The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS

  Life on our planet is changing more rapidly than ever before, and we are on the verge of one of the great transitions in human history. There are at least five major elements to this. The first, as we have seen, is the uncoupling of well-being from economic growth. Second is the environmental crisis, which means that if we fail to change the way we fuel our economies and way of life we face disaster. ‘Business as usual’ is not an option. Third is the process of ‘globalization’, which, rather than being an entirely modern process, is really part of the long-term transition: from the self-sufficiency of peasant farmers producing for their own consumption, to a system of international interdependence in which we rely on, and contribute to, a worldwide network of production and consumption aided by electronic communication. This process, linking all humanity into one vast system, looks rather like the formation of a global organism analogous to the transition from single-celled organisms to the formation of multicellular organisms.400 Linked to that, the fourth component is the unprecedented and accelerating scale of migration and mixing. Humans originally emerged from Africa and, as we spread across the world, we diversified both culturally and biologically. We are now coming together again. Through international travel, migration and intermarriage, what we are now seeing amounts to nothing less than the reunification of the human race. The process has caused friction, and rapid migrations are often resisted, but as a step in human development, the reunification of humanity is both inspiring and, in the long term, completely unstoppable. Fifth and last, the pace of technological change continues to accelerate. The seemingly endless innovations coming from areas such as electronics, artificial intelligence, bioengineering and nanotechnology are reconfiguring the landscape on which our way of life is built. Used wisely, technical innovation should make us more adaptable and give us more choice in the way our societies develop and how we move towards sustainability.

  As the human way of life has developed – from foraging and hunting, through agriculture to industrialization – the foundations of social organization have shifted under us. We saw in Chapter 5 that the egalitarianism of early human societies was based substantially on co-operative hunting. Hunting was not only a co-operative activity, in which individual contributions could not be separately assessed, but, when an animal was killed, sharing made sense because there was more meat available than one family could eat. With the development of agriculture, however, that basis for egalitarianism was lost. Production became individualized: people grew food by their own efforts for their own family on their own patches of land. Just as hunting is inherently egalitarian, so pre-industrial agriculture is individualistic and potentially unequal.

  The complexity of modern industrial production has, however, returned us to an inherently interdependent, and so potentially co-operative, way of life. We now make almost nothing for our own use but work instead in highly co-ordinated groups to produce goods and services almost entirely for the benefit of others. When such highly integrated and co-ordinated behaviour is essential, building it on systematic inequality looks like an irrational hangover from a past era.

  The periods of scarcity common to pre-industrial agricultural societies were also conducive to inequality. Hierarchies among animals and humans alike are, like pecking orders, about privileged access to scarce resources; and they only make much sense if there is – genuinely – not enough for everyone. Agricultural societies have always suffered at least occasional years of hunger when harvests are poor. But an important precondition for the remarkable equality among hunter-gatherers was, as a great deal of anthropological evidence suggests, that they were remarkably well-off.401-403 These societies have been dubbed ‘the original affluent societies’, primarily because our forebears had few needs and those they had could be easily satisfied. Far from a constant struggle to survive, anthropological studies of hunters and gatherers show that people in these societies preferred leisure to higher levels of consumption and could commonly get all the food they needed in just two to four hours a day.404 They knew of a very large number of edible species of animals and plants which could provide a kind of emergency reserve, but most of the time they could choose to eat only their preferred species. Having little was not a matter of poverty, but of having few needs. Skeletal evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers were often as tall as people in modern societies. Declines in human height and health came with the beginnings of agriculture.405, 406 The deterioration has been attributed to nutritional diseases resulting from seasonal hunger, reliance on single crops deficient in essential nutrients, crop blights and harvest failures.

  Though agriculture is often perceived as a liberating discovery which replaced the uncertainties of foraging and increased production, it was in fact born of necessity. The reason why hunters and gatherers didn’t cultivate crops was not any lack of comprehension, but rather that they could acquire all the food they needed from what grew naturally, without having to engage in the back-breaking labour of seed collection, soil preparation, planting, weeding, harvesting and threshing. Agriculture only came about when population densities increased beyond the level at which people could subsist comfortably on what grew wild.403 They were pushed into it by force of circumstances.

  In Britain, the first industrial revolution was also born of necessity.403 Pressures on the land for food, for woollen clothing, firewood and animal fodder (the basis of horse transport) needed to support a growing population had intensified. With the industrial revolution the pressures began to be eased, with cotton imports, coal and canals, but it took almost a hundred years before there were clear signs of improvements in living standards. The result today is that living standards in rich countries have risen well beyond the point where poverty or a scarcity of necessities is unavoidable. Although inequality and recent austerity policies have driven a growing minority to homelessness, foodbanks or soup kitchens, the vast majority of people living in rich countries have heated homes, comfortable beds and plenty of food. The scarcities associated with conspicuous consumption and the desire for fashionable brands of goods are driven by status competition and intensified by inequality, as we saw in Chapter 4.

