The originators of The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett, take to The Guardian to reveal that they were right all along:

Our landmark book revealed the cost of inequality. Fifteen years later, things have only got worse

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

We have long thought that the claim was something of a crock. Imagine our joy at the crockness being proven by Wilkinson and Pickett.

When economic inequality gets worse, so does our health and wellbeing. Inequality can affect a society’s death rates, its levels of chronic disease, and the amount of violence (including murders) it experiences. What we weren’t prepared for when we first wrote the book was how much worse things could get.

That’s the theory. The hypothesis if we are to be more accurate about it.

And our data show that even small differences in inequality matter: marginally reducing inequality can have a big impact on people’s health and wellbeing.

That’s a prediction derived from the hypothesis. Which is excellent, it’s now possible to do science. We see whether the prediction accords with reality as a test of the hypothesis. Remember, it only needs one of those ugly facts to disprove an hypothesis.

Things have got worse - that claim from the first quote. If inequality reduces from what it was in those dying days - 2009/10 - of the Brown Terror then things should get better. So, what has happened to inequality in that time period?

The Gini, the usual measure of inequality in a society, has declined from 36.6 (all individuals) in that origin year to 35.7 (2022, last year currently calculated).

We’ve had that marginal decline in inequality and yet things are still getting worse. The hypothesis is a crock, isn’t it?

Sure, sure, we all knew that anyway but it’s nice to have the proof from the horses’ mouth. No?

Tim Worstall