Showing posts with label income gaps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label income gaps. Show all posts
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Friday, August 30, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Public schools and poverty
Poverty Is What's Crippling Public Education in the U.S.—Not Bad Teachers
Earlier this month in New Zealand, Minister of Education Hekia Parata shared a piece of knowledge that has become common the world over. In the Southland Times, “Experts have found that four consecutive years of quality teaching eliminated any trace of socio-economic disadvantage.”
The source of this is an American economist by the name of Eric Hanushek, a professor at Stanford University, who has been spreading this for the past several years. According to Hanushek, "Good teachers are ones who get large gains in student achievement for their classes; bad teachers are just the opposite."
He looks at the distribution of student test scores, and imagines that if we could fire the teachers who are associated with the lowest 10 percent or so, then we would make huge gains. This is the theory behind a great deal of the push for 21st century K-12 education reform in the US. In order to identify and efficiently dispatch these slackers, we need national standards, and rigorous tests aligned to them.
This has led reformers to advocate that we:
- Test students more often, so we can measure learning incrementally. Test students in every subject, and at every grade level—even kindergarten, so that all teachers can be properly judged.
- Eliminate barriers to firing the "bad teachers" who get low scores, so due process and seniority protections have to go.
- Create new evaluation plans that give significant weight to "value added" measures drawn from test scores, for both teachers and administrators.
Hanushek has also argued, by the way, that more money won’t help schools succeed, nor will small class size. The teacher is the only variable worth targeting. Unions are a problem to the extent to which they make it difficult to quickly fire teachers identified as ineffective.
But the real world is proving to be a difficult place for Hanushek’s theories to be verified. No school has ever replicated the results predicted by his "four great teachers in a row" theory. In fact, there is no real research to support the idea that we can improve student achievement this way—it is all based on extrapolations.
And in fact, new data shows that in the three large urban school districts where these reforms have been given full rein, the results are actually worse than in comparable districts that have not gone this route.
Some of the key findings from the Economic Policy Institute’s April report:
- Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts.
- Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
- School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.
Most importantly:
- The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance.
This last point is crucial. This attention to the supposedly pivotal role teachers play in student success comes at a time when the number of children in poverty has been on the rise. According to a study in 2011 (pdf), one school in five was considered high poverty, up from one in eight in the year 2000. Another study showed that "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding… leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers."
While conservative economists such as Hanushek wish to focus our attention on "bad teachers," in actuality by far the largest factor affecting school performance is family income. In fact, the achievement gap between rich and poor has grown to be twice as large as the black/white performance gap in America.
Teachers are important, and of course we want to recruit the most expert and brightest possible, and give them lots of support. But the expansion of tests, and efforts to make teacher jobs depend on ever-rising scores, are turning our schools into test preparation factories.
Hanushek’s ideas have been driving a vast school reform project, which has been underwritten by the largest philanthropies on earth—starting with the Gates and Walton foundations. Now that this project is a decade old, and showing little signs of success, the time has come for a major reappraisal.
Rather than vesting our trust in tests to identify and weed out the worst teachers, why not invest some confidence in these teachers themselves, and empower them to engage in peer observation and growth through proven programs like Peer Assistance and Review? These programs feature experienced teacher coaches working with peers who have been identified as struggling. This has been found to be an effective way to strengthen teachers—and remove those who are unable to improve.
And how about some direct action to reduce the extreme income gap between wealthy and poor? An increase in the minimum wage would provide increased stability to millions of families, which would help children focus on their studies instead of where their next meal will come from. Most schools have cut nurses, librarians and counselors, at the same time we are expanding our investment in measurement systems.
So I offer this warning to the people down under and beyond. This misguided emphasis is no more likely to work there than it has in the US—unless of course, New Zealand truly is “opposite land,” where hot snow falls up.
This post originally appeared on Quartz, an Atlantic partner site.
Monday, June 03, 2013
Cash First!
Randy Mayeux sent an interesting essay from Slate.com my way recently. In it Matthew Yglesias argues that the best way to really assist the world's poor is to provide direct cash transfers to them.
I find Yglesias' analysis fascinating and, in may ways, counter intuitive to much thinking in the nation today.
In much the same way that "housing first" provides a super-charged solution to homelessness, the idea of "cash first" offers up life, incentive and initiative for recipients. Take a look at the article here.
I find Yglesias' analysis fascinating and, in may ways, counter intuitive to much thinking in the nation today.
In much the same way that "housing first" provides a super-charged solution to homelessness, the idea of "cash first" offers up life, incentive and initiative for recipients. Take a look at the article here.
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Wealth gap drives new era of segregation
by NPR STAFF
September 23, 2012
The income gap is receiving much attention lately as more Americans are isolating themselves around "people like us." More accurately, they surround themselves with people who earn similar incomes, and it is now fueling a rise in residential segregation. One recent study suggests the income gap might be greater today than even during colonial times – even when you account for slavery.
"Thirty years ago, about 9 percent of all upper-income people lived in predominantly upper-income neighborhoods," says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center. "That share has now doubled to 18 percent."
Taylor recently co-authored a study that tracked this income gap increase between 1980 and 2010.
