Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: Wellbeing Over Growth

In our season one finale of SystemShift, we’re diving deep into the myths surrounding neoliberalism with leading economists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson – two of the brightest minds in the field. Brace yourself for a compelling discussion on how inequality takes a toll on physical health, relationships, and emotions. Chronic stress, accelerated ageing, increased rates of bullying and homicide, and even lower life expectancy all intertwine with the disparity. Pickett and Wilkinson will also look at circular and regenerative economic models, shifting away from relentless growth-focused mindsets. From promoting well-being and experimenting with basic income pilots to envisioning a four-day working week, we’ll explore groundbreaking research that suggests sustainable economies can provide a decent standard of living for all. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Welcome to SystemShift, the Greenpeace podcast dedicated to exploring new ideas and thinking about economic system change that puts people and nature at the center of our economic and financial systems. In this ultimate episode of this season, we will be exploring the myths of neoliberalism, with two leading economists, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, who will discuss the impact of economic inequality on society and the environment.

Kate and Richard wrote The Spirit Level; Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Perhaps one of the most influential and talked about books on society of the last decade. The book examines the effects of the inequality that resulted from free markets and limited government intervention in the economy. The effects range from eroding trust to encouraging excessive consumption, and we will see that the outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.

Kate is a professor of epidemiology at the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York while Richard is professor Emeritus of Social Ethnology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary professor at UCL and a visiting professor at the University of York.

Kate and Richard will be explaining the psychological and social corrosive effects of inequality and the ways in which it affects our physical health, relationships and emotions. They argue that inequality damages health and wellbeing primarily through chronic stress, which ages the body’s physiological systems faster, also seen in higher rates of bullying homicide, poorer health outcomes, including lower life expectancy. We will explore new economic thinking and how reducing inequality will help us to move toward a better society for the planet and for people and how this can help in tackling environmental crisis. We will look at a range of innovative shifts such as promoting wellbeing, basic income pilots and a four day working week. With the latest research suggesting we can have a sustainable economy that provide a decent standard of living for everyone, provided they are circular and regenerative rather than growth focused.

So let’s start this episode. A warm welcome to you Kate and Richard.

Richard Wilkinson:
Thank you. 

Kate Pickett:
Thank you for having us.

Carl Schlyter: 
You wrote this rather famous book, The Spirit Level, and then you had written a follow up book and many other papers and publications. The general theme of a lot of this research is that for most people, I think impact on inequality on our societies is so much wider and far reaching than people generally would understand. Do you think since you published The Spirit Level book, have people started to understand more and more about your research and have you seen any effect of it so far on policy making?

Policy making

Richard Wilkinson:
I don’t think there’s been a very clear feed into politics. Certainly no substantial change in policy and I don’t think the wider population has any sort of detailed knowledge of the effects of inequality. But I think there is now an assumption, a widespread assumption, that it does change relationships. It does two things psychologically, if you like, not that people can be explicit about it, but it is not taken as naively as it was, that it only matters if it creates poverty or something like that. There has been some more general recognition that there are deeper effects of inequality, that the damaging socially. I often talk about socially corrosive and divisive effects.

Kate Pickett:
Richard is right. We’ve seen insufficient impact in terms of political decision making, but I think we are seeing certainly an impact on policy discussion, which is the first step towards that political change. I think we’ve seen that at local level within the UK, which obviously we know much better, at national level in some countries and at international level, including at EU level. When we wrote The Spirit Level, which was first published in the UK in 2009 and then subsequently in different editions around the world, people didn’t even talk about the impact of inequality. It was really off the political agenda. And in the ten years since, I think we’ve now got to a point where there is no discussion about the economy or public health or other things where you don’t hear inequality mentioned at some point in the discussion. I think there has been progress at multiple levels, but nowhere near as much progress as, of course we would have wished.

Pathways to inequality

Carl Schlyter: 
Maybe we should go into some examples of inequality, for example, you have done a lot of research and you have seen how anxiety and other psychological stress, and other psychological ill beings are actually aggravated by inequality. Could you explain a little bit the statistics and the links between inequality and these psychological effects?

Richard Wilkinson:
What inequality really does is increase importance of social class and social status. It makes people much more concerned with where they stand in relation to others, how others judge them, it adds to insecurities about self-worth, and there are no studies that inequality has these cycle logical effects, including increasing status anxiety, not just amongst the poor but across all income groups, so even the richest 10% of the population and more unequal countries that are more worried about how they’ve seen and judged by others.

Kate Pickett:
What Richard has been talking about are the pathways through which greater income inequality leads to worse health and social outcomes for societies. So our original Spirit Level book, we were looking at relationships between inequality and health outcomes, outcomes related to social relationships like trust, outcomes related to what the economists always call human capital development. You can think of as, you know, children’s well-being and their possibility of developing well in their societies and all of those things being affected by inequality. And then in more recent book, The Inner Level, we were very much focused on what Richard was talking about, the pathways which lead from inequality to those health and social problems being what we would call psychosocial pathways. So the ways in which inequality makes you feel and the ways in which that affects your physiology as well. So the pathways have become clearer and clearer to us over time that really we’re looking at impacts that work through the effects of chronic stress. But they get into our bodies through our feelings, through our emotions about living in a more unequal place.

