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	Why greater equality makes us stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett Equality Trust, agencies   Imagine if we compared the world’s major developed nations on most all the yardsticks that define social health and decency, everything from average life expectancy and levels of trust to the incidence of teenage pregnancies and drug addiction. Suppose we also ranked these same nations by their level of income inequality. What would we see?   We would see, the British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have helped the world realize, that relatively equal nations far outperform — on nearly every measure that matters — nations where income and wealth concentrate at the top.   Wilkinson and Pickett thrust this core insight onto the global public policy center stage with their landmark 2009 book, “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Us Stronger.” People in more unequal developed nations, “The Spirit Level” revealed, can be anywhere from two to ten times more likely than people in more equal nations to be obese or get murdered, to mistrust others or have a pregnant teen daughter, to become a drug addict or stuck in poverty.   Wilkinson and Pickett are now completing a new book, due out in 2016, and I interviewed the pair recently at their UK home outside the city of York. The resulting discussion, edited here for publication, explores their “Spirit Level” experience — and the egalitarian work they see as essential ahead. Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, an online weekly on inequality.   Too Much: What do you think people in your audiences find most difficult to accept — or understand — in what you’re talking about?   Pickett: Actually, I don’t think people find what we’re talking about all that difficult at all. I think they find that what we’re saying, about the impact of inequality, is intuitively making sense of their own experiences. So the most common reaction we see among audiences when we’re talking is nodding.   Too Much: And the skeptics?   Wilkinson: I think the difficulty for people who are skeptical is the idea that so many quite different problems — drug abuse and imprisonment and teenage births and so on — can be affected by this one thing, income inequality.   And I try and make sense of that by saying, look, these are all problems that have social gradients making them more common at the bottom of society. So we know all these problems are related to social status, and in a way, all we’re saying is that problems related to social status get bigger when inequality — and status differences — increase. The only surprise is that as inequality increases, these problems get more common all the way across society, not just among the poor.   Now some critics talk as though we dreamt all this up. They don’t realize that the first papers on income inequality and population health came out in the late ’70s. There have been 35 years of research on this.   Pickett: Hundreds of papers.   Wilkinson: Hundreds, yes – from researchers all round the world. Yet some people suggest that Kate and I cherry-picked the data we presented. Actually, it was quite the opposite. We had an absolute rule that if our source — the OECD or the World Health Organization or the U.S. Census — had data on a problem for a country or a state, then that data had to go into our analysis, whatever we think of it.   So this criticism that we cherry-picked our data to fit our thesis is just silly, a display of ignorance.   Too Much: But it’s a well-funded silliness.   Pickett: Yes, we have vested interests on the right who simply did not like our conclusion. So they tried to tear it apart statistically. They would do things like remove the Scandinavian countries from the analysis. They’re odd, they said. Well, they’re not odd. They’re real countries.   Too Much: But these right-wing attacks are fading somewhat?   Pickett: Very much so, perhaps because we now have world leaders talking about inequality all the time: Obama, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde, the Pope. Attacking the idea that inequality is damaging sounds increasingly obtuse.   Economists have also turned a great deal of attention to inequality since the global financial crisis. They’re now talking about how bad inequality is for economic stability and growth. And these are Nobel Prize-winning economists. So the evidence that there are high costs to inequality gets more and more substantial, more and more solid and robust.   Wilkinson: Yet the critics remain, and I think one of the most interesting things is what motivates them.   I sometimes talk about how everyone – regardless of politics — wants a society with better health, lower rates of mental illness, less violence, stronger community life, higher standards of child wellbeing. But the idea that you can get a bit closer to these goals by reducing inequality, some people find that an absolutely monstrous suggestion.   You know the American book, “The Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway? It’s about the attempts to rubbish climate science and the research on the harmful impacts of pesticides and the links between smoking and ill health. The book looks at who the people behind these attempts are, where their funding comes from, and what their motivation is.   