The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

by Richard Wilkinson

  Data from the 1980s and 1990s show that about 36 per cent of children whose parents were in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution end up in that same bottom fifth themselves as adults, and among children whose parents were in the top fifth for wealth, 36 per cent of them can be found in the same top fifth.272 Those at the top can maintain their wealth and status, those at the bottom find it difficult to climb up the income ladder, but there is more flexibility in the middle. Inter-generational social mobility has also been falling in Britain over the time period that income differences have widened.271

  Figure 12.2 Social mobility in the USA increased to 1980 and then decreased.272

  A second observation that supports our belief that greater income inequality reduces social mobility comes from data on spending on education. Education is generally thought of as the main engine of social mobility in modern democracies – people with more education earn more and have higher social status. We saw in Chapter 8 how inequality affects educational achievements and aspirations, but it’s worth noting that, among the eight countries for which we have information about social mobility, public expenditure on education (elementary/primary and high/secondary schools) is strongly linked to the degree of income equality. In Norway, the most equal of the eight, almost all (97.8 per cent) spending on school education is public expenditure.273 In contrast, in the USA, the least equal of this group of countries, only about two-thirds (68.2 per cent) of the spending on school education is public money. This is likely to have a substantial impact on social differences in access to higher education.

  MOVING UPWARDS, MOVING OUT

  A third type of evidence that may confirm the correlation between income inequality and social mobility is the way in which greater social distances become translated into greater geographical segregation between rich and poor in more unequal societies.

  As inequality has increased since the 1970s in the USA, so too has the geographical segregation of rich and poor.274 Political economist Paul Jargowsky has analysed data from the 1970, 1980 and 1990 US Census and shown that the residential concentration of poverty increased over that period.275–276 Neighbourhood concentration of poverty is a measure that tells us what proportion of poor people in a city live in high-poverty areas. Jargowsky estimates that in 1970 about one in four poor blacks lived in high-poverty neighbourhoods, but by 1990 that proportion had risen to one in three. Among whites, poverty concentration doubled during the two decades, while income differences were widening. When poverty concentration is high, poor people are not only coping with their own poverty but also the consequences of the poverty of their neighbours. Between the 1990 and the 2000 census, Jargowsky reports a decline in poverty concentration, particularly for black Americans in the inner cities, which goes along with the improvements in the relative position of the very poorest Americans which we described at the end of Chapter 10.277 Even as poverty concentration has declined in the inner city, though, it has grown in the inner ring of suburbs and, with the recent economic downturn in America, Jargowsky warns that the gains of the 1990s may have already been reversed.

  A similar pattern of segregation by poverty and wealth during a period of increasing income differences has been taking place in the UK.278 The rich are willing to pay to live separately from the poor,279 and residential segregation along economic lines increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s.280 The image of the ‘sink estate’ provokes just as clear a picture of a deprived underclass as does the image of the ghetto and the barrio in the USA.

  Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are clear that increased income inequality is responsible for increasing the segregation of rich and poor.281–283 The concentration of poor people in poor areas increases all kinds of stress, deprivation and difficulty – from increased commuting times for those who have to leave deprived communities to find work elsewhere, to increased risk of traffic accidents, worse schools, poor levels of services, exposure to gang violence, pollution and so on. Sociologist William Julius Wilson, in his classic study of inner-city poverty, refers to poor people in poor neighbourhoods as the ‘truly disadvantaged’.225 Two studies from the USA have shown that residential economic segregation increases people’s risk of dying, and one showed that more unequal cities were also more economically segregated.284–285 These processes will of course feed back into further reductions in social mobility.

  MATTERS OF TASTE – AND CULTURE

  So social mobility is lower and geographical segregation greater in more unequal societies. It is as if greater inequality makes the social structure of society more rigid and movement up and down the social ladder more difficult.

  The work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also helps us to understand how social mobility becomes more limited within more hierarchical societies.286 He describes how material differences between people, the amount of money and resources they have, become overlaid with cultural markers of social difference, which become matters of snobbery and prejudice. We all use matters of taste as marks of distinction and social class – we judge people by their accent, clothing, language, choice of reading matter, the television programmes they watch, the food they eat, the sports they play, the music they prefer, and their appreciation – or lack of it – of art.

  Middle-class and upper-class people have the right accents, know how to behave in ‘polite society’, know that education can enhance their advantages. They pass all of this on to their children, so that they in turn will succeed in school and work, make good marriages, find high-paying jobs, etc. This is how elites become established and maintain their elite status.

  People can use markers of distinction and class, their ‘good taste’, to maintain their position, but throughout the social hierarchy people also use discrimination and downward prejudice to prevent those below them from improving their status. Despite the modern ideology of equality of opportunity, these matters of taste and class still keep people in their place – stopping them from believing they can better their position and sapping their confidence if they try. The experiments on stereotype threat described in Chapter 8 show how strong the effects on performance can be. Bourdieu calls the actions by which the elite maintain their distinction symbolic violence; we might just as easily call them discrimination and snobbery. Although racial prejudice is widely condemned, class prejudice is, despite the similarities, rarely mentioned.

