The Spirit Level – still being debated October 12, 2010
Posted by Tomboktu in Inequality, Society, Uncategorized.trackback
It may be the media I read, but I don’t often see a book that is dense with statistics get discussed for any great length of time after it is published. So, for me at least, The Spirit Level looks like it is something of a phenomenon. This week’s Analysis programme on BBC Radio 4 is about The Spirit Level (the was broadcast yesterday, will be broadcast again on Sunday and will be available for a while for some time).
The sources of some of the criticisms have been from the broad family that is the Left, and on the Is Feidir Linn site [registration required] somebody who doesn’t understand the innards of the arguments about the methodology* used by Wilkinson and Pickett asked for a view on that row debate. The answer wasn’t illuminating: you’d need to read the book. Maybe the programme can help clarify the issues for the less statistically adept among us.
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*Why is it ‘methodology’ and not just ‘method’?
Isn’t methodology taken to mean a collection or series of methods?
Good book, interesting read, but the statistical debate is broadly over my head. Hmph.
Yes, Pidge but it has lots of nice graphs
Christopher Snowdon wrote the latest take-down of the Spirit Level. He argues, basically, that the authors just left out inconvenient countries to clean up the graphs and make it look like there’s a correlation. He concluded that the only real reason for inequality is how much tax and redistribution occurs in those countries.
I think their thesis is generally quite deterministic as well. and doesn’t take culture into account.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/8934/
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/docs/response-to-snowdon.pdf
Just for balance, here’s the authors’ reply.
Thanks Tim. For shame I’ve yet to read the book.
“What is the first name of the President of Ireland?”
Bloody hell. I must’ve typed ‘Douglas Hyde’ a dozen times….
Tim read the question again.
First name of the president, not name of the first president.
thanks LATC. I eventually figured it out
You are not the only one to be caught out by this – it’s funny how we read what we want to read.
It’s a very easy and quick read, even though based on five decades of combined research. I was impressed by the argument but not greatly surprised. The authors also seemed to feel the need to pad out the text with complementary cutting-edge research on related topics, such as the discovery of mirror neurons, work on social intelligence, and so on. It’s also cheap (I got my copy for 5 and a half euro at the Book Depository), which has probably helped to disseminate the argument.
Read it on me holliers in an afternoon. Very impressive stats in support of the thesis, though the argument couching them was a bit unwieldy at times, as John mentions. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were basing their argument for greater equality on grounds of pragmatism, utilitarianism or radical egalitarianism.
One thing that struck me when reading it was the fact of higher inequality in what some people call the ‘Anglosphere’. In these countries, political discourse gravitates toward the idea of ‘fairness’ as what ought to be the basic animating principle of the society, and equality only applies in certain situations, usually relating to some sort of contract. For instance, in the UK, there is no minister for equality, but instead, a minister for ‘equalities’, which banishes the broad idea of equality altogether.
The other thing about ‘fairness’ is that its sense is quite difficult to translate into other languages. The standard translation in Spanish would be ‘justicia’, i.e. the same as the word for justice. So perhaps the idea of ‘fairness’ serves to kill two conceptual birds -justice and equality- with one stone.
I remember at the Kathleen Lynch lecture being impressed by her take-down of the notion of ‘fairness’ which is bandied about by politicians of every hue and which is often used without definition, rendering it meaningless. She preferred to talk about equality of condition, of course. Then in the question and answer section someone identifying themselves as a representative of Labour Youth said that what they are campaigning for is ‘fairness’, without any acknowledgement of Lynch’s point and indeed suggesting that she hadn’t listened to a single word.
Youth, wasted etc. I expect a sterling response from Mark P.
In the circumstances I think one writes itself.
> someone identifying themselves as a
> representative of Labour Youth said that what
> they are campaigning for is ‘fairness’
Isn’t that how public debate goes? I make my point, you make your point. Engagement isn’t ever on the agenda