The book makes the point that these people are basically neoliberalist free market fundamentalists. And anything that seems to be an encroachment on the free market, they feel, must be attacked. A previous publication of one of our right-wing critics was an attempt to rubbish all the evidence on the health effects of second-hand smoke. So I do think that’s what this is about. They’re trying to protect the free market.   Too Much: Looking back on “The Spirit Level,” are there things you would change or emphasize more?   Wilkinson: Yes, we have about 400 references in the book, but I wish we’d made it clearer that there is a great deal of more sophisticated and supportive research out there in the journals.   Pickett: We were trying to keep the book simple. No equations, no ”p-values,” no confidence intervals — because people don’t understand all that. We were really trying to make things clear for people, and in doing that we sacrificed presenting some of the more complex underpinning.   The radical statistics society of Great Britain actually accused us of “dumbing down” —   Wilkinson: — because we didn’t put in the “p-values” and correlation coefficients and so on.   Pickett: My response to that was they are academic statisticians. They can read the original academic research papers, ours and other people’s. This book, “The Spirit Level,” wasn’t written for them.   Too Much: The charts that make up the visual core of “The Spirit Level,” the scattergrams that show how incidences of social problems increase as inequality increases, gain incredible power as they multiply throughout the book. Do you have any sense that these insights are filtering into the classes students take?   Pickett: All the data that our charts reflect are available through the Equality Trust web site. We know that lecturers and professors are downloading the data.   Wilkinson: The data we use turn out to be very good for people teaching basic statistics. Students have here both manageable amounts of data and interesting variables. It’s easy for them to run the same sort of analyses on inequality and social problems that we ran. Professors write in to us and say they’ve done that with their classes — and that they’re amazed to get the same results as we did!   Pickett: What a relief to me! As the one responsible for producing those graphs, I was constantly checking everything and getting really, really worried about what if I’ve made a mistake.   Too Much: In “The Spirit Level,” you use the ratio between a society’s richest and poorest income quintiles —the top and bottom 20 percent — as the prime yardstick for measuring income inequality. Income data globally have come most commonly by quintile. As data collection gets more sophisticated and we get sharper breakdowns of income within the top quintile, do you think you will see any different results?   Pickett: In the book, we use the 20-20 ratio because it’s easy to understand. But for the U.S. states we used the Gini coefficient because that’s what the U.S. Census provides. Most of the time it doesn’t matter much whether you use Gini, the 90-10 ratio, or the 80-20. And there are other measures as well.   What we’ve wanted to do for a long time, actually, is to have some funding for students to look at different outcomes across a whole range of measures, to see whether for some social problems it’s inequality at the bottom that matters more or if it’s at the top or if it doesn’t matter. I think there’s quite a lot of work that could be done there.   Wilkinson: About 25 years ago, I did a paper that looked at the share of income going to the bottom decile, the bottom two deciles, the bottom three, four, five, six. The correlations between population ill health and inequality – for just the few countries I had data for at the time — seemed to be strongest with the share of all income going to the bottom seven deciles, as if it was a matter of allocation between the top 30 and the bottom 70. But then I had data from so few countries that I couldn’t be confident. It was just a possible pointer.   Too Much: So the potential for further research there is huge?   Pickett: Oh, sure. And the data available keep getting better and better. For a long time there were very few countries with internationally comparable income inequality data covering substantial periods of time. That’s improving. Wealth inequality data for different countries is getting better too.   But the kind of new research that’s been most helpful has been coming from psychology.   In The Spirit Level, we have all these correlations between inequality and social problems, and we have theories and hypotheses about what is driving these correlations. But we didn’t know then whether or not the drivers we hypothesized — things like status anxiety — were actually higher in more unequal countries. Now those kinds of data are being used increasingly in psychological research. So, for instance, there are papers looking at levels of social solidarity in relation to inequality in different European countries.   Wilkinson: Solidarity in terms of whether people are kind and helpful toward each other, whether people are willing to help old people or their neighbors or the disabled.   Too Much: Your upcoming new book, which I hear has the working title, “Crisis of Confidence,” will go into much of this new psychological research?   