He tells Jacki Lyden, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered, that this is a national trend. But, he adds, locally several factors can contribute to residential segregation by income, including in-migration, the nature of the local economy, housing discrimination and even a city's physical layout.
Although it might seem self-evident that people of similar incomes would gravitate toward one another, Taylor says the problem is that it creates an increasingly polarized electorate. "We are in a political moment where the sense of the middle, the sense of the cohesion, isn't feeling particularly robust," he says. "One outcome of that is a sense that the political process is ossified ... [and] that Washington doesn't work."
Residential segregation also makes it easier when it comes to gerrymandering, or redrawing district boundaries. Taylor says that increasingly the people who draw those lines do so in order to create "safe" districts, whether for Republicans or Democrats.
Read and listen to the entire report here.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Attacking the income disparity gap
Here's a fascinating essay comparing how the U. S. handled its income gap between the well-to-do and the bottom early in the 20th Century when William Howard Taft served as President. The analysis quickly reveals how so much more conservative our nation has become, a trend that appears to be growing.
Read the article and tell me what you think.
Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality
The commission’s answer, released in a 1916 report, speaks volumes about the persistent dilemma of inequality in the United States, and about the intellectual timidity of today’s political responses. “Have the workers received a fair share of the enormous increase in wealth which has taken place in this country…?” the report demanded. “The answer is emphatically—No!”
Today, after a century of ups and down, we’ve landed back at those extremes, give or take a few percentage points. But what’s striking about the commission’s report, read from a 21st-century perspective, is how limited our own debate about inequality seems by comparison. For the commission, inequality was a fundamental problem that threatened the entire fabric of American democracy. Today, by contrast, we’re busy debating whether a multimillionaire like Mitt Romney ought to pay a few more percentage points in federal taxes.
To read the entire article click here.
Read the article and tell me what you think.
Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality
If only Americans today were as open-minded about leveling the playing field as we were 100 years ago.
The commission’s answer, released in a 1916 report, speaks volumes about the persistent dilemma of inequality in the United States, and about the intellectual timidity of today’s political responses. “Have the workers received a fair share of the enormous increase in wealth which has taken place in this country…?” the report demanded. “The answer is emphatically—No!”
Their numbers bore this out. According to the commission, the “Rich”—or top 2 percent—owned 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. By contrast, the “Poor”—or bottom 60 percent—owned just 5 percent of the wealth.
Today, after a century of ups and down, we’ve landed back at those extremes, give or take a few percentage points. But what’s striking about the commission’s report, read from a 21st-century perspective, is how limited our own debate about inequality seems by comparison. For the commission, inequality was a fundamental problem that threatened the entire fabric of American democracy. Today, by contrast, we’re busy debating whether a multimillionaire like Mitt Romney ought to pay a few more percentage points in federal taxes.
To read the entire article click here.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
The evidence mounts on income inequality and the growing national gap. . .
Gus Lubin
Nov. 7, 2011, 9:29 AM
From Business Insider
Once again the rich are getting richer as the poor get poorer in America.
Although rich people took a hit in the financial crisis, the stock market has recovered strongly.
Main Street has not: Median household income has fallen 10% since the beginning of the recession and unemployment has increased by nearly 5 percentage points.
Populist movements among Democrats and Republicans have finally put this issue in the spotlight. If you haven't seen these charts, then prepare to have your mind blown.
To read on click here. Take the time to view the remarkable charts and graphs that simply report the facts established by the data. The current trends appear frighteningly like the period immediately prior to the Great Depression.
All the while, the poor suffer most.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Half of Americans poor & low income
by HOPE YEN
WASHINGTON (AP) — Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."
Full report found here.
Friday, March 04, 2011
Income gap. . .
A report from "The Lookout," a Yahoo news blog: a problem possibly more toublesome than the national debt. . .
Wed Feb 23, 5:13 pm ET
Separate but unequal: Charts show growing rich-poor gap
By Zachary Roth
The Great Recession and the slump that followed have triggered a jobs crisis that's been making headlines since before President Obama was in office, and that will likely be with us for years. But the American economy is also plagued by a less-noted, but just as serious, problem: Simply put, over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm.
Gradual developments like this don't typically lend themselves to news coverage. But Mother Jones magazine has crunched the data on inequality, and put together a group of stunning new charts. Taken together, they offer a dramatic visual illustration of who's doing well and who's doing badly in modern America.
Here are three samples:
This chart shows that the poorest 90 percent of Americans make an average of $31,244 a year, while the top 1 percent make over $1.1 million:
According to this chart, most income groups have barely grown richer since 1979. But the top 1 percent has seen its income nearly quadruple:
And this chart suggests most Americans have little idea of just how unequal income distribution is. And that they'd like things to be divvied up a lot more equitably:
To see the rest of these fascinating charts, click on over to Mother Jones.
[Is it just me, or is this socially unsustainable? LJ]
Wed Feb 23, 5:13 pm ET
Separate but unequal: Charts show growing rich-poor gap
By Zachary Roth
The Great Recession and the slump that followed have triggered a jobs crisis that's been making headlines since before President Obama was in office, and that will likely be with us for years. But the American economy is also plagued by a less-noted, but just as serious, problem: Simply put, over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm.
