You all know the truth of what I'm going to say. I think the intuition that inequality is divisive  and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. I'm going to take you through that data and then explain why  the links I'm going to be showing you exist. But first, see what a miserable lot we are. I want to start though with a paradox. This shows you life expectancy against gross national income -- how rich countries are on average. And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and  the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. And it makes no difference  to their life expectancy at all. There's no suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look  within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across  society. This, again, is life expectancy. These are small areas of England and Wales – the  poorest on the right, the richest on the left. A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. So  income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them. The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or  social position, social status – where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps  between us. And as soon as you've got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what  happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger  or smaller? And that's what I'm going to show you. I'm not using any hypothetical data. I'm  taking data from the U.N. – it's the same as the World Bank has – on the scale of income  differences in these rich developed market democracies. The measure we've used, because  it's easy to understand and you can download it, is how much richer the top 20% than the  bottom 20% in each country. And you see in the more equal countries on the left – Japan,  Finland, Norway, Sweden – the top 20% are about three and a half, four times as rich as the  bottom 20%. But on the more unequal end – U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore -- the differences are twice as big. On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the  other successful market democracies. Now I'm going to show you what that does to our  societies. We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are  more common at the bottom of the social ladder. Internationally comparable data on life  expectancy, on kids' maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental  illness – which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction –  and social mobility. We put them all in one index. They're all weighted equally. Where a  country is is a sort of average score on these things. And there, you see it in relation to the  measure of inequality I've just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data. The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. It's an  extraordinarily close correlation. But if you look at that same index of health and social  problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no  correlation anymore. We were a little bit worried that people might think we'd been choosing  problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence, so we also did a paper in  the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being. It has 40 different  components put together by other people. It contains whether kids can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, what immunization rates are like, whether there's bullying  at school. Everything goes into it. Here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality. Kids do worse in the more unequal societies. Highly significant relationship. But once again, if you  look at that measure of child well-being, in relation to national income per person, there's no  relationship, no suggestion of a relationship. What all the data I've shown you so far says is  the same thing. The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on  national income and economic growth. That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the

rich developed world. But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each  other now matter very much. I'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index.  Here, for instance, is trust. It's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people  can be trusted. It comes from the World Values Survey. You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15% of the population who feel they can trust others. But in the more equal societies, it  rises to 60 or 65%. And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social  capital, very similar relationships closely related to inequality. I may say, we did all this work  twice. We did it first on these rich, developed countries, and then as a separate test bed, we  repeated it all on the 50 American states – asking just the same question: do the more  unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures? So here is trust from a general  social survey of the federal government related to inequality. Very similar scatter over a  similar range of levels of trust. Same thing is going on. Basically we found that almost  anything that's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that  separate test bed. We're not just talking about a fluke. This is mental illness. WHO put  together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. This is the percent of the  population with any mental illness in the preceding year. And it goes from about 8% up to  three times that – whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others. And  again, closely related to inequality. This is violence. These red dots are American states, and  the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. But look at the scale of the differences. It goes  from 15 homicides per million up to 150. This is the proportion of the population in prison.  There's a about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side. But it goes from about 40 to  400 people in prison. That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. In some places,  that's part of it. But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. And the  more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty. Here we have children dropping out of high school. Again, quite big differences. Extraordinarily damaging, if you're  talking about using the talents of the population. This is social mobility. It's actually a measure  of mobility based on income. Basically, it's asking: do rich fathers have rich sons and poor  fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? And at the more unequal  end, fathers' income is much more important – in the U.K., USA. And in Scandinavian  countries, fathers' income is much less important. There's more social mobility. And as we like to say – and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here – if Americans want to  live the American dream, they should go to Denmark. I've shown you just a few things in  italics here. I could have shown a number of other problems. They're all problems that tend to  be more common at the bottom of the social gradient. But there are endless problems with  social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries – not just a little bit worse, but  anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. Think of the expense, the human  cost of that. I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it  all together to make two points. One is that, in graph after graph, we find the countries that do worse, whatever the outcome, seem to be the more unequal ones, and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. So what we're looking at is general social  dysfunction related to inequality. It's not just one or two things that go wrong, it's most things. The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways. The position of  women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in  terms of the rich developed world. But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality. Sweden has huge differences in earnings, and it narrows the gap through  taxation, general welfare state, generous benefits and so on. Japan is rather different though. It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax. It has lower taxes. It has a 

smaller welfare state. And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same  contrast. There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax. So we conclude that it doesn't  much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow. I am not  talking about perfect equality, I'm talking about what exists in rich developed market  democracies. Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are  affected by inequality. There seems to be some truth in John Donne's "No man is an island." And in a number of studies, it's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal  countries at each level in the social hierarchy. This is just one example. It's infant mortality.  Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification. And so it's anachronistically a classification by  fathers' occupations, so single parents go on their own. But then where it says "low social  class," that's unskilled manual occupations. It goes through towards the skilled manual  occupations in the middle, then the junior non-manual, going up high to the professional  occupations – doctors, lawyers, directors of larger companies. You see there that Sweden  does better than Britain all the way across the social hierarchy. The biggest differences are at  the bottom of society. But even at the top, there seems to be a small benefit to being in a  more equal society. We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational  outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. And that seems to be the  general picture – that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom, but has some  benefits even at the top. But I should say a few words about what's going on. I think I'm  looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality. More to do with feelings of  superiority and inferiority, of being valued and devalued, respected and disrespected. And of  course, those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the  consumerism in our society. It also leads to status insecurity. We worry more about how we're  judged and seen by others, whether we're regarded as attractive, clever, all that kind of thing. The social-evaluative judgments increase, the fear of those social-evaluative judgments. Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208  different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had  their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured. And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of  cortisol, the central stress hormone. And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social evaluative threat – threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance. Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of  stress. Now we have been criticized. Of course, there are people who dislike this stuff and  people who find it very surprising. I should tell you though that when people criticize us for  picking and choosing data, we never pick and choose data. We have an absolute rule that if  our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at, it goes into the analysis.  Our data source decides whether it's reliable data, we don't. Otherwise that would introduce  bias. What about other countries? There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and  equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals. This isn't confined to these countries here, hiding a very simple demonstration. The same countries, the same measure of inequality, one problem after another. Why don't we control for other factors? Well we've shown you that  GNP per capita doesn't make any difference. And of course, others using more sophisticated  methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on. What about  causality? Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality. We spend a good bit of time. And  indeed, people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important  chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system.

Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on. I should say that to deal with this,  we've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things. We've got to constrain  income, the bonus culture incomes at the top. I think we must make our bosses accountable  to their employees in any way we can. I think the take-home message though is that we can  improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's  exciting. Thank you.



Остання зміна: середу 9 вересня 2026 13:44 PM