The Spirit Level
It is common knowledge that, in rich societies, the poor have worse health and suffer more from almost every social problem. This book explains why inequality is the most serious problem societies face today.
Stats for nerds
18recommend
32mentions
27people
2009–2026years
63% recommend31% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Spirit Level by Pickett and Wilkinson argues convincingly that the pursuit of equality and social safeguards makes life better for everyone, rich and poor.
San Francisco used to be my favorite big city in America; now it's a hellscape. The experiment, whatever experiment we're running, failed.
- One of my favorite books about inequality is The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett). It asks how this country can be so incredibly rich, unprecedented in human history, but still create so much suffering (physical/mental/emotional).
- There is so much research on the problems of inequality. "The Spirit Level" is one book. (e.g. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/)
The problems of inequality go well beyond living standards. E.g. political control in a very unequal society gets concentrated in a few people.
- The books that touches exactly that ideas are amongst other
* "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Thomas Piketty
* "The Spirit Level" - Wilkinson & Pickett
* "The Price of Inequality" - Joseph Stiglitz
However, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if none of these authors ring a bell.
But is seems like you are perfectly able to articulate the ideas - just not to internalize them. Yet.
- The Spirit Level [1] makes a good argument for why more equal societies benefit everyone within them. At the very least, I think it's fair to say that "Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse" is not definitively true.
- See also the book The Spirit Level, which shows that inequality also negatively affects those who are well-off - they become stressed about their social standing too.
This is why naive explanations of inequality that blame the poor or the envious are false.