  These social systems of taste, which define what is highbrow and cultured, and what is lowbrow or popular, constantly shift in content but are always with us. The examples that Bourdieu collected in the 1960s seem very dated now, but illustrate the point. He found that different social class groups preferred different types of music; the lower social class groups preferred the catchy tune of the ‘Blue Danube’, while the upper classes expressed a preference for the more ‘difficult’ ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’. The upper classes preferred abstract art and experimental novels, while the lower classes liked representational pictures and a good plot. But if everybody starts to enjoy Bach and Picasso and James Joyce, then upper-class taste will shift to appreciate something new – elitism is maintained by shifting the boundaries. What Bourdieu is describing is an ‘economy of cultural goods’, and inequalities in that economy affect people almost as profoundly as inequalities in income.

  In her book, Watching the English, anthropologist Kate Fox describes the social class markers of the English – in conversation, homes, cars, clothes, food and more.287 Joseph Epstein does the same for the USA in Snobbery: The American Version.288 Both books are amusing, as well as erudite, and it’s difficult not to laugh at our own pretensions and the poor taste of others.

  In the UK, for example, you can tell if someone is working class, middle class or upper class by whether they call their evening meal ‘tea’, ‘dinner’ or ‘supper’. By whether they call their mother ‘mam’, ‘mum’ or ‘mummy’, by whether they go out to a ‘do’, a ‘function’ or a ‘party’, and so on.

  Snobbery, says Epstein, is ‘sit
ting in your BMW 740i and feeling quietly, assuredly better than the poor vulgarian . . . who pulls up next to you at the stoplight in his garish Cadillac. It is the calm pleasure with which you greet the news that the son of the woman you have just been introduced to is majoring in photojournalism at Arizona State University while your own daughter is studying art history at Harvard . . .’ But snobbishness and taste turn out to be a zero-sum game. Epstein goes on to point out that another day, at another stoplight, a Bentley will pull up next to your pathetic BMW, and you may be introduced to a woman whose son is studying classics at Oxford.

  The ways in which class and taste and snobbery work to constrain people’s opportunities and wellbeing are, in reality, painful and pervasive. They are forms of discrimination and social exclusion. In their 1972 book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb described the psychological damage done to working-class men in Boston, who had come to view their failures to get on in the world as a result of their own inadequacies, resulting in feelings of hostility, resentment and shame.289 More recently, sociologist Simon Charlesworth, in an interview with a working-class man in Rotherham, in the English Midlands, is told how ashamed the man feels encountering a middle-class woman.290 Even without anything being said between them, he is immediately filled with a sense of his inferiority, becomes self-conscious and eventually hostile and angry:

  I went in to the social [Social Security Office] the other day . . . there were chairs and a space next to this stuck-up cow, you know, slim, attractive, middle class, and I didn’t want to sit with her, you feel you shouldn’t . . . I became all conscious, of my weight, I felt overweight, I start sweating, I start bungling, shuffling, I just thought ‘no, I’m not going to sit there, I don’t want to put her out’, I don’t want to feel that she’s put out, you don’t want to bother them . . . you know you insult them . . . the way they look at you like they’re disgusted . . . they look at you like you’re invading their area . . . you know, straight away . . . you feel ‘I shouldn’t be there’ . . . it makes you not want to go out. What it is, it’s a form of violence . . . right, it’s like a barrier saying ‘listen low-life, don’t even [voice rises with pain and anger] come near me! . . . ‘What the fuck are you doing in my space . . . We pay to get away from scum like you . . . It fucking stresses you, you get exhausted . . . It’s everywhere . . . I mean, I clocked her [looked at her] like they clock us, right, . . . and I thought ‘fuck me, I ain’t even sitting there’. She would be uncomfortable, and it’ll embarrass me, you know, [voice rises in anger/pain.] . . . Just sitting there, you know what I’m trying to say? . . . It’s like a common understanding, you know how they feel, you feel it, I’m telling you . . . They are fuck all, they’ve got nothing, but it’s that air about them you know, they’ve got the right body, the clothes and everything, the confidence, the attitude, know what I mean. . . . We [sadly, voice drops] ain’t got it, we can’t have it. We walk in like we’ve been beaten, dragging our feet when we’re walking in . . . you feel like you want to hide . . .

  THE BICYCLING REACTION

  Bigger differences in material wealth make status differences more important, and in more unequal societies the weight of downward prejudice is bound to be heavier; there is more social distance between the ‘haves’ at the very top and the ‘have-nots’ at the bottom. In effect, greater inequality increases downward social prejudices. We maintain social status by showing superiority to those below. Those deprived of status try to regain it by taking it out on more vulnerable people below them. Two lines of doggerel capture these processes. The English say ‘The captain kicks the cabin boy and the cabin boy kicks the cat’, describing the downward flow of aggression and resentment, while a line from an American rhyme famously describes Boston as the place, ‘where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God’, invoking the snobbery and social climbing of people looking up to those above them.

