The Inner Level (book review) – how more equal societies reduce stress and improve wellbeing

... the authors argue, capitalism also needs to be overthrown because climate change demands a social revolution along more egalitarian, “sustainable” lines. Business as usual, they say, is not an option, echoing Naomi Klein’s argument in her 2014 eco-socialist manifesto, This Changes Everything....

You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the truth that we feel rich or otherwise not according to any objective measure, but in comparison with how our peers are doing. And vast disparities of wealth in any society just make things worse. In their influential 2009 book The Spirit Level, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated conclusively the pernicious effects of economic inequality. In more unequal countries, outcomes are worse for almost everyone in areas such as public health, education, obesity and social mobility. Their new book, more a companion volume than a sequel, concentrates on the doleful psychic effects of inequality on individuals.

It turns out that pretty much everything you can think of is worse in more unequal countries (such as the UK and the US), compared with the least unequal ones (Norway, Finland and Japan). We’re more prone to chronic stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, unnecessary spending and ruinous gambling. Remarkably, people of lower status in hierarchies have higher levels in their blood of a clotting factor called fibrinogen, implying that their bodies are constantly on high alert to heal potential wounds. Advertisers, we learn, spend less money in more equal societies, such as Denmark, because their citizens are less motivated by status purchasing. In the most unequal societies, by contrast, people are more prone to “a defensive, narcissistic presentation of self”: we risk, it seems, creating a society of mini-Trumps all clawing at one another’s hairpieces.

Much of the heavy lifting of analysis and argument has already been done in the previous book, and this one contains more opinion, speculation and arguable interpretation of evidence, as the authors wander off briefly into different fields of inquiry. Anthropological evidence that hunter-gatherer societies are surprisingly egalitarian, for instance, is argued to demonstrate that it is not “human nature” for us to be competitive and hierarchical. The authors make much of “stereotype threat” – the idea that being reminded you are old, or of an ethnic minority, makes you perform worse in tests – without noting that, as with so much in social psychology, recent attempts to reproduce such results have signally failed.

Wilkinson and Pickett also try very hard to downplay the current, robust evidence that intelligence is partly inherited, which you don’t really have to do in order to make the (correct) point that family and school environments play a very large role in cognitive development. At one peculiar point, they even appear to suggest that rock music is better than modern classical music because it doesn’t give people class anxiety.

For all the power of the book’s data and charts the reader may remain unconvinced that inequality explains everything bad, and greater equality explains everything good, about happiness levels in different countries. Reducing inequality, nonetheless, seems like a good idea. How to do it? Redistributive tax regimes, the authors think, are insufficient, since they can always be overturned by the next government. Instead they champion the co-operative (John Lewis) model for workers, as well as mandatory employee representation on company boards, rising over time to give them full control. But this won’t suffice. Not just inequality but the “market economy” itself is blamed for making everyone unhappy, even though Finland and Norway are also market economies, so this cannot be a general explanation of our woes either. The authors think economic growth should be halted in the rich countries, since increasing material wealth no longer makes us feel better. This recommendation isn’t quite squared away with one justification given for employee ownership of companies, which is that they allegedly have “higher productivity”. There’s not much point increasing productivity if you are anti-growth.

But, the authors argue, capitalism also needs to be overthrown because climate change demands a social revolution along more egalitarian, “sustainable” lines. Business as usual, they say, is not an option, echoing Naomi Klein’s argument in her 2014 eco-socialist manifesto, This Changes Everything. As with Klein’s book, this nice rhetoric is a bit woolly, and short on persuasive details of how a zero-carbon, zero-growth nirvana may be achieved. In the meantime, advances in solar and other renewable energies will very likely continue to be made by people trying – among other things – to get rich.