The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  One recent study compared ‘verbal cognition’ at age five for three groups of children, from the UK, Australia and Canada.331 At age five, just as at age fifteen in the PISA data, steep social gradients were present in all three countries in a pattern consistent with the level of income inequality in the country. Children from families with low parental education or low income fell further behind their peers in the UK, the most unequal country of the three. Other researchers have compared inequalities in literacy in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and have shown that gaps were larger in the two most unequal countries – the UK and USA.332 Both countries have low average educational performance right across the social gradient, but it is standards among the least well-off which are most seriously affected.

  In a 2012 report mentioned earlier in this chapter, the OECD presented findings on which countries seem to promote ‘resilience’ in children and families, in other words the ability of children to achieve better educational outcomes than would be expected given their family socio-economic position.299 The UK performs worse than average in the OECD on the proportion of disadvantaged students who are resilient to their socio-economic background. Conversely, countries with less economic inequality, such as Canada, Finland and Japan, perform well overall and their children do well regardless of their socio-economic background. In China more than 70 per cent of poor children are educationally resilient in this way, whereas in the UK less than a quarter of poor children manage to exceed expectations based on family background.

  The USA and UK are also falling behind other countries in further education outcomes. As well as considering PISA scores, a UNICEF report looked at the proportion of children aged between fifteen and nineteen who had left full-time education and who were classed as Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) in 2009/2010. Young people in the USA and UK are NEET more often than young people in many other rich countries, ranking twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh out of thirty-three countries, respectively.333

  Among many other factors linking inequality to poor educational performance, two stand out. Being bullied is an experience singularly corrosive to the self-esteem and educational performance of those who suffer it. In Chapter 5, we described the study by Canadian psychologist Frank Elgar and his colleagues, who found that inequality was significantly related to large differences in the frequency both of bullying others and of being a victim of bullying.233 We have also found that the proportion of children who say their peers are not kind and helpful is much higher in more unequal rich countries.189 The relationship between inequality and bullying is much like that between inequality and homicide, presumably because children are immersed in the same social milieu of status differentiation and interpersonal violence as adults and are similarly affected.334 Juvenile homicides rates are, like adult homicide rates, correlated with income inequality.335

  Another factor contributing to the link between inequality and educational performance is the rate at which children from less well-off backgrounds drop out of high school before graduating. In The Spirit Level we showed a strong relationship among the fifty states of the USA between high school dropout rates and inequality.1

  The most fundamental effect of inequality on children’s physical and cognitive development can be seen in measures of child well-being. As we described in Chapter 4, UNICEF compiles an index specifically to measure child well-being in rich countries. The data bring together some forty different aspects of child well-being including, for example, whether children feel they can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, rates of child immunization, drinking, smoking and teenage birth rates. In a paper in the British Medical Journal we showed that the 2007 UNICEF index and most of its components were much more strongly related to income inequality than to measures of average income.189 Figure 4.3 (here) shows the same relationship using data from the 2013 UNICEF report,190 and we described how, using the twenty indicators that were measured in both reports, which included reading, mathematics and science literacy, participation in further education and the proportion of young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs), we were also able to compare changes in child well-being between the 2007 and 2013 reports.190 We found a statistically significant tendency for changes in a country’s income inequality between 2000 and 2009 to be mirrored in the changes in child well-being soon afterwards. Figure 6.6, using data from the 2016 UNICEF report, shows how consistent this relationship remains.

  Figure 6.6: Greater income inequality is associated with poorer performance on the 2016 UNICEF Index of Child Well-being in wealthy countries (Turkey, with very low child well-being and high inequality, not shown).336

  CLIMBING THE LADDER

  We now have a clearer understanding of where individual differences in ability come from and how children’s differing circumstances affect the subsequent development of their cognitive capacity. Income and status differences are, as we have seen, at the heart of these processes at the level of the individual, but bigger income differences also reduce educational outcomes across whole societies. We have seen something of the mechanisms behind these processes, how they affect the vast majority of the population, and why they damage those at the bottom most. The evidence presented in this chapter shows not only that it is mistaken to think that the social hierarchy is a reflection of innate differences in intelligence, but also that much the greater part of the differences in ability reflect rather than determine position in the hierarchy. In short, in any relation between ability and social position, the causality goes in the opposite direction from the view used to justify privilege.