  By transforming us into an interdependent species and ending any necessary scarcity, modern economic development has recreated the two crucial conditions for equality. The co-operative nature of production and high living standards mean that current levels of inequality are now an anachronism. Taking the long view, history is on the side of egalitarians. Modern living standards mean that we no longer need to remain imprisoned within outmoded forms of society based on genuine scarcity and the necessity of guarding our consumption from the needs of others.

  As our societies are tossed about by changes which will, if left to themselves, threaten human survival, it becomes crucial to have a clear idea both of the conditions that need to be met to ensure human well-being and of the kind of society we should be moving towards.

  INEQUALITY AND SUSTAINABILITY

  There are powerful links between inequality, the threat to the environment, and the failure to achieve genuinely higher levels of well-being. Most obviously, greater inequality intensifies consumerism and status consumption. Starker material differences magnify status differences and make us more prone to worries about the impression we create in the minds of others and, as we cloak ourselves in the symbols of status and success to communicate our ‘worth’ to each other, money becomes even more important. As a result, we work longer hours, save less, get into debt more and spend more on status goods.

  Instead of being a source of well-being and fulfilment, as advertisers would have us believe, psychological studies confirm that consumerism is driven by status insecurity. A recent review of the findings of over 250 studies of the relationship between aspects of well-being and having a ‘materialistic’ and consumerist orientation, found ‘a clear, consistent, negative association between a broad array of types of personal well-being and people’s belief in, and prioritizatio
n of, materialistic pursuits in life’.407 The connection between materialism and lower levels of well-being seemed to involve ‘negative self-appraisals’ and ‘low levels of satisfaction of needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness’. Insecurities and self-doubts lead people to seek solace in acquisitiveness. The review also showed that those who get into serious personal debt, particularly those who use pawnbrokers and moneylenders, suffer higher rates of common mental disorders.408 Shopping is ‘retail therapy’ because it speaks comfortingly to status insecurities. Indeed, the marketing and fashion industries exploit these links expertly and relentlessly.

  But status competition is a zero-sum game. In a hierarchical ranking system, one person’s gain is another’s loss: we cannot all improve our status in relation to each other. Although increases in someone’s income relative to others moves them up the social ladder and so tends to improve their well-being, we cannot all enjoy the benefits of increased status in relation to each other. And, as we have seen, even if ‘trickle down’ really happened and economic growth managed to make everyone better off, it would no longer improve overall well-being. In the rich countries, it is therefore no longer legitimate to think that individual desires for higher incomes amount to a societal demand for economic growth. To reduce consumerism, and the damage it does to our wallets and world, the inequality which intensifies status competition must be reduced. If it is not, then the same energy which we saw in the last chapter powering social class differentiation will continue to drive an insatiable torrent of consumption as we try to keep up with, or gain advantage over, each other.

  It is hard to tell how much higher consumption is in rich countries than levels which might be enough to support similar standards of well-being. If we take life expectancy as a central measure of well-being, it is related to CO2 emissions in much the same way as it is related to GDP per head, as shown in Figure 8.1. Just as some countries achieve levels of life expectancy comparable with the richest countries despite much lower income levels, so some countries achieve high life expectancy while emitting less than a third of the carbon emissions per head typical of the richest countries.

  Having reached the end of what rising material standards can do for well-being, it is important to recognize that improvements in our social environment and relationships can now provide very major advances in the quality of life, consistent with sustainability. In more unequal societies, where community life is threadbare and the desire for status is intensified, the consequences for people with little chance of gaining recognition and respect are profound. At the extreme – and even after taking into account gun control, poverty and other factors – mass shootings (those with three or more victims) have been shown in a study using data for the 3,144 counties of the USA, to be responsive to increased inequality.409 How many of these angry, suicidal shootings express a desperate desire to show the world that the perpetrator cannot be ignored? To die killing others has often been a protest against feeling you have been cast as a loser, and to kill in the name of a cause, of a supposedly greater good, can transform the gesture (at least in the mind of the perpetrator) into an honourable act. Although these acts involve only a tiny minority, they surely speak volumes about the experience of vast numbers of people who do not try to punish others for their suffering.