Gradual developments like this don't typically lend themselves to news coverage. But Mother Jones magazine has crunched the data on inequality, and put together a group of stunning new charts. Taken together, they offer a dramatic visual illustration of who's doing well and who's doing badly in modern America.
Here are three samples:
This chart shows that the poorest 90 percent of Americans make an average of $31,244 a year, while the top 1 percent make over $1.1 million:
And this chart suggests most Americans have little idea of just how unequal income distribution is. And that they'd like things to be divvied up a lot more equitably:
To see the rest of these fascinating charts, click on over to Mother Jones.
[Is it just me, or is this socially unsustainable? LJ]
Friday, January 14, 2011
Man in the yellow raincoat
My friend, Robbie San Juan, shared this experience recently. He gave me permission to use it here. Moving. Insightful. Honest. Real. What's your reaction? Ever made assumptions about the folks you observe?
Prayers for the man in the yellow raincoat
by Robert San Juan on Friday, January 7, 2011 at 11:48am
So I was on the train going to work this morning and I was sitting behind this gentleman in a yellow raincoat. I wouldn’t say he was one of the many homeless that jump on the train to keep warm, but I will say he looked down on his luck.
He looked to be over 60, with glasses, a moustache and a dirty baseball cap. He was filling out a work application for some random burger joint that I had never heard of. In the space that was labeled “Where did you hear about us?” he wrote “craigslist” and dotted the “I” with a hollow circle.
Out of his worn bag he then pulled out 3 worn pieces of notebook paper. Those three pieces of paper were entirely covered in the same tiny handwritten scrawl, the i’s all dotted with circles. There was not an empty space left anywhere on the pages. There was writing cross-ways, up the sides, running horizontally and vertically. It looked like a prop from the movie “A Beautiful Mind”… and my first reaction to those pages was “oh no… I bet he’s crazy”. There were barely any spaces between the words making the handwriting almost illegible. ALMOST illegible.
As we rode the train together, he pulled the pages closer to his face so he could read them better, and in effect pulling it closer to me (And yes I did ashamedly invade his privacy by reading over his shoulder). As I studied the pages along with him I realized that every single “entry” on the page was information about jobs… managerial contacts… phone numbers… addresses… websites… URLs… he was really… REALLY looking for a job… somewhere, he had been lucky enough to gain access to a computer and had hand written all of this information on these three pieces of paper in his search for a job…
I found myself feeling severely ashamed that I had so quickly judged him… I felt angry that this man, that so badly wanted a job and wanted to work, did not have one… and I felt sad that I did not have a job to offer him… I wanted to ask him what sort of job he was looking for, thinking I might be able to help him… but was conflicted in that I would have to admit that I had been snooping over his shoulder, or that I might offend his pride in doing so. Before I could make up my lazy, self centered mind, he was up and off the train before I realized it.
So all I have for him now, this man in the yellow raincoat, is prayer. I’m praying for him. Praying that he was getting off the train for a job interview and will be employed very soon… I also have my ability to request prayers for him on his behalf, from those that are believers in prayer… so please pray for him, and all those like him that are searching so hard to provide for themselves and those that they love.
To the man in the yellow raincoat… thank you. Thank you for putting a little more perspective to my day. And I hope you are blessed with more than what you were ever looking for.
Prayers for the man in the yellow raincoat
by Robert San Juan on Friday, January 7, 2011 at 11:48am
So I was on the train going to work this morning and I was sitting behind this gentleman in a yellow raincoat. I wouldn’t say he was one of the many homeless that jump on the train to keep warm, but I will say he looked down on his luck.
He looked to be over 60, with glasses, a moustache and a dirty baseball cap. He was filling out a work application for some random burger joint that I had never heard of. In the space that was labeled “Where did you hear about us?” he wrote “craigslist” and dotted the “I” with a hollow circle.
Out of his worn bag he then pulled out 3 worn pieces of notebook paper. Those three pieces of paper were entirely covered in the same tiny handwritten scrawl, the i’s all dotted with circles. There was not an empty space left anywhere on the pages. There was writing cross-ways, up the sides, running horizontally and vertically. It looked like a prop from the movie “A Beautiful Mind”… and my first reaction to those pages was “oh no… I bet he’s crazy”. There were barely any spaces between the words making the handwriting almost illegible. ALMOST illegible.
As we rode the train together, he pulled the pages closer to his face so he could read them better, and in effect pulling it closer to me (And yes I did ashamedly invade his privacy by reading over his shoulder). As I studied the pages along with him I realized that every single “entry” on the page was information about jobs… managerial contacts… phone numbers… addresses… websites… URLs… he was really… REALLY looking for a job… somewhere, he had been lucky enough to gain access to a computer and had hand written all of this information on these three pieces of paper in his search for a job…
I found myself feeling severely ashamed that I had so quickly judged him… I felt angry that this man, that so badly wanted a job and wanted to work, did not have one… and I felt sad that I did not have a job to offer him… I wanted to ask him what sort of job he was looking for, thinking I might be able to help him… but was conflicted in that I would have to admit that I had been snooping over his shoulder, or that I might offend his pride in doing so. Before I could make up my lazy, self centered mind, he was up and off the train before I realized it.
