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Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
Bloomsbury Press
January 2010
On Sale: December 22, 2009
352 pages
ISBN: 1608190366
EAN: 9781608190362
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The eye-opening and headline-generating UK bestseller that
shows how one single factor—the gap between its richest and
poorest members—can determine the health and well-being of a
society. “This is a book with a big idea, big enough to change
political thinking…In half a page [The Spirit Level] tells
you more about the pain of inequality than any play or novel
could.”
—Sunday Times (UK ) It is well established that in rich societies the poor have
shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social
problem. Now a groundbreaking book, based on thirty years’
research, takes an important step past this idea. The Spirit
Level shows that there is one common factor that links the
healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality
among their members. Not wealth; not resources; not culture,
climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore,
more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within
them—the well-off as well as the poor. The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level reveals
striking differences, not only among the nations of the
first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost
every modern social problem—ill-health, violence, lack of
community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness—is more
likely to occur in a less-equal society. This is why
America, by most measures the richest country on earth, has
per capita shorter average lifespan, more cases of mental
illness, more obesity, and more of its citizens in prison
than any other developed nation. Wilkinson and Pickett lay bare the contradiction between
material success and social failure in today’s world, but
they do not simply provide a diagnosis of our woes. They
offer readers a way toward a new political outlook, shifting
from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more
sustainable society. The Spirit Level is pioneering in its
research, powerful in its revelations, and inspiring in its
conclusion: Armed with this new understanding of why
communities prosper, we have the tools to revitalize our
politics and help all our fellow citizens, from the bottom
of the ladder to the top.
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