Richard Wilkinson:
A good example is the increase in violence, usually measured by homicide that accompanies increases in inequality. When people start to notice that relationship and it’s now been shown in many different studies across the world, that’s more unequal societies have higher levels of violence, people started wondering, okay, what is the connection between these two? And it’s now clear that actually it’s that in more unequal societies where status does matter more, people are more worried about disrespect, feeling looked down on, devalued and of course, what triggers violence so often is those issues to do with being disrespected and looked down on. There’s one way I can make you respect me, and that’s through violence if I can’t do it by any other expression of status. Or rather, if you can’t respect me, at least you can fear me.

Effects of Inequality

Carl Schlyter: 
There are many aspects here. In your book, for example, you noticed that when Americans were asked to put their stress levels from a scale from 1 to 10, so many selected to stress levels, 8 to 10, very, very high stress and then you have this positional consumption power, you need to keep up or preferably be above the rest and then you have the anxiety about people actually seeing through that you might not be as successful as you tried to show off. All this puts a load of stress on people and unequal societies. One shocking fact when I saw one of the diagrams here was that even the richest 10% feel more anxiety about their class position in a very unequal country than the poorer 20% in a more equal country. This kind of pursuit of enormous income at the top doesn’t help them in an unequal society. It seems inefficient to have an unequal society. How come that has been the norm?

Kate Pickett:
People simply didn’t know that. Perhaps some of the research that has been most surprising to people that it isn’t just the poor who are affected by inequality, it is the whole society. And as you say, that means that inequality is very inefficient from a point of view of producing good outcomes. That was perhaps the part of our research and other researchers continue to contribute to this field. That is perhaps the part that has surprised people most. If you don’t know something’s occurring, then you’re unlikely to be thinking about policy and political solutions to it. I think the fact that it’s not just the poor that are affected, but indeed it is the rest of us and the rich. That was the most surprising part, don’t you, Richard?

Richard Wilkinson:
People deny the extent to which they are concerned with status. We tend to say, I know other people are all into status stuff and trying to pick themselves up, that I don’t do that. Actually, it goes very deeply into psychology and the insecurities about it. I think often people conceive of those as if it was a personal weakness that I don’t feel quite confident and at ease with others. I’m trying to put on good appearance and so on. So those are sort of denial of the importance of status competition. Of course, it becomes an even bigger problem in more unequal societies.

Self-identity and its influence in life

Carl Schlyter: 
When we use the word status maybe to make people self-identify more with that, maybe it is like it has different levels. Of course, normally if you have some guests, you will try to clean your house for a certain time before they come, and you think about how you dress a little bit. For example, before this interview today, my partner told me that, Carl, you put your sweater inside out and I didn’t really notice. I changed the way she told me. So it’s kind of a micro-level that is harmless. But then when it affects our life, when we buy things we can’t afford, when we are constantly thinking about how we are perceived by other people, it turns into negative emotions and anxiety. Is that how I should understand it?

Richard Wilkinson:
I think one of the most obvious facts and one of the most relevant to environmental issues is that one of the ways we try and pick ourselves up and show our status, present ourselves positively to others is through consumption and the research papers will show that if you live in a more unequal society, you spend more on status goods and more on a posh looking car, all that kind of thing. So it’s both people at the top and the bottom So many people have an unnecessarily good car, even if they find it difficult to afford. I remember a Guardian journalist who interviewed some very rich bankers and she said to them, Why on earth do you need all this money, you can’t possibly spend it. And the banker said, yes, but it shows me I’m better than the next man.

Shame and inequality

Kate Pickett:
That’s another word, I think, which hasn’t come up yet, which shame is. So, you know, we’ve been talking about the striving for greater status and the need to sort of try and keep up and all of the pressures that are created around striving for superiority in a more unequal society. And of course, the other consequence of that is that if you fail to be successful in those kinds of societies, the shame that is attached to that is really heightened. It’s always shaming across the world in society after society; researchers have found that there is shame related to being poor in your society. You know, people feel that they have failed, they have failed themselves, they have failed their families. And this happens at wildly different levels of material success across the world. But inequality makes that kind of shame more salient and it makes more people suffer from it. So that’s a really important concept for us to be addressing here, I think. And in that context, the cost of living crisis that is affecting so many people across Europe currently isn’t only a crisis of lack of material resources. You know, the price is going up for energy, fuel and food. And, you know, the fact that you’ve got less money to buy more things or can’t afford things, it is equally a crisis of the psychological consequences of that, the feelings of shame and anxiety and of being unsuccessful in an otherwise successful society. The cost of living crisis, just heightening the impact of inequality even further and doing it in psychological terms as well as material ones.

Carl Schlyter: 
And the effect of this is also then that you tend to get more focus on material things. I mean, we are now talking at the general outset here as we are talking about societies where the consumption primarily is not anymore vital to your survival, like getting food and shelter. But we are talking about people living with access to food and so on. So that’s the basic assumption for this discussion would say. But anyway, our societies in Europe now, we could easily feed everybody. We could easily shelter everybody living in Europe today, without any problem if we had the right distribution and pre-distribution of things. But when this feelings of shame come, that also prevent us. Because then if you don’t want to feel ashamed, so you try to alleviate that. But then in an unequal society you tend to be normally more focused on material things or income and spending rather than other ways of getting appreciation from your peers like maybe you could be a voluntary karate teacher or dancer helping children to learn how to dance or whatever. So if you focus more and more on material things, we have also seen from your research that an unequal society also spends more time on consuming and buying and earning an income, thereby actually being less efficient. Also from an environmental point of view, being less also, ecologically sustainable can you explain a little bit the mechanisms here?