So all I have for him now, this man in the yellow raincoat, is prayer. I’m praying for him. Praying that he was getting off the train for a job interview and will be employed very soon… I also have my ability to request prayers for him on his behalf, from those that are believers in prayer… so please pray for him, and all those like him that are searching so hard to provide for themselves and those that they love.
To the man in the yellow raincoat… thank you. Thank you for putting a little more perspective to my day. And I hope you are blessed with more than what you were ever looking for.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Income inequality, economic gaps and social dysfunction. . .
For a fascinating and very important interview Big Think interview with Dr. Kate Pickett, Epidemiologist, University of York, click here. If you decide to watch the interview via the link, be aware that she is answering questions that appear on the screen during the interview and that break up her comments.
The information shared here is extremely important as we think about income inequality and the urban centers of the United States.
One takeaway: whether we like it or not, we're all in this life together.
Here is a transcript of the conversation for those who prefer to read rather than watch and listen:
Kate Pickett: I’m Kate Pickett. And I’m a Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York in England.
Question: What is the relationship between economic growth and life expectancy?
Kate Pickett: What we find is, in the rich developed market democracies, there’s no longer any relationship between average levels of income in a country and life expectance. So, you can have a country like the USA, or Norway, that’s twice a rich as another country like Greece for instance, and that doesn’t seem to affect life expectancy at all. And the same is true of happiness. Happiness isn’t related to average levels of income in a country either. Now, that’s not true of the developing world when you don’t have enough, when people are lacking food or shelter, or the basic material necessities. Then economic growth is really important. But in our rich, developed democracies, it no longer makes any difference. So, we seem to have come to an end of what economic growth can do for us in terms of life expectance, happiness, well-being and that sort of thing.
If you look at the United States, over the past few decades, you’ve become twice, three times a rich as you used to be, levels of happiness haven’t improved at all.
Question: How does social inequality affect our health?
Kate Pickett: I think this is where it helps that Richard Wilkinson, my co-author and I, we’re epidemiologists, and so we study levels of population health. And one thing we really learned over the past 30 years in epidemiology is the importance of psycho-social factors for health. Things like low social status, or social affiliation, social networks, whether or not you have friends, and the stresses of early childhood. All of those things have turned out to be really important for health. And we have quite a good understanding now of the biology of chronic stress. So, all of these things are working as stresses, low social status, lack of friends or social networks, stress in early childhood. And chronic stress affects our biology, our physiology in lots of different ways. It affects our immune system, our hormonal responses, it affects our cardiovascular health. And that’s quite well understood. And so we have also known for a long time that the people at the bottom of society, the poorer people in our societies, people living in the most deprived neighborhoods have much higher levels of stress and much worse health than those who are more affluent or have higher social status.
Question: Is there a threshold for when economic growth stops affecting life expectancy?
Kate Pickett: Yeah, it’s not so much about the threshold, the threshold changes over time. It’s really just seeing that although life expectancy continues to improve over time, that’s not related to average levels of income anymore in the rich countries. Instead, what we find is really important is the level of income and equality that is the gap between the rich and the poor. That’s what seems to matter these days for our health and social well being.
Question: Why are humans prone to developing unequal societies?
Kate Pickett: Well, I think we’ve lived in every kind of society. I mean, for a lot of our existence as human beings, we’ve lived in fairly egalitarian, hunter/gather societies. But we’ve also lived in very hierarchical tyrannies as well. We clearly can manage to exist in both and develop all kinds of different societies. Why hierarchy seems to matter, why status differences matter so much and so the gap between rich and poor matters, is because as human beings, we are very sensitive to social relationship. We have an evolved psychology that makes us very aware about how others judge us.
If you think about it, some of the most difficult things to do, or the most potentially embarrassing situations wherein, those where other people can judge us negatively. Rather like what I’m doing now, which might go out and been seen by hopefully thousands of people and they might think I’m doing a good job, or a bad job, and being aware of that can make us feel very embarrassed, be very aware of how others judge us, and that really affects our psychology and our biology in very profound ways.
So, if we’re looking at societies where the social distances between people are bigger as they are in unequal societies, there’s just more potential for all of us to feel we are judged negatively by others and to feel that our status really matters, that it’s really important.
Question: What is the Social-Evaluative Threat?
Kate Pickett: Social-Evaluative Threat that’s a term psychologist’s use. There are two psychologists who looked at all the studies that other researches have done on what kind of stresses most reliably raise our cortisol levels. What kinds of stress most reliably stress us? And they usually do this kind of work by inviting students into the laboratory and asking them to do unpleasant tasks. The might ask them to solve math problems or to write about an unpleasant experience, or be videotaped doing something. And the question these researchers asked was, which kind of stress most reliably raises our stress hormone levels? And they found it was ones which contained a social-evaluative threat. So, it’s not so much having to do math problems, it’s having to read out your real marks at the end and your scores and share them with other people. It’s tasks in which other people can judge you negatively, that most reliably make you feel stressed.
