[lbo-talk] Better live in Sweden than in the US: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Thu Feb 18 14:02:32 PST 2010


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
>> 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?

According to David Runciman's LRB review the prison population chart has to use a log scale because otherwise the US wouldn't fit.

Overall his main criticism of the book is that even if people on average are better off in equal societies, the people who are better off in the less equal societies have a lot to lose, so the authors dissolve the reality of conflicting interests in a bath of rational 'evidence based politics'.

"This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ matters so much: politics. If it is almost everyone who would benefit from a more equal society, then this is an encouragement to solidarity across social boundaries, so that joint action to remedy the problem might be possible. But if it is everyone on average, then this can go along with an absence of solidarity and the hardening of divisions, because the disadvantages may be so unequally distributed."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/david-runciman/how-messy-it-all-is

Mike Beggs



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