Richard Wilkinson:
We sometimes say that inequality makes money more important because of this status competition, but it also explains a very important issue to do with the fact that we are happier now while well-being increases if we earn more than other people in our society. But if you look at the whole society and the rich world, as rich countries get richer, the happiness and well-being does not increase. So it works for individuals, but it doesn’t work for the whole of society. And that’s a really important dilemma. And of course, what it means is that it’s relative position and income that matters. And of course we can’t all improve our status in relation to others in our society, perhaps for individuals, but it’s a zero sum game that tends to make economic growth less important. It doesn’t actually improve well-being, measures of happiness, life satisfaction, and actually there are now no longer relationships between improvements in life expectancy and economic growth.

Inequality effects on health and life expectancy

Carl Schlyter: 
You don’t see a very clear correlation like the US has surprisingly low life expectancy despite having a very high income. So inequality actually damages health. How does that work?

Kate Pickett:
So inequality damages health primarily through the mechanism I mentioned earlier, through chronic stress. Chronic stress is incredibly bad for people’s health. You can think of it as sort of making your whole body with all your physiological systems age faster and stress is bad for almost all bodily systems when it’s chronic. So if we are constantly stressed by the pressures of living in an unequal society, then through that chronic stress mechanism, we see effects on health, including how long people live, including whether or not rates of infant mortality are high in a society, including things like diabetes and obesity and other chronic health conditions. So we really see a major impact on the health and well-being of the public. And of course, we mentioned earlier some of the psychological effects, but we see those in terms of clinical mental health conditions as well, things like depression and anxiety and more severe mental disorders as well so very widespread effects on the health and wellbeing of the public.

And if inequality is damaging the health, well-being of the public and increases in GDP or no longer in rich countries increasing the health and wellbeing of the public, then clearly we need to focus not on more economic growth but on reducing inequality.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, we can see that clearly. My hometown, Stockholm, for example, the richest neighborhood and the poorest neighborhood have a ten year difference in life expectancy. That’s enormous if you translate that to a scale between countries.

Effects of inequality in both the rich and the poor

Kate Pickett:
It’s huge and we see similar gaps, you know, in all cities and in all countries where there’s a penalty for being poorer in that society. But what our research is showing in addition to that, there’s a penalty for all of us from living in a more unequal society. So you’ve got a double whammy if you’re poor in an unequal society and the best protection for societal health and well-being if you don’t have a lot of poor people and you have a more equal society.

Moderator: And just to stress the point here, the rich will not get away with the inequality, because if you look at infant mortality, for example, in a very unequal society, even rich people have more infant mortality than an unequal one is that correct?

Richard Wilkinson:
Well, people often want us to talk about the super-rich. They say that inequality damages the fraction of 1% who are the super-rich, but we don’t have a separate data for that. And I think they can’t insulate themselves from the effects of inequality. But we can say that 90-95% of the population would do better if they lived in more equal countries with the same education, jobs and income, But they would do better in terms of perhaps living a little bit longer, their children might do a bit better at school, there’d be less likely to be victims of violence in that sort of way. They’d do better in a more equal society.

Inequality effects on death

Carl Schlyter: 
So what’s wrong here? We have a clear connection between that, it’s more bullying in an unequal societies, more homicide in unequal societies, more unhealthy unequal societies, less life expectancy, it’s less life satisfaction, all these enormous consequences on society, and still this is not primary on their agenda, that’s really strange. And also it’s like when you talk about cars and accidents, many countries spend a lot of money for zero visions on accidents. And even in countries where ten times more people die from the exhausts of the cars and the particles in the air from the cars than from the car accidents themselves, that’s never where the primary focus on reducing mortality from car is. And I start to get the same feeling here about inequality in health. We don’t see the big picture. We don’t see what causes most damage. How come we are so blind to this? Why is this not on the top of the agenda?

Kate Pickett:
Well, we might have different answers, but I’ll go first and then we’ll see what Richard says. For me, it’s about two things. One is about lack of awareness among decision makers and politicians policymakers who can make those changes. The understanding of the profound impact of inequality is, I suppose, fairly recent in those terms. And so we’re still on that pathway of getting people to understand and therefore then be able to make policy. But the second part of my answer would be that there are vested interests against change from the rich who suffer least of all of these issues and perhaps may not know that they suffer at all. And the third part of my answer would be neoliberal ideology, which has dominated our economic thinking for the past however many decades, which states that there are things more important than what we’re talking about, you know, things like liberty and freedom of markets and all of this. And they believe that those are the route to better well-being for everybody, despite the fact that we certainly have no evidence that that is so.

