On Feb 18, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Bryan Atinsky wrote:
> It is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter
> lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. In a quite
> fascinating book, /The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost
> Always do Better/ <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Societies-Almost-Always/dp/1846140390
> >, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson <http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cps/index.php?page=2.0.0.40
> > and Kate Pickett <https://hsciweb.york.ac.uk/research/public/Staff.aspx?ID=1197
> > demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone
A distinguished sociologist I know, who prefers to remain nameless, said that Wilkinson's results are very sensitive to how you specify the equations or set up your country universe - i.e., not very robust to alternative specifications, as they say. Or, more rudely, you can get the results you want by setting things up in a certain way. In my own crude way, I tried some multiple regressions using World Bank data on inequality and income as the independent variables and life expectancy and infant mortality as the dependent variables, and I couldn't get inequality to be significant. And on something like this, if the results don't leap out at you, then you might want to avoid making the claim.
> The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are
> striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem - ill-
> health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental
> illness, long working hours, big prison populations - is more likely
> to occur in a less equal society.
I wonder how much these results are driven by the U.S. If you did the rich OECD countries without the U.S., would the results be statistically significant?
Doug