Question: How does status anxiety link with consumerism?
Kate Pickett: Well, in our modern societies, we don’t really need to consume more stuff for basic survival. We consume, we shop, and we want to earn more money to show our status. And so, owning things that demonstrate that we are keeping up, keeping up appearances that show we are a valued member of society, that’s why we consume so much. In more unequal societies that competition for status is more important. And so, in more unequal societies there is a stronger drive toward status competition and consumerism. All of those things matter more, matters more to earn more money, not because you need more money for basic things, but you need to show your status relative to other people in society.
Question: What is the link between greater inequality and public health?
Kate Pickett: We look at more and less equal countries, and let me describe what I mean by that. We use income equality as a measure of how hierarchical a society is, how unequal it is. And so we’re comparing – we’re looking at countries and looking at how much richer the top 20% of the population are compared to the bottom 20%. It’s ratio of the top fifth to the bottom fifth of incomes. And in more equal countries like Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the top 20% earn about 3 ½ to 4 times as much as the bottom 20%. And in the more unequal countries like the UK, where I’m from, the USA, Portugal, Australia, Singapore, it’s 7 ½ to 9 times as much. So, that’s the scale of inequality that we’re looking at.
And what we do in our book is take that scale of income differences and look to see how it affect a range of health and social problems in different societies. And we find that more unequal societies have lower levels of trust, higher levels of mental illness, worse physical health, more obesity, their children do less well in schools, there are more teenage births, more violence, as you just mentioned, a greater percentage of the population is in prison and social mobility is lower as well. So, everything seems to get worse in more unequal societies. This is a general social dysfunction. And because this is politically quite sensitive, we thought we’d test it all out again in separate setting. So, we compared the 50 states of the USA as a sort of independent test, and again, we look at levels of income and equality in the 50 different states and compare that tot heir level of health and social problems. And it’s a remarkably consistent picture. So that all those health and social problems are worse in the more unequal states.
And we think this human sensitivity to social relationships is the underpinning cause of all of those problems. You asked about violence, and in a more unequal society, of course, there are more people who don’t have access to the kinds of things that give us status, money, jobs, cars, employment, those sorts of things. And in a society where social judgments can be harsher, those at the bottom are going to be much more sensitive to threats to their status. And we know from the work of prison psychiatrists, for instance, that being disrespected, or humiliated, or potentially losing face is the most common trigger for violence of all. So, I think that’s the link between greater inequality and high levels of violence.
And the differences are huge. If we compare, for instance, the American states and Canadian Provinces, in the more equal of those, there are about 15 million, sorry, 15 murders per million residents per year. And in the more unequal, it’s about 150. So that’s a ten-fold difference, ten times the murder rate in the more unequal places than the more equal ones.
Question: What is the connection between sustainability and equality?
Kate Pickett: Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to the idea I was talking about earlier that, in a sense, in the rich developed countries we’ve come to the end of what economic growth can do for us in terms of better quality of life. We also know that we’ve got to constrain economic growth to deal with the challenges of climate change. And we need to develop more sustainable economies. And we think that equality has an important role to play here in several different ways. The first is the increased status competition that I talked about in more unequal societies. That drives consumerism. And we know that high levels of consumerism are a major cause of high levels of carbon emissions and that we need to rein in consumerism to cope with climate change. So, I think more equal societies will be better places to be able to do that because there will be less drive to consume.
Also because we find that levels of trust are much higher in more equal places, social cohesion is better. People are more willing to act together for the common good, there’s a greater public spiritedness and people are less out for themselves. And we see that in more equal countries, this translates into the way the population acts with respect to the planet and with respect to other countries. For instance, more equal countries donate more in foreign aid. A greater portion of their national income is given in foreign aid and they do better at recycling across a whole variety of waste goods. And in more equal countries, business leaders are more likely agree that their government should comply with environmental regulations. So, there are all kinds of ways in which more equal societies seem better able to act for the common good.
But there’s a third thing as well, and I think this is really important because I think a lot of people have thought in the past that we need a certain level of inequality to drive aspirations and creativity. And we’ve actually found that using a sort of proxy measure of innovation, we use the number of patterns grounded per head of population, sort of a measure of innovation and creativity, and we find that there is a significant tendency for more equal countries to have a higher level of patterns grounded per capita than the more unequal ones. Probably because in more unequal societies educational achievement is lower and social mobility is lower. So, they’re wasting a much higher proportion of their potential human capital.
So in terms of consumerism, acting in a public spirited way, and being creative and innovative, it looks as if greater equality might be a very necessary precondition as far as coping with climate change.
Question: What practical steps can countries take to enhance equality?
Kate Pickett: I think the first thing to note is that not only do we find that inequality is related to a whole range of social problems, we also find that it affects the vast majority of the population, and I think that’s really key to getting greater support for measures that would make our societies more equal. Greater equality won’t just benefit the poorer in our society; the benefits seem to extend all the way up the population so that even among the wealthier, more educated, affluent sections of our populations, they are healthier and do better in a more equal society. So, I think that’s really key.