Richard Wilkinson:
I think people are very unaware of the way they are affected by society. People think there’s a sort of human nature that’s separate from everything else. And the basic issue, I think, is that status is more important to each of us than all those things you are talking about, all the ills of inequality. They disappear into the distance. We don’t really know about them, but we feel very intimately and the concern with status. But I’m sure Kate is right also about the effects of basically of ignorance. People don’t know these things. We have been concerned with research on health and inequalities for a very long time maybe, 45 years or so. There have been a series of official reports on these health inequalities that 10, 15 or even 20 year differences in life expectancy between the rich and poor biggest human rights abuse in in the wealthy countries and each of these reports basically says the same thing. They’ve been coming out every five or ten years, and the press always greets them as groundbreaking. This is really new and surprising. And actually they’re telling exactly the same story as we had a few years ago. It just gets forgotten.

European pillar and inequality

Carl Schlyter: 
This is also a podcast on an EU level, and then, of course, even if no, your country left the EU, what could the EU do to help the member countries actually achieve the targets of greater equality?

Kate Pickett:
Well, I think, you know, it is difficult for us to comment on the EU having left. I almost do feel we have no right to sort of make any suggestions. But I suppose, you know, looking from the outside, what is encouraging to me is the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan as at least providing a shift towards some recognition of a need for progress in some of the areas we’ve been talking about. And obviously mostly what can be achieved there is the EU encouraging nation states to have action plans and goals and targets, rather than themselves having the instruments to achieve change. But I have been encouraged by, you know, the targets that are set for 2030 there, around poverty reduction and training and skills around employment. I think those will make a difference.

Richard Wilkinson:
I think the two most important things for international action of which the EU is so well placed to pursue, but all rich countries need to be involved in is proper financing of the Loss and Damage fund, helping poorer countries make the transition to sustainability. And of course, it’s the rich countries that have created most of this problem, and it’s the poor countries that are going to suffer most of the consequences in terms of loss of agricultural production and heat and floods and so on. But the other big problem that needs international action, of course, is dealing with tax havens, and that must be pursued more strongly. So I put those to top of my list.

Carl Schlyter: 
And then maybe also to avoid national tax competition, maybe some kind of basic rules on wealth taxes and so on.

Kate Pickett:
That would be helpful. Yes, and I think in addition to what’s happening at EU level, the fact that we have the UN Sustainable Development Goals is an important framework to the extent to which EU policy can become congruent with those will see positive progress.

Carl Schlyter: 
And I know this is not maybe your field of expertise, but another part of the Greenpeace work here is of course, a financial and banking reform. It’s designed for a different economy. It’s designed for different purpose, internal growth, depth based growth that creates a lot of inequality. So that’s also another aspect where the EU should actually act.

Kate Pickett:
Yes, absolutely. And it’s not our area of expertise, but where it can act there I think it could be, you know, extremely influential and progressive.

Richard Wilkinson:
And lots of people have shown in research papers how the reduction of financial controls has led to all sorts of problems that we are now suffering from. Yeah, after the millennial financial crisis when food commodity speculation was deregulated, we could see extreme negative effects, especially on poor countries.

Impacts of inequality on economy

Carl Schlyter: 
Let’s do some neoliberal myth busting then. Rising tide lifts all boats and trickle down will help everyone. What’s wrong with those statements then?

Kate Pickett:
Well, I’m very fond of a cartoon that shows two skeletons sitting in a boat on the ocean floor with a little label that says, of we all the 99%. And one of them is saying to the other, they say a rising tide lifts all boats. Do they say when? I think this was the promise of neoliberalism that a rising tide would lift all boats, that trickle down would improve things. But actually, over the time period since we have had that ideology sort of firmly in place and dominating economic thinking in Western developed countries, we have seen either stagnation or a deterioration of economic outcomes for people and a deterioration or stagnation of health and social outcomes as well. So things have either not got better for most people or they’ve got worse. And I think the evidence around that is overwhelming. 

Richard Wilkinson:
There has been a massive transfer of money from the poor to the rich over the last 30 years or so as inequality has increased, the vast majority of the proceeds of economic growth have gone to the rich. So rather than lifting all boats, it’s actually a pattern, almost the opposite that rising boats of the rich is sinking the boats of the poor. 

Carl Schlyter: 
That’s an interesting analogy because today when our economy started, we had this lack of transforming nature into commodity. It has made our life more comfortable. Today, the limiting factor is nature itself and biodiversity and climate that is setting the limits for the economic system. But the economic system is designed just to grow beyond those borders. So we need to reshape that. But we have been failing to go away from this logic. That increase of production is the main goal of everything and not really enjoyed the fact that we can produce so much. We can start thinking about other things. Instead, we’re stuck in the status race. What would be a pathway out of the status race and start enjoying the fact that we actually could all of us have a really good life with what we’re able to produce today. What kind of tools and mechanism can help people be alleviated from the status stress?

Kate Pickett:
I think over the past decade, Richard and I have worked increasingly often with commissions, with groups who are trying to find a different way. So, for example, with the Commission for Sustainable Equality at EU level that was sponsored by the Social Democrats, we’ve worked with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, which is an international group, we’ve contributed to a recent publication, a report to the Club of Rome, which follows on from 50 years after Limits to Growth was published. And in all of those settings, I think we are seeing a lot of discussion, I guess it’s pretty high level discussion at the moment about what a framework ought to look like for a way forwards that would pursue wellbeing instead of GDP or would frame success in eco-sociological terms rather than in economic growth. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is an excellent example of that kind of framing where we sort of start to think about how do we combine better well-being for everybody, what she would call a social flaw with a restriction on us crossing planetary boundaries, you know, finding what she would call a safe and just space for humanity. That’s not the only frame. But I think there’s a lot of thinking going on across the world. You know, you could characterize it as a movement of new economic thinking, actually, that stands in opposition to neoliberalism and conventional economic thinking. And in those settings, inequality is always at the heart of them. It’s a really important part of how those framing can think about moving towards a better society for the planet and for people that redistribution and pre-distribution have a role to play there.

