#Resource The Spirit Level Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status . . . It has grown . . . as an invidious distinction between classes . . . Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics what is most exciting about the picture we present is that it shows that reducing inequality would increase the wellbeing and quality of life for all of us. Far from being inevitable and unstoppable, the sense of deterioration in social wellbeing and the quality of social relations in society is reversible. Understanding the effects of inequality means that we suddenly have a policy handle on the wellbeing of whole societies. ## How inequality gets under the skin The task was then to develop psychological tests which could distinguish between people with a healthy and those with an unhealthy kind of self-esteem. The healthier kind seemed to centre on a fairly well-founded sense of confidence, with a reasonably accurate view of one’s strengths in different situations and an ability to recognize one’s weaknesses. The other seemed to be primarily defensive and involved a denial of weaknesses, a kind of internal attempt to talk oneself up and maintain a positive sense of oneself in the face of threats to self-esteem. It was (and is) therefore fragile, like whistling in the dark, and reacts badly to criticism. People with insecure high self-esteem tend to be insensitive to others and to show an excessive preoccupation with themselves, with success, and with their image and appearance in the eyes of others. This unhealthy high self-esteem is often called ‘threatened egotism’, ‘insecure high self-esteem’, or ‘narcissism’. The finding that social evaluative threats are the stressors which get to us most powerfully fits well with the evidence of rising anxiety accompanied by a narcissistic defence of an insecure self-image. As Dickerson and Kemeny say, the ‘social self’ which we try to defend ‘reflects one’s esteem and status, and is largely based on others’ perception of one’s worth’ (p. 357). ## Community life and social relations 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 connectedness 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 We also see a consistent association among both the United States and the developed countries. Earlier we described how Uslaner and Rothstein used a statistical model to show the ordering of inequality and trust: inequality affects trust, not the other way round. The relationships between inequality and women’s status and between inequality and foreign aid also add coherence and plausibility to our belief that inequality increases the social distance between different groups of people, making us less willing to see them as ‘us’ rather than ‘them’. In Figure 5.1 we use these surveys to show the association in rich countries between income inequality and the proportion of adults who had been mentally ill in the twelve months prior to being interviewed. This is a strong relationship: a much higher percentage of the population suffer from mental illness in more unequal countries. Such a close relationship cannot be due to chance, indeed the countries line up almost perfectly, with only Italy standing out as having lower levels of mental illness than we might expect, based on its level of income inequality. INEQUALITY AND ILLEGAL DRUGS Low position in the social status hierarchy is painful to most people, so it comes as no surprise to find out that the use of illegal drugs, such as cocaine, marijuana and heroin, is more common in more unequal societies. It’s not just our social status and psychological wellbeing that affects our health. The relationships we have with other people matter too. This idea goes back as far as the work on suicide by Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, in the late nineteenth century.69 Durkheim showed that the suicide rates of different countries and populations were related to how well people were integrated into society and whether or not societies were undergoing rapid change and turmoil. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that epidemiologists began to investigate systematically how people’s social networks relate to health, showing that people with fewer friends were at higher risk of death. Having friends, being married, belonging to a religious group or other association and having people who will provide support, are all protective of health.70–71 THE ‘BIG IDEA’ If average levels of income don’t matter, and spending on high-tech health care doesn’t matter, what does? There are now a large number of studies of income inequality and health that compare countries, American states, or other large regions, and the majority of these studies show that more egalitarian societies tend to be healthier.10 This vast literature was given impetus by a study by one of us, on inequality and death rates, published in the British Medical Journal in 1992.81 In 1996, the editors of that journal, commenting on further studies confirming the link between income inequality and health, wrote: The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.82 Inequality is associated with lower life expectancy, higher rates of infant mortality, shorter height, poor self-reported health, low birthweight, AIDS and depression. Figures 6.3–6.6 show income inequality in relation to life expectancy for men and women, and to infant mortality – first for the rich countries, and then for the US states. Of course, population averages hide the differences in health within any population, and these can be even more dramatic than the differences between countries. In the UK, health disparities have been a major item on the public health agenda for over twenty-five years, and the current National Health Service Plan states that ‘No injustice is greater than the inequalities in health which scar our