  Perhaps the final proof lies in the strong tendency shown in Figure 6.7 for more unequal countries to have less social mobility; or, to put it another way, in the countries where income differences are larger, children are even further away from enjoying equal opportunities. Inequalities in outcome cannot easily be combined with equal opportunities. The data in Figure 6.7 show intergenerational income mobility – the income of parents when a child is born compared to the income of the child when it reaches thirty years of age. The correlation between the incomes of parents and their adult children shows the extent to which rich parents have children who grow up to be rich and poor parents have children who grow up to be poor. The USA and UK do particularly badly, and much has been written on the scale of their declining or stagnating social mobility over the past half century and the reasons behind it.337-341 The graph is a testament to the cumulative weight of disadvantage and inferior status bearing down on the opportunities and development of less well-off children.

  Figure 6.7: There is less social mobility in countries with bigger income differences.337

  INEQUALITY PENETRATES FAMILY LIFE

  We saw earlier that schools, instead of offering opportunities for poorer children to develop, may compound the damage already done to them by inequality. But how does inequality take root before these children have started their education and become integrated into society? How does societal inequality get so deep into family life that it affects children’s developing capabilities and attainment from their earliest life onwards? A key part of the answer is that inequality affects the quality of family life and relationships, thus hampering the capacity of parents and caregivers to provide an optimal environment for child development and well-being. Learning begins at birth (if not earlier), and the first few years of life are a particularly critical period for brain development. Essential for early learning is a stimulating social environment; babies and young children need to be talked to, loved and interacted with. They need opportunities to play and explore their world, and they need to be encouraged within safe limits, rather than restricted in their activities.

  In societies with higher levels of income inequality, a higher proportion of parents suffer from mental health problems, including depression and anxiety, and substance and alcohol misuse – all well-known risk factors for poor child development.59, 189 Even mild to moderate depression and anxi
ety can have a severe impact on family life. Children living in low-income families experience more family conflict and disruption, and are more likely to witness or experience violence, as well as to be living in more crowded, noisy and substandard housing.342 An American study found higher levels of child maltreatment in counties with higher levels of income inequality, even after adjusting for parents’ level of education, levels of welfare and benefits, child poverty rates and state-level variations in rates of maltreatment.247 Some families react to deprivation with more punitive and unresponsive parenting, even to the extent of becoming neglectful or abusive.343, 344 Income inevitably affects the quality of family life, the difficulties faced by families and their ability to deal with them.345 Showing the toll of inequality on marriage, another American study linked rising divorce rates to increases in income inequality in counties over time.346

  The effects of inequality cannot, however, be explained by family breakdown, as is sometimes asserted by politicians and media commentators. Although children raised in single-parent households in some of the more unequal developed countries, like the UK, are indeed at a disadvantage, we found no international association between the UNICEF measures of child well-being and the prevalence of single-parent households.1 In more equal developed countries, such as the Scandinavian countries, poverty among single parents is dramatically reduced by both generous universal and targeted provision of family support and services. And, as Professor Kathleen Kiernan and others have found, it is the poverty in which most single parents live, rather than single parenthood itself, which does the damage.292

  As we have seen, income inequality heightens the importance of status, and consequently of income and status competition. Consumption increasingly becomes a measure of personal worth and, consequently, people in more unequal societies work longer hours, and accumulate more household debt.199, 347 Lack of time for family life and the stress of debt that result were powerfully illustrated in the report (quoted in Chapter 4) on a qualitative UNICEF project looking at family life and child well-being in three countries with contrasting levels of inequality.192

  It is important to emphasize here that difficulties in family relationships and parenting are not, of course, confined to the less well-off. Within a large study of children born in 2000 and 2001, even mothers in the second from the top social class group are more likely to report feeling incompetent as parents or having poor relationships with their children, compared to those in the topmost group.1

  We saw in earlier chapters the evidence that inequality increases status anxiety among adults,57 reduces solidarity,39 and agreeableness,105 and leads to a greater tendency to ‘self-enhancement’, i.e., claiming you are better than others.112 We can expect that children will detect all of these and become aware of status differences in the wider society, and so – inevitably – become affected by the unequal context in which they grow up. The age at which children become consciously aware of class and status differences varies, but research has found that by the time they leave primary school, children are able to rank occupations hierarchically and place people into social classes by indicators such as clothing, houses and cars.348, 349

  PICKING UP THE PIECES?

  In November 2014, Professor Danny Dorling, from the University of Oxford, commented on income inequality and educational attainment in the Times Higher Education:

  Numeracy levels in … six wealthy countries … as assessed by the OECD, display an almost perfect inverse relationship to the countries’ levels of economic inequality. So in places where the rich take far more, young people find it harder to understand why there can be such large differences in income between the median and the mean.350

  The point is both ironic and rather poignant. To understand economic inequality – inequality of income and/or wealth – requires an understanding of the statistics of distribution. In nations where inequality is more of a problem, fewer young people will understand how it is measured.

