Book reviews: Why equality is better for everyone

New Zealand parents are tough on their children. Simon Collins explains

The Spirit Level
Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett
2nd ed, Penguin
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
Allen Lane

I have to thank former Children’s Commissioner Ian Hassall for referring me to The Spirit Level when it first came out two years ago.
I had been struck by his comment, in an interview about smacking, that New Zealand parents tended to be “harsher” on our children than parents in other countries.
There were several possible explanations, but one was that we raise our children to survive in a much more ruthless, competitive society than parents in either traditional village societies or advanced social democracies such as Sweden.
Swedish psychologist My Wilkstedt surveyed parents here and in Sweden and found that our parents were much less protective of children. We encourage our children to be more independent, and to cope with the consequences. We are also tougher on them – we are more likely to punish them both physically and emotionally, whereas Swedish parents are more likely to use requests, distractions and rewards.
Dr Hassall believes that The Spirit Level is a key to explaining these differences. The book, which has recently gone into a second edition with the subtitle Why Equality is Better for Everyone, argues that what makes some societies harsh and others gentle is their level of equality.
The logic is straightforward: in an equal society we can afford to be gentle because we know that everyone else will look after us if we need help; by definition, an equal society is one where everyone, whatever their abilities or state of health, is brought up to a living standard much the same as everyone else.
In contrast, in an unequal society, the winners reap incredible fortunes and the losers suffer miserably in poverty and insecurity. In such a society we need to elbow each other out of the way to claw our path to the top.

Violent crime
The Spirit Level’s authors, British health researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, show that levels of trust, mental and physical health, the status of women, educational achievement and general child wellbeing all increase progressively as societies become more equal.
Conversely, fighting and bullying among children, drug use, violent crime and teenage parenthood (the female counterpart to male hopelessness and rage) all increase with inequality. If you can see that you are destined for the scrap-heap rather than the top, why play by rules that are stacked against you?
A graph plotting Unicef’s index of 40 indicators of child wellbeing against income inequality in 22 rich countries sums up a convincing array of similar graphs in the book. Child wellbeing is highest in egalitarian Sweden and drops with each increase in inequality down to the pits of child abuse and neglect in dog-eat-dog post-Thatcher Britain and New Zealand.
The point is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Wilkinson and Pickett show that people and apes have lived in both equal and unequal societies, and that our stress levels are much lower in more equal ones. We have changed our social structures in the past and we can do so again.
Korean-born British development economist Ha-Joon Chang, in 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, argues that we can actually be better off economically as well as socially if we temper the extremes of inequality and greed that led to the recent global financial meltdown.
These two books could not be better timed. Wilkinson and Pickett have already been beamed in by video link to New Zealand meetings aimed at strengthening our welfare state in the face of a review group’s agenda to reduce it, and at building a social development agenda for the new Auckland super-city.
They have an armoury of facts and detailed social and economic alternatives on their website, equalitytrust.org.uk. Read the website, read these books, and let’s build the public support that we need to gradually make our society less harsh.

Simon Collins is the New Zealand Herald’s social issues reporter.