Richard Wilkinson:
But I think this is not going to happen, we’ll not have a reduction in inequalities just because academics and people will say it’s important. We have to have people on the streets. There have to be huge demonstrations. There has to be an enduring movement of ten years or so of enormous public pressure. In the 1930s when the huge inequalities started to come down President Roosevelt in the United States said, ‘’we must reform in order to preserve’’. What he meant was, he felt the system was under threat because of the huge inequalities, the increasing importance of the labor movement and so on. And he was trying to sell the idea of redistributing income to the rich by saying, Look, you’ve got to do this, otherwise the whole system might be under threat. I think the rich have to feel threatened.

Kate Pickett:
I think we should add, Richard, that we’ve often written about the fact that the public can view and those who make policy as well can often view what needs to happen to address the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis and other environmental crisis. What needs to happen is going to mean a reduction in quality of life for everybody. It certainly might mean a reduction in what we think of as material standards of living in some ways. But what our research shows is that there is a benefit to some of the things that need to be done to tackle those crises. You know, if we need to reduce consumption, then we need to reduce inequality, to reduce status consumption and then if we’ve reduced inequality, then there are benefits for everybody. So rather than seeing the necessary changes that have to happen to tackle those environmental crises as worrying, we should be seeing them as opportunities to create a society with a more perhaps family and individual focused sense of creating wellbeing, a focus on children, a focus on social connections. There’s so much that that we could benefit from if we tackle the inequality as we need to do to tackle the climate crisis. So many benefits, in terms of social wellbeing, health. Etc.

How inequality is seen in pays in different companies

Carl Schlyter: 
Another neoliberal myth is Oh, but you need to pay more to the people in the top so more people would feel inspiration to do more stuff. What do you say about that myth?

Richard Wilkinson:
Well, it’s, of course, a myth that the CEOs and bankers at the top are very keen on. They say, to get the right people the rare talent that’s needed for these jobs that have to pay that money. But actually there have been several studies which have compared CEO pay, how much they’re getting with company performance. There was a study which was reported both in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which showed actually, if you take the biggest companies, the biggest 400 companies or so, the companies where the CEOs are getting less than average do better than the companies where the CEOs are getting more than average. There have been other studies that show absolutely no relationship between CEO pay and performing arts, but also studies which suggest that big pay differences within a company are damaging. 

Carl Schlyter: 
But also I think I read in your book too, that if income inequality is too high, many people give up without trying, that it’s not even working this thing to make people incentivized.

Kate Pickett:
But that’s absolutely right. I mean, we see lower levels of social mobility in more unequal societies.

Richard Wilkinson:
I think that’s not because people give up so much as the barriers, the class structure and so on. Class prejudice is what I often call the downward prejudices thinking people below you are stupid and incapable and so on. Those prejudices increase, and so the barriers to social mobility increase. But as Kate says, there are now good studies showing that instead of making the country more fluid, income inequality make it more rigid.

Carl Schlyter: 
So you see, I made the same mistake; I put the blame on the individual when we see the system. Thanks for correcting that.

Richard Wilkinson:
It wastes talent.

Inequality and freedom of choice

Carl Schlyter: 
Yes, absolutely. Another thing is that neoliberals often talk about the freedom of choice, like choose the school and your children have better, choose your pension fund and you’ll have better pension, choose whatever society goods. And then they combine this with actually a reduction of the financing of the service. But then by doing so, they put the blame on the individual. So this kind of illusion of choice, does inequality increase or not?

Kate Pickett:
I think inequality decreases certain kinds of choice.  It’s taking away some of your freedom to live in a healthy society, some of your freedom to live in a social society, you know, some of your freedom to have greater well-being. And I think the myth that people need choice. I think we really need to challenge that. I don’t think most people want when choosing a school to have to sift through all the local schools and figure out which is good and which is not, and then compete to get their child into it. They would just like the school near them to be a good school. So we really need a sort of more equal distribution of good services so that people’s choices are unnecessary. There’ll be something good near you in the same would apply for hospitals and all sorts of other kinds of services and provision. So, you know, I think this idea of people wanting freedom to make choices is really overblown. What mostly we want is to have access to good services and other resources close to us.

Richard Wilkinson:
And a lot of the data we show in our book actually shows how inequality leads to decline in choice. For instance, children tend to do less well at school, so few have the opportunities that they might have had. The lower social mobility means that those more unequal societies are farther from equal opportunity for children. More people get involved with drugs, many more people in prison. So in all sorts of ways, mental illness of course, increases. So you’re seeing a widespread damage to society, which is the opposite of freedom. But freedom, you’ve got to have it an increase in well-being and happiness and confidence, and you get the opposite.