Wilkinson: Yes. I worry that many people think that these things we’ve been writing about — like violence or poor educational performance — all go on out there in “society” and have nothing to do with what they think matters most to them, like their own personal and emotional ups and downs and the well-being of their friends and family. So I’m rather keen to show how inequality gets into our intimate worlds.   Pickett: We’re aiming for a different sort of audience with this new book, the people who don’t think they’re interested in politics or society — people who would never pick up a book like “The Spirit Level” because it doesn’t seem to be speaking to their interests, but who might buy self-help books and try to understand their own relationships.   Wilkinson: There’re so many people today suffering from low self-esteem, social anxiety, and depression, who conceive of it all as their own fault — a matter of their own private vulnerability. Or they see these anxieties as just part of the human condition. They don’t understand how social structures affect these anxieties, the lack of confidence, and low self-esteem that blight so many lives.   Pickett: The whole field of social epidemiology has uncovered how important our social lives are for our health and well-being. But that’s still not an understanding really current in the public mind — or even among health professionals.   We wrote a New York Times article that discussed a study that showed a higher incidence of schizophrenia in the more unequal countries. A U.S. psychiatrist wrote to me and asked if I could I send him the reference to the study. He said he really needed to read the study because it threatened to destroy the entire basis of what he thought about schizophrenia. In his mind, it was all a matter of genetics. So the idea that there might be some social environmental impact involved had passed him by, although he was an academic researcher in schizophrenia.   Too Much: In the U.S., many people assume we must be doing well in any international ranking of health outcomes because we have all this advanced medical knowledge and technology.   Pickett: Dr. Stephen Bezruchka at the University of Washington has a very interesting exercise on this for first-year medical students. Students in his class on public health have to write a speech for the President on why the United States has the best health in the world – backed up with statistics.   The students go off and start their research and are then shocked to find that health outcomes in the United States are actually worse than in other developed countries — nearer the level of much poorer countries, including Cuba. It’s a real eye-opener for them.   Too Much: In the U.S. debate over President Obama’s health care reform proposals, we had no sign of what you talk about in The Spirit Level, no understanding that health is related to the social relations around us, the level of inequality. It was all a matter of if you have insurance, you’ll be healthy. If you don’t have insurance, you won’t be healthy. So the paradigm hasn’t shifted yet in the United States. What do you think it will take to shift that paradigm?   Wilkinson: I know that understanding comes a bit easier here in the UK because people, the vast majority, are all getting the same medical care. The sociologist Peter Townsend did some very creative work that recognized this reality. His idea was to take different cities, like Newcastle, and show the health inequalities between one neighborhood and another. And the people and local media in Newcastle knew that everyone in these neighborhoods used the same medical services. Yet rich and poor neighborhoods had very different average life expectancies. People knew the reason wasn’t differences in medical care.   Pickett: Researchers have produced some nice images around that kind of idea. There’s a map of the London tube system where you can see life expectancy dropping as you move, station by station, along the Central line, and they’ve done the same for a bus route in Sheffield   Wilkinson: People in public health here were influenced by a book that came out in the early 1970s, “An Introduction to Social Medicine,” by Thomas McKeown and Charles Lowe. One of the most influential things they did was to look at the decline in death rates since the late 19th century, basically the 20th century up until the 1970s. They looked at death rates from diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, and other infectious diseases that had been major killers in the first half of the century. These rates all declined rapidly as the century moved on.   The book had graphs that tracked the timeline for death rates for each disease, with arrows indicating when each disease’s cause was first identified, another when any effective treatment was developed, and another when an immunization was developed.   And one graph after another showed that almost all of the decline in death rates from these diseases had nothing to do with medicine. All those medical advances actually came far too late to explain the main decline in death rates. And this knowledge is what everyone in UK epidemiology and public health was brought up on. So things pointed to socio-economic factors — and quite strongly. And interestingly, the explanation was not primarily clean water and sewerage because most of these diseases are airborne.   