But we also find that it is the level of inequality that matters for all of these health and social problems and it doesn’t seem to matter how that greater equality is achieved. So we often point to the contrasts between Sweden and Japan, for instance. Both of them are at the more equal end of the spectrum and they do very well in terms of health and social problems. But they achieve their greater equality in very different ways.
Sweden has quite large income differences to start with and redistributes through taxes and benefits, whereas Japan has smaller income differences to start with. And that doesn’t seem to matter, it’s the level of inequality of equality that they achieve that matters. And we find the same contrast actually among the U.S. states. So, we have two states bordering each other, Vermont and New Hampshire, culturally very alike, but New Hampshire has very low levels of state expenditure and taxation and Vermont much higher. So, New Hampshire looks a bit more like Japan and Vermont a bit more like Sweden. But because they are among the more equal states, they do very well in terms of health and social problems.
So we don’t advocate any particular way of achieving greater equality. There are big state interventions that could work such as higher tax rates on higher incomes, or raising minimum wage levels. But there are sort of small state solutions as well that are around institutions, how companies decide to set their salary structures. And it does seem that where there is more economic democracy, more employees on the board for instance, or promotions from within a company, more employees owning shares in a company. Income differences within those institutions are kept smaller. So, there are lots of different ways that greater equality can be achieved
Question: Why do Cubans live longer on average than Americans?
Kate Pickett: Sure. If you look at the international rankings of life expectancy, yes, the U.S.A. does particularly badly among the rich developed countries, which is fairly recent. You used to be one of the high performers in terms of life expectancy. And it’s interesting; actually, that the U.S.A. and Japan have rather swapped places after the Second World War and Japan was a very unequal country with very poor levels of life expectancy, whereas America was very equal and performed very well internationally with life expectancy. And since that time, you’ve swapped places. So that America has become much more unequal and slipped down the rankings of life expectancy and Japan has become much more equal and now has the highest life expectancy in the world, and crime rates have come down, etc. And there are countries that are much poorer. You mentioned Cuba, but we can also look at Costa Rica, and some of the other Latin American countries and some of the poorer European countries, such as Greece that achieve life expectancies as high, or higher than the United States without that higher level of affluence.
Question: Is the U.S. inherently unequal?
Kate Pickett: Although the U.S.A. does come very near the top in terms of income inequality today among the rich capitalist countries, only Singapore does worse in our dataset. This isn’t a sort of fixed American problem. In the past, after the Second World War and right up through the 1970’s, you were one of the more equal of the western developed countries. And so, it’s not anti-American to suggest that American society might become more egalitarian, more equal. That’s actually very characteristic of your fairly recent past. And it’s certain true of the founding principles on which your country or society is based.
And so, although I think Americans have perhaps gotten used to high levels of inequality in the very recent past, you do have a long tradition of a more egalitarian ethos and of smaller income differences in your society. And so, I think the American Dream isn’t dead, although levels of social mobility are much slower here, educational performance is suffering, you can look to your past, I think, to recover that hope and that optimism and see it as a very true American ambition to have the kind of society that offers a fair opportunity for everybody.
The information shared here is extremely important as we think about income inequality and the urban centers of the United States.
One takeaway: whether we like it or not, we're all in this life together.
Here is a transcript of the conversation for those who prefer to read rather than watch and listen:
Kate Pickett: I’m Kate Pickett. And I’m a Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York in England.
Question: What is the relationship between economic growth and life expectancy?
Kate Pickett: What we find is, in the rich developed market democracies, there’s no longer any relationship between average levels of income in a country and life expectance. So, you can have a country like the USA, or Norway, that’s twice a rich as another country like Greece for instance, and that doesn’t seem to affect life expectancy at all. And the same is true of happiness. Happiness isn’t related to average levels of income in a country either. Now, that’s not true of the developing world when you don’t have enough, when people are lacking food or shelter, or the basic material necessities. Then economic growth is really important. But in our rich, developed democracies, it no longer makes any difference. So, we seem to have come to an end of what economic growth can do for us in terms of life expectance, happiness, well-being and that sort of thing.
If you look at the United States, over the past few decades, you’ve become twice, three times a rich as you used to be, levels of happiness haven’t improved at all.
Question: How does social inequality affect our health?
Kate Pickett: I think this is where it helps that Richard Wilkinson, my co-author and I, we’re epidemiologists, and so we study levels of population health. And one thing we really learned over the past 30 years in epidemiology is the importance of psycho-social factors for health. Things like low social status, or social affiliation, social networks, whether or not you have friends, and the stresses of early childhood. All of those things have turned out to be really important for health. And we have quite a good understanding now of the biology of chronic stress. So, all of these things are working as stresses, low social status, lack of friends or social networks, stress in early childhood. And chronic stress affects our biology, our physiology in lots of different ways. It affects our immune system, our hormonal responses, it affects our cardiovascular health. And that’s quite well understood. And so we have also known for a long time that the people at the bottom of society, the poorer people in our societies, people living in the most deprived neighborhoods have much higher levels of stress and much worse health than those who are more affluent or have higher social status.
Question: Is there a threshold for when economic growth stops affecting life expectancy?