Kate Pickett:
And of course, that damage also undermines the other neoliberal myth, which is that you’ve got to have some inequality to drive competition, to drive innovation. But of course, if you’re wasting vast amounts of your human talent because of the damage caused by inequality, then you’re not going to be able to grow innovation in a way you might have been if that talent had been encouraged to flourish to the best of its ability. And that’s why we actually see what you might think of as measures of innovation. Typically, what’s used is something like the number of patents granted per head of population. Those are lower in more unequal countries.

Carl Schlyter: 
Well, with the current situation, when people are so stressed to consume things, to climb on the status ladder, any mentioning of reduced consumption will scare people because they will feel, oh, I personally will then go down this ladder. But what we’re actually doing is making it less important to climb and find other ways to get appreciation from your peers by things you are doing. Maybe reduce working time so you have the time to develop your character or education or just, you know interaction with other humans. So how do we take out this initial fear of reduced consumption? Because with the current status race, that will put me in the lower level of course. So how can we make people feel safe and secure in such a transition?

How inequality is linked to stress

Richard Wilkinson:
You talked about stress, but I think people don’t understand the sources of their stress. They think to themselves, Oh, I’ve got to be at work such and such a time. I wonder if I’ll have time at lunch to pick up a few things for dinner tonight and I’ve got to do the children and this kind of thing. You know, we feel it’s the pressure of things on us or performance at work or whatever that may be. Our boss isn’t very pleased with us and fails to see how concern with status is driving so many of these things. And even something like unemployment. We think unemployment is bad just because unemployment is bad, but we don’t realize the damage to status. The shame of being unemployed is what drives it or to earning a bit less. We lose status and we don’t realize it. We think money is good in itself, so it’s not understanding these processes that give rise to stress and link it with inequality.

Kate Pickett:
But you’re right that we have a job to do around public education around these issues. I mean, I think there are exciting and innovating shifts in various places. There are places in Europe that are trying four day working week. There are companies that try to do innovative things that promote wellbeing. We’ve got some basic income pilots going on in various places. And I think as we get results from those where we start to realize that actually we can have sustainable economies, that perhaps are circular and regenerative, more than that they are growth focused, that provide a decent standard of living for everybody, but actually also free us all up in ways to have more connections to our communities, time for our family and friends, time to volunteer, as you mentioned earlier perhaps, or time to learn a new skill or care for a family member. I think as the evidence from some social experiments and some shifts comes along, then I think the public education job gets a bit easier because people will know of someone who’s had that experience and felt better.

Richard Wilkinson:
But of course advertisers all the time promoting goods in terms of an appeal to status. One cosmetics firm that advertises saying, you must have this because you’re worth it. And it’s really nasty things about appealing to your sense of self-worth and so on.

Carl Schlyter: 
And here where you see some paradoxes in your book because you mentioned one statistic that stuck to me was like in 1950s, 12% of the American youth thought they were very important persons. And in the 1980s they were 80%. And of course, you’re doomed to be disappointed if the rest of the world doesn’t agree that you’re a super important person. So why do you have this change? Why do people feel this need to feel very important today more than before? What triggers such a belief?

Richard Wilkinson:
Well, there been studies of what’s called self enhancement, given that while we’re more worried about how we’re seen and judged, most people pick themselves up in other people’s eyes. We try and find ways of dropping into the conversation of some of our achievements or that we went to a very good university or we were promoted young or whatever it is. But at the same time there’s also the opposite response. If everyone’s judging you and you’re worried about whether they think you’re stupid, unattractive, boring, and so on, you withdraw from social life. Your sense of self-worth declines, you feel inferior and so on. And so those two things happen at the same time. 

Kate Pickett:
And of course, our argument is that increasing inequality is a key driver of those changes over time of those trends in the rise of narcissism and self enhancement, of those trends in the rise of depression and other problems, not the only cause, of course, there are other things going on in the world besides a trend towards increasing inequality in the rich developed countries. But what our research shows is that that is a fundamental part of explaining those different trends. And so if you fix that, you’ve potentially not a silver bullet, but maybe a bronze one, certainly one that’s going to be more useful. I’m not trying to shoot any bullets at the problem at all. Our research, I suppose it opens up policy levers. 

Richard Wilkinson:
That increase in the proportion who think they are important. It’s not a genuine self-confidence and self-esteem, its narcissism. It’s people wanting to big themselves up. That’s what this study of self-enhancement in different countries shows. More unequal countries people beat themselves. It’s a process of self-advertisement and trying to feel good about yourself but it’s related to, as I say, to narcissism rather than genuine self-confidence and self-esteem.

Effects of inequality on mental health

Carl Schlyter: 
So we have this double whammy effect on people. Our economic system triggers people to become narcissist or get really low self-esteem as a self-defense mechanism against this bad pressure on us. How come we then see this psychological epidemic of ill health and still constantly look for the root causes within themselves when it could very well be the inequality of our economic system that triggers many of the ill health we see today?

