The spirit level

Why more equal societies almost always do better

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Allen Lane, 356 pages, hardback, £20

If Britain became as equal in income distribution as Japan, Norway, Sweden or Finland, say Wilkinson and Pickett, mental illness would be halved, teenage pregnancies would fall to a third of their current levels, only a quarter of the number of people would be murdered, we’d have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, prisons would close by the dozen and everyone would live around a year longer.

The authors compare statistics from the richest countries in the world, and conclude that a focus on economic gain has failed to continue to provide benefits beyond a certain minimum point of development.

More unequal societies — the US, UK and Portugal — are at the bottom of the rankings and consistently do worse on measures such as life expectancy, children’s educational performance and social mobility than do countries like Japan and the Nordic states and much of the rest of Europe, or even less developed nations.

Where the book is weaker is in constructing policy foundations for changes towards producing a more equal society. And the authors say change must be transformational, not revolutionary, and must come incrementally, from inside society itself.