Doesn’t this just sprinkle on some people’s chips?
It appears that The Spirit Level’s much vaunted finding about inequality - that it makes us all miserable in and of itself - is not, quite, wholly true:
Exposure to economic inequality is widely thought to erode subjective well-being and mental health1,2,3,4,5, which carries important societal implications6,7,8,9,10. However, existing studies face reproducibility issues11,12,13, and theory suggests that inequality only affects individuals in disadvantaged contexts14,15,16. Here we present a meta-analysis of 168 studies using multilevel data (11,389,871 participants from 38,335 geographical units) identified across 10 bibliographical databases (2000–2022). Contrary to popular narratives, random-effects models showed that individuals in more unequal areas do not report lower subjective well-being (standardized odds ratio (OR+0.05) = 0.979, 95% confidence interval = 0.951–1.008). Moreover, although inequality initially seemed to undermine mental health, the publication-bias-corrected association was null.
As in, not quite, wholly, true in the sense of not being so, of being wrong.
Of course, it’s still wholly open to some to insist that inequality is something they’d prefer not to see or allow happen. But the argument that inequality, per se, is something that degrades society in general turns out not to be true.
At which point we’re back with the old insistence. We know that making the poor richer makes the poor better off. So, what system makes the poor better off? Given that no non-capitalist and market based socioeconomic system has ever had rich poor people - and that all those that have been capitalist and free market for more than a few decades do have rich poor people - then we need to be capitalist and free market in order to gain a better society.
We’ve roughly that spectrum from Nordic social democracy - which, we never tire of pointing out, is more market and capitalist than either the US or UK - through to the very Manchester Liberal Hong Kong ideas. That’s about it really, nothing else quite does it.
Good to know for the New Year, no?
Tim Worstall