Kate Pickett:
Yes, I think that’s been a longstanding focus, of course, of psychiatry and psychology is to look for the causes of mental ill health within individuals in their past or in their particular perhaps family experiences. And this shift to more structural understanding of how systems cause problems in mental health and wellbeing for populations and increases the pressures on the mental health of all the public. That is a quite recent, I think, recognition, and so it means you have to switch from thinking that you’re talking therapies are what’s needed to fix mental health problems in the population to thinking, No, actually we need to tackle inequality and poverty and job insecurity and housing insecurity and fuel poverty and food poverty. And, you know, the list goes on. Those are the things that we need to do if we want to seriously address this epidemic. I would argue actually pretty much a pandemic of mental ill health.

Richard Wilkinson:
In the United States there’s been a decline in life expectancy going on for ten years, I think, and the cause of this is mainly deaths due to drugs and alcohol and suicide. And they’ve now been described as deaths of despair. But people don’t see that they’re related to the fact that the USA is one of the most unequal in a rich developed world. And there’s now research in progress showing the link between inequality and those so-called deaths of despair.

Measures to curb inequality

Carl Schlyter: 
So let’s design a 12-step program against the unequal economy then. So the first step is then to understand that we have a problem, so to speak. I think we have talked about that here today. And then if we continue the steps to get rid of this dependency on inequality for a very limited number of people to feel at the top what measures would you think, you have mentioned already maybe a reduction of working time or change of work life balance. You have mentioned basic income, which is mostly when people talk about basic income as an unconditional income. That at least gives you access to basic life needs. What other measures have you already seen in research are successful or do you believe could be successful if we try them?

Kate Pickett:
I think progressive taxes on income, but even more importantly on wealth would absolutely be one of my top picks for a 12-step program to reduce inequality, improve things for everybody. 

Richard Wilkinson:
And there is, of course, substantial public support for that. There is real annoyance at the scale of tax avoidance and the use of tax havens amongst the super-rich, even within the economy and the big corporations go in for that tax avoidance and often avoid paying any tax. Whereas the smaller firms say this is unfair, we can’t do it. They have an unfair advantage. And I think there is very substantial public opinion in favor of dealing with those problems that the other thing, whether as a large measure of public support, is for greater measure of democracy in companies. People want to be involved more in decisions about their firm. They want to be better informed about what’s going on. And one of our previous recent Conservative prime ministers, when she was fighting for the leadership, she actually promised as a way of getting more votes from the Conservative MPs, introducing employee representation on company boards. It would have just been token. But that measure of economic democracy is not something that is only supported by the far left, and actually there are evaluations of how more democratic companies do, which go much further than that just that tokenism of employee representation. And it looks as if those companies actually are more efficient, their employees are happier.

Carl Schlyter: 
You can have several layers of this influence from the workers like in the German law. There’re bigger companies that are obliged to have labor union representatives in the board to a large extent, but also in the US. When you talk about feeling an influence, I always found it strange that like democracy, democracy, democracy in the 9:00 Stop hierarchy and then 5:00 again, democracy is best. Why do we have this block of our lives where it’s not working? It is working. So I think the Trondheim model is interesting. Have you heard about that? The Norwegian experiment in the city of Trondheim, where you had cut downs and it was really a bad situation, and then the labor unions, together with four of the parties that won the majority, made a deal that we are not going to have any layoffs in the municipal staff, but we are going to take back the outsourcing, we’re going to insource it back in again, but we’re going to do the cost savings that we intended. What happened was that they introduced more democracy in the working space and when people felt more control over their work situation, the reduced stress paid for the reform, only that. So they reduced sick leave, actually paid for the whole reform. So that’s more democracy at work. And then in the US you have like I don’t know if it’s around 17 million people working in ESOPs workers owned companies where you of course break down this hierarchy. So I think this is also part of the pre-distribution logic that you mentioned before, Kate?

Kate Pickett:
Yes.

Carl Schlyter: 
Ways to create pre-distribution by more democracy in the work space. I think that’s a very interesting aspect here.

Taxes and inequality

Kate Pickett:
And I think what Richard and I feel is that you, of course, need the redistribution mechanisms, which would include the wealth taxes, but also things like closing tax havens, etc.. But those are always vulnerable to political shifts. You know, new governments can change tax and fiscal policy and reverse progress. We think that if you increase economic democracy, that’s potentially a way of getting progress towards greater equality, more deeply embedded into the culture, the culture of workplaces, the culture of employment and the culture of the whole society. And that once you extend rights to people, then I think it becomes harder to remove them than it is to simply switch attacks. And reading Thomas Piketty’s most recent book, which takes a very long historical view of inequality across the world, it’s clear that the long term historical trend in reductions in inequality was either driven by or certainly accompanied by the extension of rights to people who had not previously had them, whether that was slaves or women or other groups. So we think that anything that improves economic democracy potentially is going to be a sort of long lasting change, a more robust or resilient change. And so we would argue for that alongside the changes to tax. 

Carl Schlyter: 
You mentioned this wealth tax. I totally agree on that. And also we see that even if you love democracy and freedom and liberty, actually the total liberty would increase with the wealth tax because you would free up more resources for people to live their lives. But I’m wondering a little bit in most of your research and most of your graphs, you have income. So the inequality based on income, but we have seen in the last decades that inequality in wealth is actually growing even quicker. Is that because it’s more difficult to get data or why is it so much focus on the income when the wealth is even worse off, so to speak? Can you explain a little bit here?