nation.’83 In the late 1990s the difference in life expectancy between the lowest and highest social class groups was 7.3 years for men and 7 years for women. THE EQUALITY DIET It is clear that obesity and overweight are not problems confined to the poor. In the USA, about 12 per cent of the population are poor, but more than 75 per cent are overweight. In the UK, social class differences in women’s obesity can be seen all the way up the social ladder. While obesity affects only 16 per cent of ‘higher managerial and professional’ women, just below them, 20 per cent of lower managerial and professional women are obese. It’s hard to argue in the face of these facts that the obesity epidemic is due to poor nutritional knowledge among the uneducated. In a study of middle-aged British women,137 84 per cent knew they should be eating five fruits and vegetables each day, and another study showed that obese people are better than thinner people at guessing the calorie content of snack foods.138 Another piece of evidence that it’s relative, not absolute, levels of income that matter for obesity comes from studies in which people are asked to describe subjectively their place in the social hierarchy. Researchers show subjects a diagram of a ladder and tell them that at the top are people with the highest status, and at the bottom people with the lowest status, and then ask them to place an ‘X’ on the ladder to mark their own standing. It has been shown that this measure of subjective social status is linked to an unhealthy pattern of fat distribution 139 and to obesity 140 – in other words, obesity was more strongly related to people’s subjective sense of their status than to their actual education or income. THE HOME ADVANTAGE Although good schools make a difference, the biggest influence on educational attainment, how well a child performs in school and later in higher education, is family background. In a report on the future of education in Britain, Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar describe how: One of the biggest problems facing British schools is the gap between rich and poor, and the enormous disparity in children’s home backgrounds and the social and cultural capital they bring to the educational table.145,p. 23 Children do better if their parents have higher incomes and more education themselves, and they do better if they come from homes where they have a place to study, where there are reference books and newspapers, and where education is valued.146 Parental involvement in children’s education is even more important. In 2004, World Bank economists Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey reported the results of a remarkable experiment.163 They took 321 high-caste and 321 low-caste 11 to 12-year-old boys from scattered rural villages in India, and set them the task of solving mazes. First, the boys did the puzzles without being aware of each other’s caste. Under this condition the low-caste boys did just as well with the mazes as the high-caste boys, indeed slightly better. Then, the experiment was repeated, but this time each boy was asked to confirm an announcement of his name, village, father’s and grandfather’s names, and caste. After this public announcement of caste, the boys did more mazes, and this time there was a large caste gap in how well they did – the performance of the low-caste boys dropped significantly (Figure 8.5). This is striking evidence that performance and behaviour in an educational task can be profoundly affected by the way we feel we are seen and judged by others. When we expect to be viewed as inferior, our abilities seem to be diminished. Despite the work we mentioned on social anxiety and the effects of being judged negatively which we discussed in Chapter 3, it is perhaps surprising how easily stereotypes and stereotype threats are established, even in artificial conditions. Jane Elliott, an American schoolteacher, conducted an experiment with her students in 1968, in an effort to teach them about racial inequality and injustice.166 She told them that scientists had shown that people with blue eyes were more intelligent and more likely to succeed than people with brown eyes, who were lazy and stupid. She divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups, and gave the blue-eyed group extra privileges, praise and attention. The blue-eyed group quickly asserted its superiority over the brown-eyed children, treating them contemptuously, and their school performance improved. The brown-eyed group just as quickly adopted a submissive timidity, and their marks declined. After a few days, Elliott told the children she had got the information mixed up and that actually it was brown eyes that indicated superiority. The classroom situation rapidly reversed. New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed. When we feel happy or confident our brains benefit from the release of dopamine, the reward chemical, which also helps with memory, attention and problem solving. We also benefit from serotonin which improves mood, and from adrenaline which helps us to perform at our best. When we feel threatened, helpless and stressed, our bodies are flooded by the hormone cortisol which inhibits our thinking and memory. So inequalities of the kind we have been describing in this chapter, in society and in our schools, have a direct and demonstrable effect on our brains, on our learning and educational achievement. ##### EARLY MATURITY AND ABSENT FATHERS The first of these additional reasons was touched on in Chapter 8, where we discussed the impact of inequality on family relationships and stress in early life. Experiences in early childhood may be just as relevant to teenage motherhood as the educational and economic opportunities available to adolescents. In 1991, psychologist Jay Belsky at the University