  When people react to a provocation from someone with higher status by redirecting their aggression on to someone of lower status, psychologists label it displaced aggression.291 Examples include: the man who is berated by his boss and comes home and shouts at his wife and children; the higher degree of aggression in workplaces where supervisors treat workers unfairly;292 the ways in which people in deprived communities react to an influx of foreign immigrants; 293–294 and the ways in which prisoners who are bullied turn on others below them – particularly sex offenders – in the prison hierarchy.295

  In his book, The Hot House, which describes life inside a high-security prison in the US, Pete Earley tells a story about a man in prison with a life sentence for murder.296, pp. 74–5 Bowles had been incarcerated for the first time at the age of 15 when he was sent to a juvenile reformatory. The day he arrived, an older, bigger boy came up to him:

  ‘Hey, what size shoes do you wear?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Don’t know’ said Bowles ‘Let me see one of ’em will ya?’ the boy asked politely.

  Bowles sat down on the floor and removed a shoe. The older boy took off one of his own shoes and put on Bowles’s.

  ‘How ’bout letting me see the other one?’

  ‘I took off my other shoe and handed it to him,’ Bowles remembered, ‘and he puts it on and ties it and then walks over to this table and every boy in the place starts laughing at me.

  That’s when I realized I am the butt of the joke.’

  Bowles grabbed a pool cue and attacked the boy, for which he received a week of hard labour. When a new boy arrived at the reformatory the following week, ‘he too was confronted by a boy who demanded his shoes. Only this time it was Bowles who was taking advantage of the new kid. “It was my turn to dish it out,” he recalled. “I had earned that right.”’

  In the same book, Earley tells almost exactly the same story again, only this time he describes a man’s reaction to being sexually assaulted and sodomized on his first night in a county jail at the age of 16. Six years later, arrested in another town, he is put in a jail cell with a ‘kid, probably seventeen or so, and you know what I did? I fucked him.’296, pp. 430–31

  Displaced aggression among non-human primates has been labelled ‘the bicycling reaction’. Primatologist Volker Summer explains that the image being conjured up is of someone on a racing bicycle, bowing to their superiors, while kicking down on those beneath. He was describing how animals living in strict social hierarchies appease dominant animals and attack inferior ones. Psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto have suggested that human group conflict and oppression, such as racism and sexism, stem from the way in which inequality gives rise to individual and institutional discrimination and the degree to which people are complicit or resistant to some social groups being dominant over others.297 In more unequal societies, more people are oriented towards dominance; in more egalitarian societies, more people are oriented towards inclusiveness and empathy.

  Our final piece of evidence that income inequality causes lower social mobility comes from research which helps to explain why stigmatized groups of people living in more unequal societies can feel more comfortable when separated from the people who look down on them. In a powerful illustration of how discrimination and prejudice damage people’s wellbeing, research shows that the health of ethnic minority groups who live in areas with more people like themselves is sometimes better than that of their more affluent counterparts who live in areas with more of the dominant ethnic group.298 This is called a ‘group density’ effect, and was first shown in relation to mental illness. Studies in London, for example, have shown a higher incidence of schizophrenia among ethnic minorities living in neighbourhoods with fewer people like themselves,299 and the same has been shown for suicide300 and self-harm.301 More recently, studies in the United States have demonstrated the same effects for heart disease302–303 and low birthweight.304–308 Generally, living in a poorer area is associated with worse health. Members of ethnic minorities who live in areas where there are few like
themselves tend to be more affluent, and to live in better neighbourhoods, than those who live in areas with a higher concentration. So to find that these more ethnically isolated individuals are sometimes less healthy is surprising. The probable explanation is that, through the eyes of the majority community, they become more aware of belonging to a low-status minority group and perhaps encounter more frequent prejudice and discrimination and have less support. That the psychological effects of stigma are sometimes strong enough to override the health benefits of material advantage tells us a lot about the power of inequality and brings us back to the importance of social status, social support and friendship, and the influence of social anxiety and stigma discussed in Chapter 3.

  Bigger income differences seem to solidify the social structure and decrease the chances of upward mobility. Where there are greater inequalities of outcome, equal opportunity is a significantly more distant prospect.

  PART THREE

  A Better Society

  13

  Dysfunctional societies

  No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

  John Donne, Meditation XVII

  The last nine chapters have shown, among the rich developed countries and among the fifty states of the United States, that most of the important health and social problems of the rich world are more common in more unequal societies. In both settings the relationships are too strong to be dismissed as chance findings. The importance of these relationships can scarcely be overestimated. First, the differences between more and less equal societies are large – problems are anything from three times to ten times as common in the more unequal societies. Second, these differences are not differences between high- and low-risk groups within populations which might apply only to a small proportion of the population, or just to the poor. Rather, they are differences between the prevalence of different problems which apply to whole populations.