We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle
or Paperback
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
See also the book he co-authored with Kate Pickett
_Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better_
I have original data using the 50 U.S. states as the level of analysis (versus nations across the world). Income inequality (gini coefficients) don’t explain anything in terms of why some states fair better than others. IQ and / or religious fundamentalism completely wipe out the effects of income inequality. Gross income levels themselves are better predictors of well-being than is income inequality. In fact, the percentage of same sex households is a better predictor of state well-being than is income inequality. So too is the ratio of Starbucks to Walmarts within states.
I’m not sure why economists come to such different conclusions in this area. More interdisciplinary research is needed here, imo.
Large correlations at the aggregate level (states or nations) are the exception rather than the rule (so don’t be too impressed by this guy’s pretty scatter plots). It seems like everything correlates non-trivially with everything else (creating a nexus) at aggregate levels. I suspect there is no one causal variable.
If one looks at variance explained after partialing out other variables, income inequality is not the answer (I admit though that controlling variables in regression is less than ideal with these data in terms of getting at causality).
B
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