After reading Wilkinson’s and Pickets ‘The Spirit Level’ I picked up a copy of this rebuttal by Christopher Snowdon, in the interests of fairness.
‘The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone’ was published in 2009 to wide acclaim on all sides of the political spectrum and argued through evidence garnered from reliable sources [notably the UN and EU] that greater inequalities in society hampered the overall effectiveness of a nation’s economy and health, with The UK and US emerging as two of the most unequal societies in the developed world.
This book is one of the first to challenge those findings. However, the problem Snowdon has are first perceptions; what is he trying to say? That Wilkinson and Pickett are wrong and the UK is actually a more equal place than they describe, or that its societal inequalities are actually acceptable, that in fact a small minority of people should be allowed to be ‘super-rich,’ for the ‘benefit of all’, and an increasingly marginalised underclass is a fair price to pay for this, particularly as they usually deserve to be there through their own failings, anyway?
The first stumbling block this book has to get over [and fails] is that any ordinary person [i.e. 95% of the population] can see day in day out that Britain is a very unequal society and we are, frankly, in a social and economic mess where any sense of community is barely a memory now for much of its population. The vast majority of people can sense there is something very wrong with this, even if they cannot fully articulate it.
So again the question begs to be answered: what is Snowdon trying to prove? His association with a right wing libertarian think tank probably explains a lot, and the speed of this rebuttal to the publication of ‘The Spirit Level’ clearly shows Wilkinson and Pickett’s book must have disturbed the libertarian right considerably, but having said that Snowdon’s book is well written and, as a couple of reviewers have said, is a good ‘tube read’ which is no bad thing, but probably sums up its ‘academic’ weight. The fact is unfortunately, apart from spending a lot of time trying to shoot down Wilkinson and Pickett’s figures and methodology, Snowdon comes up with very little counter-analysis of his own.
Wilkinson and Pickett’s ‘The Spirit Level’ is far from perfect, but its overall findings are solid and its argument is convincing, striking a cord I would imagine with the underlying feelings of very many people. Snowdon’s rebuttal is interesting but at the end of the day, a paper tiger. Certain points made in the ‘Spirit Level’ are obsessed over as incorrectly/disingenuously presented, yet they are nonetheless fully explained by Wilkinson and Pickett in their book. For example much is made of the sample group of rich countries, yet the criteria for their selection is fully explained by W & P, and going on for example about places like Hong Kong not being included is simply erroneous from the outset, as it is not even a nation state.
The fact remains, despite its occasional airbrushing over of a few details, ‘The Spirit Level’ is a highly successful, peer reviewed work that will have a positive impact for years to come. Snowdon’s critique though, cannot escape the feeling of being an exasperated bleat of indignation from the neoliberal right, who are trying to maintain their well-worn strategy of the past 30 years of muddying reality with disinformation and spin. It has worked for a couple of decades, but this book shows that these techniques may well now have run its course, and neoliberalism is on the run. And it is the majority of the UK/US population who will benefit from this, which is no bad thing.
