Inequality is fatal?
May 14, 2009 – 10:55 pm by JohnIn the April 30 issue of Nature, the new book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is reviewed. Some excerpts from the review:
Why are our chances of reaching a great age so affected by wealth and status? The obvious answer is that more income buys better health. But it is a lot more subtle than that, as shown three decades ago by the Whitehall Study, in which epidemiologist Michael Marmot examined the death rates of British civil servants. To the surprise of many, he found that his subjects—all in continuous paid employment and with equal access to health care—were more likely to die in any given year if they were in a lower-grade job than a higher one. Marmot concluded that the employment hierarchy itself created status-dependent stress that affected the workers’ health.In their new book, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett extend this idea with a far-reaching analysis of the social consequences of income inequality. Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world’s richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials—such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal—the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal—do worst.
Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country. A variety of problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children at school, follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust in the United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.
First of all, while I am far from defending Republicans, the authors’ and/or the reviewer’s assertion that Republicans carry most of the blame for inequality and mistrust is absurd and puts the rest of their arguments under suspicion. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention knows Republicans have been growing more and more left-liberal over the years, to the point that we have neocons that resemble Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt more than Eisenhower or Goldwater or any other politician associated with conservatism in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Second, what “long Republican ascendancy”? And what exactly did the idiots in the Democratic Party do to stem this rising tide of inequality? Tax and spend and inflate and ruin schools and destroy families and wage a war on drugs? Which was different from Republicans…how?
The review continues:
How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem. This triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure and blood sugar levels, from which myriad health and social problems unfold. This seemingly hard-wired response has been well studied in social hierarchies of monkeys; low-status animals become predisposed to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Humans experiencing chronic stress exhibit similar symptoms, accumulating abdominal fat under the influence of a part of the brain associated with addiction.Cortisol overrides ‘feel-good hormones’ such as oxytocin, involved in establishing trust, and dopamine, the reward signal that reinforces memory, attention and problem-solving ability. Cortisol-induced stress predisposes some individuals to mental illness or violent behaviour. It can hasten the arrival of puberty, which may prompt premature sexual adventures, providing a plausible explanation of the high prevalence of teenage pregnancies in the most unequal societies. Cortisol also transmits stress to a fetus, with lasting consequences for physical and emotional development.
I have heard about some of that research, and it is probably all valid as far as it goes. The only problem is: cortisol doesn’t know why it is released or what situations it is acting in. It only increases our perceived stress level, whatever that means; it’s a broad term. These authors would have us believe that success (wealth and high-level job status) necessarily and systematically involves less stress than mediocrity and even poverty. I don’t believe it for a minute. That sounds like the tendency, driven by class-envy and class-warfare, of liberals to refer to poor people as the “working class,” as if wealthy, educated people earned their status by privilege and conniving. The opposite is usually true. Successful people typically work harder and longer than others to get there, and get rewarded with more stress, more responsibility, and less free time. Smart, industrious people, who are more often “successful” than others, I think, experience plenty of stress during high school, college, graduate school, and after. The cortisol doesn’t know the difference; it doesn’t know whether it’s being released because of the pressures of succeeding or the stresses of not succeeding. Neither, I’d wager, do our bodies or our lower-level neural functions.
The research with primates showing that animals lower in their social hierarchy are less healthy than the higher-status animals offers one good argument against mine, namely, that monkeys might not have the higher cognitive functions and psychology that allow humans to differentiate between, and fret over, different types of stress like socioeconomic stress, the pressure to succeed at a difficult job/school, the stress of having little free time, raising kids, your country descending into a poverty-ridden police state, etc.—but the monkeys still suffer from their hierarchy-related stress, which I think has been shown to be correlated with (maybe caused by?) cortisol. This would at least partially invalidate my notion that cortisol affects our organs and nervous systems the same regardless of what our higher-level (uniquely human) psychologies perceive as the causes of our stress, because if monkeys, with their sub-human brains and incapacity for understanding subtle differences between stressors, are still harmed by the stresses of being lower on the totem pole, then maybe different stressors affect humans differently in some fundamental way, even though the hormone (cortisol) is the same and all of our other organs, including the brain, are basically similar across a large population. (If there were some fundamental, neurological differences between people who end up wealthy and those who don’t, which is absurd, then those would likely be the causes of their bad health, not the inequality.)
(Then again, maybe we should give primates more credit because maybe they can differentiate between different stressors about as well as we can.)
One aspect of the primate studies that might make them invalid to be compared with human societies is: I don’t know that higher-status monkeys experience all that much stress, the way higher-status people do. Do wealthy humans in executive-level jobs have lower cortisol levels than others? Does this relate to the higher-status monkeys in any meaningful way? Probably not.
The book also addresses the impact of inequality on the hormone oxytocin, dubbed the “trust hormone.” Cortisol reduces the effectiveness of oxytocin, which the authors skew to imply that mediocrity- and poverty-induced stress makes humans less trustful of others and exacerbates their psychological, and therefore physiological, problems. Same thing for dopamine.
Not surprisingly, libertarian social and economic theory offers solutions to both the problems addressed by the book and the problems with its analysis. Libertarians have explained extensively how certain Statist policies increase inequality. Four such things are inflation, government schooling, dependence-inducing social-welfare programs, and outlawing of vices (prostitution and the War on Drugs, which keep urban minorities poor and in a state of war with police and each other). Libertarianism also explains that nations that extend their welfare states to such an extent that these inequalities are mitigated (France, Scandinavia) make everyone poorer, not everyone richer. Wilkinson and Pickett would argue that the greater good is evidently served by making society poorer but equaler rather than making everyone richer but some more than others. That isn’t a metaphysical impossibility, but the problem is that this can only be true in the short run; as Mises and Hayek showed, a middle-of-the-road policy must lead to totalitarian socialism.
To dispense with the odd claim that a massive welfare state can make people more trusting and friendly towards each other, one only needs to peek out of his ivory tower and look at the world for a minute or two. Almost everything the State does causes demonstrably more strife and divisiveness among its subjects, as political instead of economic decision-making pits factions against each other and each new interference with our freedoms of exchange and association lead us to seek more of the pie, more control over others—lest they take our slice along with our control over ourselves.
Lastly, libertarians of all stripes assert that true market anarchism would reduce the sizes of the upper and lower classes, putting more people into the middle class while making everyone richer in the long run. I have never seen anything in any Statist theory or governmental program that would reduce the influence of the power elite while enlarging the economic pie for everyone. Government takes and redistributes; it doesn’t create wealth or facilitate the growth of wealth. It rewards the rich and powerful by giving favors, protection, and barriers to entry into most industries; it limits the options of the poor by insisting on running their schools and providing for them while turning our cities into police states; and it squanders everyone’s wealth by inflation and immeasurable waste.