Kate Pickett: Yeah, it’s not so much about the threshold, the threshold changes over time. It’s really just seeing that although life expectancy continues to improve over time, that’s not related to average levels of income anymore in the rich countries. Instead, what we find is really important is the level of income and equality that is the gap between the rich and the poor. That’s what seems to matter these days for our health and social well being.
Question: Why are humans prone to developing unequal societies?
Kate Pickett: Well, I think we’ve lived in every kind of society. I mean, for a lot of our existence as human beings, we’ve lived in fairly egalitarian, hunter/gather societies. But we’ve also lived in very hierarchical tyrannies as well. We clearly can manage to exist in both and develop all kinds of different societies. Why hierarchy seems to matter, why status differences matter so much and so the gap between rich and poor matters, is because as human beings, we are very sensitive to social relationship. We have an evolved psychology that makes us very aware about how others judge us.
If you think about it, some of the most difficult things to do, or the most potentially embarrassing situations wherein, those where other people can judge us negatively. Rather like what I’m doing now, which might go out and been seen by hopefully thousands of people and they might think I’m doing a good job, or a bad job, and being aware of that can make us feel very embarrassed, be very aware of how others judge us, and that really affects our psychology and our biology in very profound ways.
So, if we’re looking at societies where the social distances between people are bigger as they are in unequal societies, there’s just more potential for all of us to feel we are judged negatively by others and to feel that our status really matters, that it’s really important.
Question: What is the Social-Evaluative Threat?
Kate Pickett: Social-Evaluative Threat that’s a term psychologist’s use. There are two psychologists who looked at all the studies that other researches have done on what kind of stresses most reliably raise our cortisol levels. What kinds of stress most reliably stress us? And they usually do this kind of work by inviting students into the laboratory and asking them to do unpleasant tasks. The might ask them to solve math problems or to write about an unpleasant experience, or be videotaped doing something. And the question these researchers asked was, which kind of stress most reliably raises our stress hormone levels? And they found it was ones which contained a social-evaluative threat. So, it’s not so much having to do math problems, it’s having to read out your real marks at the end and your scores and share them with other people. It’s tasks in which other people can judge you negatively, that most reliably make you feel stressed.
Question: How does status anxiety link with consumerism?
Kate Pickett: Well, in our modern societies, we don’t really need to consume more stuff for basic survival. We consume, we shop, and we want to earn more money to show our status. And so, owning things that demonstrate that we are keeping up, keeping up appearances that show we are a valued member of society, that’s why we consume so much. In more unequal societies that competition for status is more important. And so, in more unequal societies there is a stronger drive toward status competition and consumerism. All of those things matter more, matters more to earn more money, not because you need more money for basic things, but you need to show your status relative to other people in society.
Question: What is the link between greater inequality and public health?
Kate Pickett: We look at more and less equal countries, and let me describe what I mean by that. We use income equality as a measure of how hierarchical a society is, how unequal it is. And so we’re comparing – we’re looking at countries and looking at how much richer the top 20% of the population are compared to the bottom 20%. It’s ratio of the top fifth to the bottom fifth of incomes. And in more equal countries like Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the top 20% earn about 3 ½ to 4 times as much as the bottom 20%. And in the more unequal countries like the UK, where I’m from, the USA, Portugal, Australia, Singapore, it’s 7 ½ to 9 times as much. So, that’s the scale of inequality that we’re looking at.
And what we do in our book is take that scale of income differences and look to see how it affect a range of health and social problems in different societies. And we find that more unequal societies have lower levels of trust, higher levels of mental illness, worse physical health, more obesity, their children do less well in schools, there are more teenage births, more violence, as you just mentioned, a greater percentage of the population is in prison and social mobility is lower as well. So, everything seems to get worse in more unequal societies. This is a general social dysfunction. And because this is politically quite sensitive, we thought we’d test it all out again in separate setting. So, we compared the 50 states of the USA as a sort of independent test, and again, we look at levels of income and equality in the 50 different states and compare that tot heir level of health and social problems. And it’s a remarkably consistent picture. So that all those health and social problems are worse in the more unequal states.
And we think this human sensitivity to social relationships is the underpinning cause of all of those problems. You asked about violence, and in a more unequal society, of course, there are more people who don’t have access to the kinds of things that give us status, money, jobs, cars, employment, those sorts of things. And in a society where social judgments can be harsher, those at the bottom are going to be much more sensitive to threats to their status. And we know from the work of prison psychiatrists, for instance, that being disrespected, or humiliated, or potentially losing face is the most common trigger for violence of all. So, I think that’s the link between greater inequality and high levels of violence.
And the differences are huge. If we compare, for instance, the American states and Canadian Provinces, in the more equal of those, there are about 15 million, sorry, 15 murders per million residents per year. And in the more unequal, it’s about 150. So that’s a ten-fold difference, ten times the murder rate in the more unequal places than the more equal ones.
Question: What is the connection between sustainability and equality?