Too Much: As you look back on the five-plus years of “The Spirit Level,” what makes you feel most proud?   Pickett: I feel most proud that Richard’s decades of research, and his deep thinking about inequality, is out there now and recognized, because he worked on that for an awfully long time. He faced lots of criticism over the years. But he stuck with it. He was tenacious.   Wilkinson: This is Kate being very generous. You can never tell how much of the demand for our book is because of a rising interest in inequality and how much it contributed to that rising interest in inequality. But it has been wonderful to see the growth of interest.   I think in terms of political pendulum, which moved to the right for decades, from sometime in the late 1970s, and then, with the financial crash, sort of slowed, stopped, and began to slowly swing back. And now it’s moving back at an increasing pace. We’ve seen in the British Social Attitudes Survey a growth in the proportion of the population that think the income differences are too big.   Pickett: And it now looks like the Sustainable Development goals that the UN is producing will have inequality targets and whatever replaces the millennium development goals will have targets, too. This will offer a framework for making sure governments monitor inequality, keep an eye on it, and have to report trends.   Wilkinson: But there’s an important point I’d like to make about the major changes in inequality. The basic picture of changes in inequality during the 20th century in most rich countries is that there was high inequality in the 1920s, then declining inequality from sometime in the 1930s, which continued through the middle of the century until it petered out in the 1970s. Then, from around 1980, you get the modern rise in inequality. That trajectory I am absolutely sure reflects the strengthening and then the weakening of the labor movement, plus the fear of communism and the strength of the social democratic movement.   If you look in one country after another, you see inequality dropping when the proportion of the working population in trade unions rises and inequality rising when the union population is dropping. It really is an extraordinary fit.   I don’t think it’s simply that trade unions make such a huge difference to the wages of their members, though I’m sure they make an important difference. But trade union membership also provides an indicator of the strength of the countervailing voice of the whole labor movement in society, offering a different perspective.   As soon as this countervailing voice weakened, suddenly inequality shoots up again and we lost the progress we made. I think that means that if it’s right to think about the swinging of the political pendulum, and if we are going to get a period of perhaps more radical progressive views, it is really essential that this time we make more structural changes. If the political tide turns again, we don’t want it to be so easy for progressive changes to be reversed.   That’s why I emphasize the importance of forging real economic democracy. If you just reduce inequality with a bit of redistribution through taxes and safety-net benefits, then the first government that doesn’t like that redistribution simply undoes it all.   http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/spirit-level http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality http://inequality.org/spirit-level-level/ http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/03/thomas-piketty-paul-krugman-and-joseph-stiglitz-on-the-economics-and-inequality/ Visit the related web page
	World Bank should recognize importance of human rights in its new environmental and social policies by Philip Alston Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights   August 2015   World Bank: Dangerous Rollback in Environmental, Social Protections. (Human Rights Watch, agencies)   The World Bank has released new draft safeguard policies that will vastly weaken protections for affected communities and the environment at the same time as the bank intends to finance more high-risk projects, 19 organizations said today. The proposed new Environmental and Social Safeguards Framework pointedly contradicts World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s commitment to ensure that the bank’s new rules will not weaken or “dilute” existing mandatory environmental and social protection measures and calls into question the extent to which the bank has responded to public input.   In addition, the proposed new framework will not cover substantial sections of the World Bank‘s portfolio, including rapidly disbursing policy-based lending for environmentally and socially sensitive sectors. Despite repeated requests, the bank has also failed to make public a detailed budget for the implementation of its proposed plan.   