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Should We Worry about Inequality?

by Noah Carl
28 March 2025 11:00 AM

One of the Left’s major bugbears is inequality. In Britain, thinktanks like the Fabian Society and newspapers like the Guardian are always banging on about its supposedly pernicious effects. And such organisations no doubt have their counterparts in other Western countries.

Back in 2009, a wildly popular book called The Spirit Level claimed to show that almost all social ills can be traced back to inequality. And I’m not exaggerating when I say “almost all”. Part II of the book, “The Costs of Inequality”, has sections on “community life”, “mental health”, “obesity”, “violence” and “teenage births”—to name just a few.

One problem with the thesis that inequality is terrible for society is that it’s not obvious why this should be the case. Suppose Bill Gates moves to Britain. Because he has a huge amount of money, this makes Britain more unequal. But it’s hard to see how ordinary people are worse off. Would they be better off if every billionaire picked up and left? Surely not.

The mechanism proposed by the authors of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, is that inequality makes life more stressful for the have-nots by magnifying social status differences. Humans evolved in relatively egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers, the authors note, so they aren’t adapted to societies with vast differences in material resources.

This is not an unreasonable argument—though it should be noted that humans have continued to evolve since the dawn of agriculture when complex social hierarchies first emerged.

However, the argument makes a crucial assumption—that people can correctly perceive the level of inequality. If they can’t, then higher levels of inequality aren’t necessarily bad.

When social scientists have looked into this, they’ve found that people have only a vague idea about the level of inequality in their country. In a 2018 paper, Vladimir Gimpelson and Daniel Treisman reported small-to-moderate correlations between measures of perceived inequality and measures of income inequality, as well as negative correlations between measures of perceived inequality and measures of wealth inequality. A more recent paper tracked the relationship over time in a sample of countries and found that it was small and non-significant.

Interestingly, both papers found that support for redistribution was strongly related to perceived inequality but not to actual inequality. So people want the government to reduce income differences when they perceive those differences to be large—not when those differences actually are large.

What all this means is that Wilkinson and Pickett’s proposed mechanism probably doesn’t work, at least when it comes to differences between nation states. If people have only a vague idea about the level of inequality in their country, it seems unlikely that inequality itself is making their lives more stressful (though their perceptions of inequality might be).

Another reason the Left’s crusade against inequality is misplaced is that the situation in Britain has barely changed for more than three decades and has actually improved slightly since the Financial Crisis. As figures published by the ONS show, the Gini index—a measure of income inequality—is lower now than it was in 2007.

Taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor to pay for public services is entirely appropriate and most governments around the world do it. But fretting endlessly about inequality doesn’t make much sense.

Tags: BritainInequalityThe Spirit Level

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40 Comments
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Free Lemming
Free Lemming
1 year ago

Can we ban images of mentally ill people holding up signs about banning ‘conversion therapy’? It’s like seeing a packet of skittles come to life.

57
-3
soundofreason
soundofreason
1 year ago

Conversion therapy. Presumably it will be illegal to help people to convert to whatever ‘Trans’ would be in their case?

28
-1
wilsonnl
wilsonnl
1 year ago

I agree, if the Act will prohibit any “conduct directed towards a person for the purpose of changing or suppressing their gender identity” then it will prohibit any attempt to persuade a person to change their gender in the first place. This Act will ban attempts by teachers, nurses, doctors, and activists to gender affirm. This should result in jail sentences for activists who pressure children to be sterilised and castrated.

38
-1
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  wilsonnl

That’s a nice theory, but not how it will work out in practice: At the core of the transreligion is the belief that people are composed of a gendered soul that’s separate from and more important then the merely physical body which needs to be affirmatively castrated (or other mutilated) to save this gendered soul from its otherwise certainly terrible fate. That’s obviously nonsense on steroids or – somewhat more politely put – like all other stories about nonphysical existance of something ot somebody, a superstition/ religious creed but because social scientists are pushing for it, it’s by definition a part of The Science™.

Tranfafficionados obviously don’t word that in this way, they prefer handwaiving while mumbling something about The Brain™, but in realitly, little is known about how the brain (the real one) actually works at the chemical level and they’re just exploiting this to avoid being contradicted.

11
0
Jon Mors
Jon Mors
1 year ago

Does this mean that for counsellors to try and convert confused gay kids to straight trans kids is also banned?

There’s something very sick about people that prefer to believe that somebody (e.g. their child or patient) can be born in the wrong body, and may need surgery to correct it, to accepting that they have same sex attraction.

Why, if I were gay I’d be quite offended.

21
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
1 year ago

It is an interesting idea given the depth of the issue. I think that there is much more to it than is commonly understood and therefore a therapeutic approach would be based upon shallow foundations. Obviously it shouldn’t be banned any more than learning about Marxism or Nazism should be banned. There is a very interesting book called The Mysteries Of Same Sex Love. It really is a deep mystery I wouldn’t assume that you have you have an understanding of it. You won’t grasp it on a psychological or cultural or genetic level.The understanding belongs to a higher realm which used to be commonplace but we have lost sight of it. It is a gradual returning to the realm of the spirit.

3
-1

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