Kate Pickett: Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to the idea I was talking about earlier that, in a sense, in the rich developed countries we’ve come to the end of what economic growth can do for us in terms of better quality of life. We also know that we’ve got to constrain economic growth to deal with the challenges of climate change. And we need to develop more sustainable economies. And we think that equality has an important role to play here in several different ways. The first is the increased status competition that I talked about in more unequal societies. That drives consumerism. And we know that high levels of consumerism are a major cause of high levels of carbon emissions and that we need to rein in consumerism to cope with climate change. So, I think more equal societies will be better places to be able to do that because there will be less drive to consume.
Also because we find that levels of trust are much higher in more equal places, social cohesion is better. People are more willing to act together for the common good, there’s a greater public spiritedness and people are less out for themselves. And we see that in more equal countries, this translates into the way the population acts with respect to the planet and with respect to other countries. For instance, more equal countries donate more in foreign aid. A greater portion of their national income is given in foreign aid and they do better at recycling across a whole variety of waste goods. And in more equal countries, business leaders are more likely agree that their government should comply with environmental regulations. So, there are all kinds of ways in which more equal societies seem better able to act for the common good.
But there’s a third thing as well, and I think this is really important because I think a lot of people have thought in the past that we need a certain level of inequality to drive aspirations and creativity. And we’ve actually found that using a sort of proxy measure of innovation, we use the number of patterns grounded per head of population, sort of a measure of innovation and creativity, and we find that there is a significant tendency for more equal countries to have a higher level of patterns grounded per capita than the more unequal ones. Probably because in more unequal societies educational achievement is lower and social mobility is lower. So, they’re wasting a much higher proportion of their potential human capital.
So in terms of consumerism, acting in a public spirited way, and being creative and innovative, it looks as if greater equality might be a very necessary precondition as far as coping with climate change.
Question: What practical steps can countries take to enhance equality?
Kate Pickett: I think the first thing to note is that not only do we find that inequality is related to a whole range of social problems, we also find that it affects the vast majority of the population, and I think that’s really key to getting greater support for measures that would make our societies more equal. Greater equality won’t just benefit the poorer in our society; the benefits seem to extend all the way up the population so that even among the wealthier, more educated, affluent sections of our populations, they are healthier and do better in a more equal society. So, I think that’s really key.
But we also find that it is the level of inequality that matters for all of these health and social problems and it doesn’t seem to matter how that greater equality is achieved. So we often point to the contrasts between Sweden and Japan, for instance. Both of them are at the more equal end of the spectrum and they do very well in terms of health and social problems. But they achieve their greater equality in very different ways.
Sweden has quite large income differences to start with and redistributes through taxes and benefits, whereas Japan has smaller income differences to start with. And that doesn’t seem to matter, it’s the level of inequality of equality that they achieve that matters. And we find the same contrast actually among the U.S. states. So, we have two states bordering each other, Vermont and New Hampshire, culturally very alike, but New Hampshire has very low levels of state expenditure and taxation and Vermont much higher. So, New Hampshire looks a bit more like Japan and Vermont a bit more like Sweden. But because they are among the more equal states, they do very well in terms of health and social problems.
So we don’t advocate any particular way of achieving greater equality. There are big state interventions that could work such as higher tax rates on higher incomes, or raising minimum wage levels. But there are sort of small state solutions as well that are around institutions, how companies decide to set their salary structures. And it does seem that where there is more economic democracy, more employees on the board for instance, or promotions from within a company, more employees owning shares in a company. Income differences within those institutions are kept smaller. So, there are lots of different ways that greater equality can be achieved
Question: Why do Cubans live longer on average than Americans?
Kate Pickett: Sure. If you look at the international rankings of life expectancy, yes, the U.S.A. does particularly badly among the rich developed countries, which is fairly recent. You used to be one of the high performers in terms of life expectancy. And it’s interesting; actually, that the U.S.A. and Japan have rather swapped places after the Second World War and Japan was a very unequal country with very poor levels of life expectancy, whereas America was very equal and performed very well internationally with life expectancy. And since that time, you’ve swapped places. So that America has become much more unequal and slipped down the rankings of life expectancy and Japan has become much more equal and now has the highest life expectancy in the world, and crime rates have come down, etc. And there are countries that are much poorer. You mentioned Cuba, but we can also look at Costa Rica, and some of the other Latin American countries and some of the poorer European countries, such as Greece that achieve life expectancies as high, or higher than the United States without that higher level of affluence.
Question: Is the U.S. inherently unequal?
Kate Pickett: Although the U.S.A. does come very near the top in terms of income inequality today among the rich capitalist countries, only Singapore does worse in our dataset. This isn’t a sort of fixed American problem. In the past, after the Second World War and right up through the 1970’s, you were one of the more equal of the western developed countries. And so, it’s not anti-American to suggest that American society might become more egalitarian, more equal. That’s actually very characteristic of your fairly recent past. And it’s certain true of the founding principles on which your country or society is based.
And so, although I think Americans have perhaps gotten used to high levels of inequality in the very recent past, you do have a long tradition of a more egalitarian ethos and of smaller income differences in your society. And so, I think the American Dream isn’t dead, although levels of social mobility are much slower here, educational performance is suffering, you can look to your past, I think, to recover that hope and that optimism and see it as a very true American ambition to have the kind of society that offers a fair opportunity for everybody.
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