The Impact of Inequality (2005), by Richard Wilkinson

In his important but rather polemical Growth Fetish (2003, ISBN 1741140781), Clive Hamilton asks the basic but subersive question: why economic growth? More accurately, Hamilton asks why modern, industrial (or postmodern, post-industrial) societies – the so-called ‘western world’ – pursue policies designed to produce growth in Gross Domestic Product of 4 per cent every year, despite the fact that the ‘economic problem’, that of access to scarce resources, has been ‘solved’ for the vast majority of its populations.

Richard Wilkinson takes the question further in his new book, The Impact of Inequality (2005, ISBN 1565849256). Despite his role in the University of Nottingham’s School of Medicine, where he is Professor of Social Epidemiology, Wilkinson is not your garden-variety medico: rather than looking for causes of illness in microlocations within the bodies of individuals and then confining treatment to sites as limited as ‘the bronchial tract’ or ‘the tonsils’, he searches for social effects on individual and collective health.

In many ways, Wilkinson’s argument is new and revolutionary (though, as he points out during the course of his book, this was not always the case). We know prolonged stress has consequences for individual health, for example. What if we then find that one of the greatest potential causes of stress is interaction with other people? We know (now) that depressive illness is real, and is often characterised by low levels of seratonin in the brain. But what if we then find that differences in seratonin levels among individuals may be functional in a hierarchical society, as high-status individuals exhibit higher seratonin levels than low-status individuals?

Wilkinson cites studies that confirm such findings, and others. His central thesis is that inequality itself is a causal factor in many social ills and individual illnesses, from homelessness, violence and teenage pregnancies to obesity, depression and even the common cold. A society marked by relatively large status inequalities is more likely to be one in which its members interact competitively and self-interestedly; hence, individuals are likely to trust others less, have less close friends, and be more susceptible to consequential depression and/or viral infections.

He does run the risk of alienating readers by presenting a ‘magic bullet’ theory to explain every negative aspect of modern living, but his analysis, sincerity and qualified use of peer-reviewed research is highly convincing. At the very least, Wilkinson’s work challenges the view propagated by today’s political leaders, who argue that competition in market terms is necessarily good, that (undemocratic) corporatism is the way of the future, and that inequality is okay so long as there exists ‘equality of opportunity’. His prose is somewhat repetitive, although he does warn his readers of this tendency in his introduction.

In an age in which we are increasingly encouraged to see things through a utilitarian economist’s narrow lens of costs and benefits, and in which social interactions are being whittled down to the bare necessities of consumer transactions (soon a second human won’t even be required), Wilkinson asks us to think about the consequences, with reference to our most important individual ‘asset’: our quality of life.