The independent environmental and human rights groups are: 11.11.11. (Belgium), Alyansa Tigil Mina (Philippines), Bank Information Center (United States), Both ENDS (Netherlands), Bretton Woods Project (United Kingdom), Center for International Environmental Law (US), Derecho Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Peru), Forest Peoples’ Program (UK), Earthlife Africa (South Africa), NGO Forum on Asian Development Bank (ADB) (Philippines/Regional), Gender Action (US), Human Rights Watch (International), Inclusive Development International (US), International Accountability Project (US), International Trade Union Confederation, Oxfam International, Re:Common (Italy), ‘Ulu Foundation (US), and Urgewald (Germany).   “Clear and mandatory requirements, incentives, accountability structures, and a detailed budget are lacking in the proposed new framework,” said Korinna Horta of Urgewald in Germany. “Yet this is what we urgently need if we are serious about addressing the interconnected problems of poverty, climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.”   In July 2014, the bank released draft safeguards that proposed a massive dilution of existing protections for environmental and social issues under the current safeguard policies. Bank vice presidents, academics, United Nations experts, civil society, and community organizations expressed strong opposition to the document.   “The new draft rolls back the bank’s due diligence requirements, removes mandatory timing and procedural requirements for borrower compliance, and effectively dismantles 30 years of environmental and social protections for affected communities,” said Stephanie Fried of the ‘Ulu Foundation, a US environmental organization. “The release of this draft shows that bank management has directly undermined President Kim’s public commitment to ensure no weakening of environmental and social protections.”   Despite the World Bank’s widely publicized commitment to “turn down the heat” and close the US$70 billion climate finance gap, not only does the new proposal remove protections for forests, biodiversity, and forest dependent peoples, but the newest draft of the climate safeguard lacks a crucial component: “By eliminating the threshold for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounting and moving it into the non-binding ‘guidance notes,’ the bank is allowing borrowers to opt out of climate safeguards and avoid the much needed accounting for carbon pollution as a first step to dealing with the climate change crisis,” said Makoma Lekalakala of Earthlife Africa in Johannesburg.   “The bank proposes replacing its own mandatory safeguards and accountability mechanisms with vaguely worded aspirational standards and an over-reliance on borrowers’ national systems, and even those of opaque ‘financial intermediaries,’” said Cesar Gamboa from Derecho Ambiente y Recursos Naturales in Peru. “At the same time, the bank proposes to allow the use of ‘preventative’ violence by security forces. This risks sparking a sharp increase in risk to local communities.”   The second draft includes some improvements on the 2014 draft – for example, new language on labor, indigenous peoples, and differential analysis of the needs of particular vulnerable groups, clarifying that assessments must examine differentiated impacts of projects on specific groups rather than on disadvantaged or vulnerable groups as a whole. Yet, the draft does not consistently ensure, throughout all standards, that unique impacts of projects on each disadvantaged or vulnerable group are differentiated to prevent harm to these groups, and leaves some key groups out, including those discriminated against on the basis of political or other opinion and language.   According to Elana Berger from the Bank Information Center, “the involuntary resettlement standard does not clearly state how disadvantaged or vulnerable groups’ needs would be addressed, which is necessary to ensure accessibility and inclusivity for all of those affected by the project.”   Peter Bakvis of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) indicated that the draft policies include some improvements pertaining to labor rights, but unlike the safeguards of other institutions, “the new draft does not require full respect for workers’ rights. Respect for rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining are only required if these rights are already fully protected in national law – which is not the case in many countries.   Other financial institutions make these rights a mandatory requirement notwithstanding national laws. Furthermore, the new draft policies still do not reference International Labour Organization core labor standards,” he said.   Jessica Evans, senior advocate and researcher on international financial institutions at Human Rights Watch, said that the new draft policies of the bank do not require bank-supported activities to respect human rights and to not contravene a borrower’s international human rights legal obligations.   “The draft treats human rights as merely aspirational, rather than binding international law,” Evans said. “The bank’s refusal to require respect for human rights, despite pleas to do so from communities around the world, sends a message to its own staff that respect for rights is discretionary.”   Rayyan Hassan of NGO Forum on ADB said that the World Bank dilutions clearly raise a red flag for safeguards at all international financial institutions as there is “a clear intent to push responsibility to potentially weak and inadequate borrower systems while eliminating the bank’s mandatory due diligence requirements to ensure that borrower environmental and social protections are at least as strong as, and equivalent to, those of the bank.   