The Spirit Level

Richard Wilkinson is a British author, activist, and professor of social epidemiology. Wilkinson first studied economics at the London School of Economics before completing a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master’s of Medical Science at the University of Nottingham. Throughout his career as an epidemiologist, Wilkinson focused on differences in health outcomes between social classes. A prolific researcher, Wilkinson has also published a previous book entitled Poverty and Progress and is the co-author of the sequel to The Spirit Level, called The Inner Level. Wilkinson has received numerous awards for his contributions to scholarship, including a medal from The Australian Society for Medical Research, the Community Access Unlimited’s Humanitarian award, the Irish Cancer Society’s Charles Cully Memorial medal, among others.

Along with his colleague and life partner Kate Pickett, Wilkinson brings his years of experience as an epidemiologist to this work, using studies and statistics to draw conclusions about how class and income differences affect people’s health and lifespans, and to suggest solutions to these societal problems. Wilkinson’s familiarity with the research in these areas helps him to draw on a wide variety of scholarly work, from sociology to psychiatry and psychology, as well as global statistics, to create a compelling and evidence-based argument.

Gilligan is a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. Gilligan specializes in understanding and preventing violence at the university’s Center for the Study of Violence. Gilligan has decades of experience working with prisoners to understand the common triggers and context of violence, and formerly directed Massachusetts’s mental health services for prisoners. Gilligan is the author of Violence and Preventing Violence, which analyzes why people commit violent acts and how this can be prevented.

Pickett and Wilkinson use Gilligan’s work on violent crime to support their argument that a loss of pride and status can function as a trigger to violence. In Gilligan’s works, he claims that feelings of shame and embarrassment are the most common trigger for violence, which happens when people, usually young men, are trying to restore their sense of pride and status. The authors use these findings to argue that impoverished people at the bottom of unequal societies are more likely to be sensitive to threats to status and to lash out when their sense of pride is threatened.

Wilson and Daly are co-authors of the book Homicide, which demonstrates how young men are overrepresented among murderers. Wilson and Daly offer an evolutionary explanation for this, arguing that young men’s sexual success depends more on status than anything else. Some young men, particularly those who have little status to begin with, will defend their pride and position with violence when they feel it is threatened. The writers explain, “In their 1988 book Homicide, and a wealth of chapters, books, and articles since, they use statistical and 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” (134). Pickett and Wilkinson use Wilson and Daly’s research to show how inequality fosters the conditions which lead to homicidal violence by increasing poverty, hierarchy, and competition.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French politician, writer, historian and political scientist. De Tocqueville is best remembered for his writings on democracy and liberty. He served in the French government until Napoleon’s takeover, when he was expelled for refusing to collaborate with the new regime. Wilkinson and Pickett cite de Tocqueville’s observations on early America to persuade the reader that equality generates social trust. While traveling in the US, de Tocqueville observed that most white Americans had similar incomes and lifestyles and enjoyed a high degree of social trust and neighborliness between them. Meanwhile, chattel slavery and the violent displacement of Native American people were also the norm at the time; de Tocqueville observed the contradiction between American values and these violent practices. Pickett and Wilkinson refer to de Tocqueville’s reflections as further proof that inequality degrades empathy and community, claiming that creating a social underclass of Black and Native Americans prevented many white Americans from feeling compassion for them. They connect these claims with modern societies, noting that our current inequality prevents people from different social classes from relating to each other.

Kemeny and Dickerson are psychologists at the University of California. In a review of 208 studies on stress, Kemeny and Dickerson found that “social evaluative threats” most consistently raised cortisol levels. They defined these experiences as “threats to self-esteem or social status” that occurred when others criticized their performance on a task (37). Wilkinson and Pickett rely on this evidence to support their claim that people are inherently wired to be sensitive to social evaluation, and that feeling judged causes people’s physical stress to spike. The authors use this study to bolster their argument that inequality makes people more concerned about being negatively evaluated by others and losing their status in the hierarchy, thereby increasing their stress levels.

Richard Layard is an economist and the founder of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. The authors cite his book Happiness, in which he argues that status competition makes people more anxious and materialistic, as they push the limits of their finances to strive to attain the lifestyle of the rich. The authors use Layard’s claims to support their argument that unequal societies produce more status-conscious behavior and competitive materialism. They explain, “Another economist, Richard Layard, describes our ‘addiction to income’ - the more we have the more we feel we need and the more time we spend on striving for material wealth and possessions, at the expense of our family life, relationships, and quality of life” (69).