  Among health researchers, there is a popular analogy used to teach students about different approaches to population health. Students are asked to imagine a cliff that people keep falling off. If there is an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the cliff, a person who falls can be quickly taken to hospital for treatment, but this is a costly business and many lives will still be lost. Alternatively, we can also imagine that a safety net is provided halfway down the cliff so that most people are less injured than they would otherwise have been. This is analogous to the use of medicines to manage chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes – known in medical care as secondary prevention. Primary prevention is like putting a barrier at the top of the cliff to stop people falling down in the first place, for example reducing pulmonary disease by getting people to stop smoking and to take up exercise. But none of these strategies stop people running towards the cliff edge in the first place. If we could stop people doing that, none of the later, partially effective preventive and treatment strategies would be needed.

  The educational parallel to the ambulance and the cliff analogy is that educational policies and interventions cannot themselves address the issues of poverty and inequality that are the root causes of poor educational performance. Primary prevention consists of early childhood interventions, like Sure Start in the UK and Head Start in the USA. Secondary prevention consists of policies like the pupil premium in the UK (extra funding given to schools with more pupils from poor backgrounds), and intensive remedial education interventions might be used to help children who are failing in the system. These strategies and programmes are expensive and never more than partially effective, but, unless the root causes of educational inequality are addressed, they will continue to be necessary.

  While the idea that poverty negatively affects an individual child’s ability to learn and to perform well in school is relatively uncontroversial,307 the impact of societal inequality is less well known, although it too reduces average educational attainment and increases inequality of educational outcomes. There are low levels of absolute poverty in rich countries, although some children still lack sufficient nutritious food or adequate shelter. (In some countries, including the UK, these numbers are increasing.) Relative poverty, in contrast, is widespread.351 According to government statistics, in the UK in 2015/16, 4 million children, or 30 per cent, were living in relative poverty (on less than 60 per cent of the median household income), and in some areas the proportion rose to 50–70 per cent.352 Two-thirds of these children lived in a family where at least one adult was working. As a higher proportion of single parents were employed and benefits paid to low-income families increased, child poverty fell dramatically between 1998 and 2012. But since then absolute and relative poverty have risen. It is projected that 4.7 million children will be living in relative poverty by 2020.353 The USA measures poverty against a threshold set by the Federal government, which is intended to provide an absolute standard. When established in 1964 it was equal to about half the US median income, but is now around 30 per cent.354 Nevertheless, more than 20 per cent of Americans report that there are times when they cannot afford food for themselves or their family, and 20 per cent of children live below that Federal poverty line.355 Measures of relative poverty suggest that about 30 per cent of all American children live in relative poverty.

  Low rates of relative poverty are accepted internationally as a benchmark of well-being. In 2015, the UK government sought to pass new legislation relieving itself from the obligation to report on family income as a measure of child poverty, and to substitute measures of worklessness, levels of educational attainment, family breakdown, debt, and drug and alcohol dependency. It was decried at the time as an attempt to redefine the consequences of poverty as the causes of it, and after a battle with the House of Lords, the government retreated and agreed to continue to report measures of material deprivation. Had the government succeeded in changing the definition of poverty, it would have made it impossible to say whether its policies were increasing
or decreasing child poverty.

  It might seem sensible to assume that spending more money on education would help overcome the disadvantages of poverty, deprivation and inequality. To test this, researchers examined national income, income inequality and government spending on education in relation to educational achievement among adolescents.356 They used OECD data on almost 120,000 students from over 5,000 schools in 24 countries. After controlling for individual pupil and school differences, they found that higher Gross Domestic Product per person – a measure of average income and living standards – had only a small beneficial effect on educational achievement. In contrast, income inequality turned out to have a large and damaging effect on literacy among these adolescents, while spending specifically on education had no effect. Neither economic growth nor the allocation of the proceeds of growth to public education appear to be panaceas for poor educational outcomes.

  A case study that exemplifies how countries can transform and improve education and children’s life chances is offered by Finland. It has a wholly non-selective school system from early childhood to age sixteen, and pupils score consistently highly on the international PISA tests.357 Finland made a wholesale reform of its educational system about forty years ago and moved to an entirely comprehensive school system. It also improved the quality of teacher training and raised the status of the teaching profession: all teachers now have a Master’s degree and a great deal of autonomy in what and how they teach within the framework of the national curriculum. Children start school at a later age than in many other countries, are subject to less standardized testing, and have more break-time during the school day. After rapid improvement in its education attainment, Finland topped the PISA league tables in 2000, 2003 and 2006, came third in 2009 and, although it moved down the rankings slightly in 2012, it has remained the best-performing country in Europe. It also has a higher proportion of resilient students (who do better than expected given their family background) than any other European country.