Unlike the bank’s draft Environmental and Social Framework (ESF), current ADB safeguards policy language has binding requirements on the ADB itself to ensure safeguards delivery and, importantly, the ADB requires 120 days of public comment on all Environmental Impact Assessments, which has been removed in the World Bank’s new ESF. The ADB must approve all category A subprojects among Financial Intermediaries, a requirement absent from the World Bank’s ESF.” Hassan said, “The ADB safeguards are a result of decades of mass social movements across Asia in response to harm to communities and the environment in the absence of mandatory safeguards.   This current dilution of the World Bank’s standards jeopardizes communities and the environment across Asia and sends the wrong signal to all international financial institutions about safeguard standards. We urge the Committee for Development Effectiveness to assess the repercussions of the 2nd draft and correct course immediately.”   Kate Geary of Oxfam emphasizes the implications of the draft framework for land rights: “Recent internal audits have laid bare the World Bank’s appalling track record when it comes to protecting people moved from their homes and livelihoods as a result of Bank-funded projects. The draft does little to ensure that these problems will be addressed, as the board will be asked to approve projects that cause displacement even before resettlement plans and budgets are in place.”   David Pred of Inclusive Development International added, “The proposed resettlement standard denies millions of people who will be impoverished as a result of mega-dams and other infrastructure projects their fundamental rights to have their livelihoods restored and share in the benefits of development. This is a guaranteed recipe for exacerbating inequality.”   The proposed framework is not consistent with the bank’s stated goals of promoting “shared prosperity and ending extreme poverty” and “sustainable development.” The dilutions and other problems outlined here must be corrected before the final approval of the proposed new framework, which is currently scheduled for the end of 2015.   http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/08/04/world-bank-dangerous-rollback-environmental-social-protections   Geneva: 17 December 2014   World Bank should recognize importance of human rights in its new environmental and social policies, by Philip Alston.   The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, today urged the World Bank to recognize the central importance of human rights to its draft environmental and social policies, also known as Safeguard policies, which apply to its investment project financing. The draft Safeguards policies were released by the Bank in July for public consultation, as part of the multi-stage review.   “The draft Safeguards seem to go out of their way to avoid any meaningful references to human rights,” Mr. Alston stressed, in a joint letter to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, together with a group of twenty-seven other independent experts of the largest fact-finding and monitoring mechanism of the UN human rights system.   “The Bank’s position is effectively a sleight of hand,” he noted. “They insist that their operations will be ‘supportive of human rights’ but then add that this must be ‘in a manner consistent with the Bank’s Articles of Agreement,’ and they have interpreted the latter as preventing human rights being taken into account because they are inherently political.”   According to the UN Special Rapporteur, Bank officials have defended its increased reluctance to engage with human rights on the basis that alternative sources of development financing are emerging, which do not require meaningful safeguards.   “The failure of other lenders to require that projects they fund should protect human rights standards is not a valid reason for the Bank to follow suit,” the expert said.   “The risk of a race to the bottom is real and would be disastrous for sustainable development.”   The World Bank’s president has repeatedly promised that the revision process will not result in a dilution of the Safeguards.   “I believe that honouring this promise requires a significantly different approach from that which is now being pursued by the Bank. The draft is a backward step that tramples upon the progress achieved over the last thirty years or so,” Mr. Alston warned.   In their joint letter, the UN experts also highlighted a range of specific concerns with the proposed new Safeguards policies. They signaled that the move away from a requirements-based Safeguards system to an aspirational one represents a clear dilution of existing protections, as does the significant delegation of responsibilities from the Bank to other actors.   The draft Safeguards also fail to meet the standards that international human rights law sets, for instance in the area of labor and working conditions, involuntary resettlement and indigenous peoples, the experts noted. In addition, many vulnerable groups remain virtually unprotected in Bank projects.   http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/ListOfIssues.aspx Visit the related web page
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