Chelsea tractors’ – Chelsea being a rich area of London, the name draws attention to the silliness of driving rugged off-road vehicles in busy urban areas. But the vehicles themselves have names that evoke images of hunters and outdoorsmen – Outlander, Pathfinder, Cherokee, Wrangler, etc. Others evoke an even tougher image, of soldiers and warriors, with names like Trooper, Defender, Shogun, Raider and Crossfire. These are vehicles for the ‘urban jungle’, not the real thing.
Not only did the popularity of SUVs suggest a preoccupation with looking tough, it also reflected growing mistrust, and the need to feel safe from others. Josh Lauer, in his paper, ‘Driven to extremes’, asked why military ruggedness became prized above speed or sleekness, and what the rise of the SUV said about American society.32 He concluded that the trend reflected American attitudes towards crime and violence, an admiration for rugged individualism and the importance of shutting oneself off from contact with others – mistrust. These are not large vehicles born from a co-operative public-spiritedness and a desire to give lifts to hitch-hikers – hitch-hiking started to decline just as inequality started to rise in the 1970s. As one anthropologist has observed, people attempt to shield themselves from the threats of a harsh and untrusting society ‘by riding in SUVs, which look armoured, and by trying to appear as intimidating as possible to potential attackers’.33 Pollster Michael Adams, writing about the contrasting values of the USA and Canada, pointed out that minivans outsell SUVs in Canada by two to one – the ratio is reversed in America (and Canada is of course more equal than America).34 Accompanying the rise in SUVs were other signs of Americans’ increasing uneasiness and fear of one another: growing numbers of gated communities,35 and increasing sales of home security systems.32 In more recent years, due to the steeply rising cost of filling their fuel tanks, sales of SUVs have declined, but people still want that rugged image – sales of smaller, tough-looking ‘cross-over’ vehicles continue to rise.
WOMEN’S STATUS
In several respects, more unequal societies seem more masculine, at least in terms of the stereotypes. When we put this to the test, we found that just as levels of trust and social relations are affected by inequality, so too is the status of women.
In the USA, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research produces measures of the status of women. Using these measures, researchers at Harvard University showed that women’s status was linked to state-level income inequality.36 Three of the measures are: women’s political participation, women’s employment and earnings, and women’s social and economic autonomy. When we combine these measures for each US state and relate them to state levels of income inequality, we also find that women’s status is significantly worse in more unequal states, although this is not a particularly strong relationship (Figure 4.4). The fairly wide scatter of points around the line on the graph shows that factors besides inequality affect women’s status. Nevertheless, there is a tendency that cannot be put down to chance, for fewer women to vote or hold political office, for women to earn less, and fewer women to complete college degrees in more unequal states.
Figure 4.4 Women’s status and inequality in US states.
Internationally we find the same thing, and we show this relationship in Figure 4.5. Combining measures of the percentage of women in the legislature, the male–female income gap, and the percentage of women completing higher education to make an index of women’s status, we find that more equal countries do significantly better.
Japan is conspicuous among the most eq
ual countries in that women’s status is lower than we would expect given its level of inequality; Italy also has worse women’s status than expected, and Sweden does better. As with the scattering of points on the American graph above, this shows that other factors are also influencing
Figure 4.5 Women’s status and inequality in rich countries.
women’s status. In both Japan and Italy women have traditionally had lower status than men, whereas Sweden has a long tradition of women’s rights and empowerment. But again, the link between income inequality and women’s status cannot be explained by chance alone, and there is a tendency for women’s status to be better in more equal countries.
Epidemiologists have found that in US states where women’s status is higher, both men and women have lower death rates,36 and women’s status seems to matter for all women, whether rich or poor.37
TRUST BEYOND BORDERS
Not surprisingly, just as individuals who trust other people are more likely to give to charity, more equal countries are also more generous to poorer countries. The United Nations’ target for spending on foreign development aid is 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income.
Figure 4.6 Spending on foreign aid and inequality in rich countries.
Only Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands meet that target – indeed, they are generous beyond what the United Nations expects – and, as we show in Figure 4.6 using data from the OECD,38 more unequal countries spend significantly lower percentages of their income on foreign aid. Japan and the UK might be seen as outliers on this graph. Perhaps Japan’s lower than expected spending on aid reflects its withdrawal from the international stage following the Second World War, and the UK’s higher than expected spending reflects historical, colonial ties to many developing countries.
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger Page 6