of London and his colleagues proposed a theory, based on evolutionary psychology, in which experiences in early childhood would lead individuals towards either a quantity or a quality reproductive strategy, depending on how stressful their early experiences had been.191 They suggested that people who learned, while growing up, ‘to perceive others as untrustworthy, relationships as opportunistic and self-serving, and resources as scarce and/or unpredictable’ would reach biological maturity earlier, be sexually active earlier, be more likely to form short-term relationships and make less investment in parenting. In contrast, people who grow up learning ‘to perceive others as trustworthy, relationships as enduring and mutually rewarding and resources more or less constantly available’ would mature later, defer sexual activity, be better at forming long-term relationships and invest more heavily in their children’s development ##### Violence: gaining respect In some ways patterns of violence are remarkably consistent across time and space. In different places and at different times, violent acts are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, and most of those men are in their teens or early twenties. In her book, The Ant and the Peacock, philosopher and evolutionary psychologist Helena Cronin shows how closely correlated the age and sex characteristics of murderers are in different places. Violent crimes are almost unknown in some societies. In the USA, a child is killed by a gun every three hours. Despite having a much lower rate than the USA, the UK is a violent society, compared to many other countries: over a million violent crimes were recorded in 2005–2006. And within any society, while it is generally young men who are violent, most young men are not. Just as it is the discouraged and disadvantaged among young women who become teenage mothers, it is poor young men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are most likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence. Why? James Gilligan is a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, where he directs the Center for the Study of Violence, and has worked on violence prevention for more than thirty years. He was in charge of mental health services for the Massachusetts prison system for many years, and for most of his years as a clinical psychiatrist he worked with the most violent of offenders in prisons and prison mental hospitals. In his books, Violence 202 and Preventing Violence, 201 he argues that acts of violence are ‘attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable and overwhelming – and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride’. Time after time, when talking to men who had committed violent offences, he discovered that the triggers to violence had involved threats – or perceived threats – to pride, acts that instigated feelings of humiliation or shame. Sometimes the incidents that led to violence seemed incredibly trivial, but they all evoked shame. A young neighbour walking disrespectfully across your immaculate lawn . . . the popular kids in the school harassing you and calling you a faggot . . . being fired from your job . . . your woman leaving you for another man . . . someone looking at you ‘funny’ . . . Here the work of evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly helps to make sense of these patterns of violence. In their 1988 book Homicide 204 and a wealth of books, chapters and articles since, they use statistical, anthropological and historical data to show how young men have strong incentives to achieve and maintain as high a social status as they can – because their success in sexual competition depends on status.77,205–208 While looks and physical attractiveness are more important for women, it is status that matters most for sexual success among men. Psychologist David Buss found that women value the financial status of prospective partners roughly twice as much as men do.209 So while women try to enhance their sexual attractiveness with clothes and make-up, men compete for status. This explains not only why feeling put down, disrespected and humiliated are the most common trigger for violence; it also explains why most violence is between men – men have more to win or lose from having (or failing to gain) status. Reckless, even violent behaviour comes from young men at the bottom of society, deprived of all the markers of status, who must struggle to maintain face and what little status they have, often reacting explosively when it is threatened. Here the work of evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly helps to make sense of these patterns of violence. In their 1988 book Homicide 204 and a wealth of books, chapters and articles since, they use statistical, anthropological and historical data to show how young men have strong incentives to achieve and maintain as high a social status as they can – because their success in sexual competition depends on status.77,205–208 While looks and physical attractiveness are more important for women, it is status that matters most for sexual success among men. Psychologist David Buss found that women value the financial status of prospective partners roughly twice as much as men do.209 So while women try to enhance their sexual attractiveness with clothes and make-up, men compete for status. This explains not only why feeling put down, disrespected and humiliated are the most common trigger for violence; it also explains why most violence is between men – men have more to win or lose from having (or failing to gain) status. Reckless, even violent behaviour comes from young men at the bottom of society, deprived of all the markers of status, who must struggle to maintain face and what little status they have, often reacting explosively when it is threatened.