  Much the most important increases in levels of well-being in the future will come from improvements in social relationships and the quality of the social environment and, as such, they are entirely compatible with environmental sustainability. We have seen already that people in more equal societies are more inclined to help others – the elderly, those with disabilities, or anyone else.39 We have seen too that community life is stronger in those societies, and that people are much more likely to feel they can trust others. With increasing levels of inequality, the data show that this all declines, social life atrophies and violence – as measured by homicide rates – increases.38, 410 In countries with the highest levels of inequality, such as South Africa and Mexico, signs that trust and reciprocity have been replaced by fear can be seen everywhere. Houses are surrounded by high walls topped with razor wire or electric fences, and windows and doors are reinforced with iron bars. Guide books instruct tourists not to go out at night. This transition from sociability to fear goes to the heart of what inequality does to human societies. Another very different kind of evidence that inequality does indeed bring exactly this catastrophic change in social relationships comes from research showing that the proportion of the labour force employed in what has been called ‘guard’ labour (such as security staff, police and prison officers) increases as income differences get larger.411, 412 These are jobs concerned with protecting people from each other. Few things are as damaging to the real quality of our lives as the effect of high levels of inequality on social relationships.

  The stronger community life and better social integration that lower levels of inequality foster make people more public-spirited and less out for themselves; that strengthens our sense of mutuality and co-operation. If the world is to move towards an environmentally sustainable way of life, it means acting on the basis of the common good as never before, indeed acting for the good of humanity as a whole. But the status insecurity and individualism promoted by inequality distance us from both the means and the will to take action on problems that threaten us all. The nature of the environmental calamity now unfolding, and the means by which we might avert its severest effects, demand that we act for the common good.

  An international survey of the opinions of business leaders included a question about how important they thought international environmental protection agreements were.413 As Figure 8.3 shows, business leaders in the more equal countries rated environmental agreements as much more important than their counterparts in more unequal countries.414 A similar pattern has been found for recycling: more equal societies recycle a higher proportion of different waste materials.1 Both these indicators show that people in more equal societies are less self-centred and more willing to act for the greater good.

  Figure 8.3: Business leaders in more equal countries regard it as more important to comply with international environmental agreements.414

  The processes which affect our willingness to act for the common good determine whether societies are able to adapt to new circumstances and problems. Researchers using a mathematical model called ‘Human and Natural Dynamics’ showed that when societies were faced with environmental resource scarcities, those divided by large economic inequalities were much more at risk of collapse than more equal societies.415 The fact that no strategy proportionate to the environmental crisis we face has so far found broad support suggests that levels of inequality are too high – and so self-interest too strong – to enable populations and politicians in many societies to focus effectively on the transition to sustainability.

  Greater equality is not only consistent with moving towards sustainability, but a precondition for doing so. It is the key to moving societies from the pursuit of false, and environmentally damaging, sources of well-being to genuine social ones. Rather than being an unwelcome belt-tightening exercise, moving towards sustainability requires that we improve the real subjective quality of modern life in ways that higher incomes and consumerism cannot. In the next and final chapter, we shall discuss how major reductions in inequality might be won.

  9

  A Better World

  The choice which confronts us is whether we expand the vertical and hierarchical or the horizontal and egalitarian dimension of our societies, whether we increase inequality and the status divisions between us, or reduce them; whether we increase appearances of superiority and inferiority, or whether we decrease them and improve the quality of social relations and well-being throughout society. The evidence we have seen shows that higher levels of inequality raise levels of social anxiety and heighten its psychological and social costs among the vast majority of the population.

  There will always be people who, while claimi
ng to deplore class and status divisions, nevertheless imagine that large income differences do not matter. Across the political spectrum, many politicians and policy makers express a desire to minimize class divisions: they want to give children more equal opportunities, reduce differences in their educational performances and increase social mobility. Others say they would like a more cohesive society, with a stronger sense of community. But despite these aims and values, many continue to dismiss the popular demand to reduce income differences as just ‘the politics of envy’. Let us therefore briefly summarize the evidence that bigger income differences really do make class and status divisions more powerful.

  THE FIVE LINKS

  1. Inequality makes problems with social gradients worse

  International comparisons show that bigger income differences increase the prevalence of almost all socially graded problems (i.e. those which become more common lower down the social ladder). For example, health deteriorates lower down the social scale and is less good for most people in more unequal societies. The same is true of a host of other issues, including violence (as measured by homicide rates), teenage birth rates, poor educational performance of schoolchildren, drug abuse, mental illness, child well-being, rates of imprisonment and obesity. In The Spirit Level we showed that all these problems are between twice and ten times as common in the more unequal of the developed countries (such as the USA and the UK) than they are in more equal societies such as the Scandinavian countries or Japan. The effects of inequality are greatest among the least well-off, but also affect – to a lesser extent – the better-off, including those with good educations, jobs and incomes. The result is that in more unequal societies, health and social problems develop steeper social gradients and so bigger differences in outcomes between rich and poor.