Richard Wilkinson:
When we were doing our research, there was data internationally comparable data on wealth inequalities for very few countries, so we didn’t have much choice. I have seen a paper or two more recently. Now there are more data on wealth inequalities, which is internationally comparable and it’s quite difficult to make it internationally comparable, that shows a similar picture where wealth inequality is greater while health is worse. And ideally I think we would find some combination in our data combining income inequality and wealth inequality. Basically, if you like, the social distances between us up and down the social hierarchy are based on the material differences, which is income and wealth, and it’s that that does the damage, allows people to live quite different lives and to think better than others or to make other people feel inferior. So ideally we’d have both lots of data.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, that’s interesting. The reason I asked this question is in some Scandinavian countries and specifically in Sweden, you see a rapid rise in wealth inequality not really the same and difference in income inequality. So one would expect if you would stick only to income inequality and Sweden would start to look worse on things that could probably be explained by wealth inequality, adding that to the factor.

Kate Pickett:
Possibly, yes. And I think, you know, if we think about states wishing to tax, they can get a certain amount from incomes, but they could potentially realize far more from proper progressive tax on land, for example, and other forms of wealth that would allow give them formal freedom to fund the kinds of Social Security programs they might wish to, or education systems or health systems. You know, we really could have societies that were able to afford the things they wanted to do and afford environmental protection in there as well, if we had sensible systems of taxation to address wealth as well as income.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, the richest 1% use twice the amount of resources that the world’s poorest 50%. So there’s to do also there. I was wondering if people already have convinced by your discussion with me here today that, okay, we want to deal with inequality, but they are not a politician, and you mentioned before Richard that taking to the streets we see often that that’s how things start. What other tools and tips would you give people that listened to our podcast today and thought I want to act on this? What suggestions do you have? What do you think would work?

Richard Wilkinson:
Well, there have been quite a number of other processes that have helped.

Students for instance, in some universities have made their vice chancellors at the top embarrassed at how many more income of the cleaners at the bottom. There have been a set of what are called fairness commissions around Britain that cities with Labor local governments have set up commissions to make recommendations about how inequality can be reduced locally. And one of the most important things they’ve done is led to those local governments paying not the minimum wage to the people at the bottom, but the living wage, which is substantially higher, and so affecting many thousands of people,  but not enough to make a big difference to the overall measures of inequality. 

Kate Pickett:
Well, I would say that for individuals who want to sort of start trying to be active in promoting greater equality, it matters how you vote, of course, but also the questions you might ask of your politicians at any level. You know, what are they going to do to tackle inequality so that then you have the knowledge to know where to vote? I think grassroots campaigning, as Richard said, is important. I think joining organizations such as yours, Greenpeace, but perhaps you might want to join the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, perhaps you might want to join other campaigning groups and act through those. I think even the conversations that we have with friends and family are important. We can raise these issues and try and spread learning among the people we know. So I think there are lots of things that people can do, but doing something is always going to feel more helpful to people than than doing nothing and just thinking of inequalities too big a problem. It’s too big a challenge. We can’t tackle it. I think there’s lots that all of us can do to help work towards more egalitarian societies, and I think once people recognize how beneficial they are, you know, that should provide some impetus for people to act for change. 

Carl Schlyter: 
I’m actually happy you mentioned the kitchen table because many good humans idea starts around the table eating together and nobody is powerless in their kitchen table. So this feeling of powerlessness disappears there. And then we can create bigger and bigger spheres with the feeling of no power is more and more dissolved into a feeling of, Yes, we can change this.

Richard Wilkinson:
But I think the people at the top must feel bothered, threatened, worried about political trends growing in their society before they modify their behavior of course, there were a few CEOs at the top who, in the financial crisis 2007 and eight decided that they would look better if they took less of the pay they were entitled to. And so that was the sort of movement which we need a lot more of, backed by changes in taxation that at the moment the political parties don’t dare to make. So it needs greater pressure that we saw in the financial crisis and it needs much greater pressure.

Kate Pickett:
I mean, we set up what is now a charity called the Equality Trust, which works within the UK to educate and campaign for greater equality. And they will often produce information for individuals or suggestions of how they might campaign. I think there’s a lot out there, you know, that people can find and get engaged with. And I think, yes, people shouldn’t feel powerless and shouldn’t feel that anything that they do doesn’t matter because I think it does. And we never know when tipping points are going to happen or one person’s action is suddenly going to resonate. You know, who would have thought that a Swedish schoolgirl striking from her school outside parliament would end up having the impact and the influence that it did? So we all have to take the actions we can and see where they take us.

Carl Schlyter: 
So thank you for this final eviction notice for politicians, stop taking inequality seriously. Let’s hope they actually see the self-interest of everyone in actually doing this without leaving office. But otherwise they know what’s coming probably. Thank you really much for today’s discussion. It was a pleasure having you here with us today.

Kate Pickett:
Thank you for having us. 

Richard Wilkinson:
Thank you.

Carl Schlyter: 
This was actually the last episode of the first season of this podcast Systemshift. Finally, a great thanks to you, dear listener. So stay tuned and you might discover that we actually do a second season of this podcast.

Kate Pickett is a Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, while Richard Wilkinson is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at UCL, and a Visiting Professor at the University of York. Together they wrote The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better – a book that examines the effects of the inequality that resulted from free markets and limited government intervention in the economy.