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Inequality: the root of all problems?

Professor Yaffle

Butterbeans and Breadcrumbs
Professor Yaffle
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I have recently been reading a lot of The Equality Trust's material and was wondering what other people thought of them. Their basic idea is that most social problems (physical and mental health, obesity, violence, teenage pregnancies drug abuse etc) in developed countries vary closely with the amount of income inequality within the country (it also seems true on a state level within the US).

Can anyone spot any major flaws in their evidence or reasoning? Because I am becoming a bit of a bore about this and wanting to interject it into every conversation I have, as it has such wide relevance. If someone found something majorly wrong with it, I might find myself able to talk about other things again.
 
This is what they say about causality:

To suggest that these relationships are causal does not involve a major departure from what we know already. Within countries we know that all the components of our Index of Health and Social Problems are strongly related to social status: the further down the social ladder the more common they become. The new part of the picture is simply that if you stretch out the social status differences all the problems related to social status become more common. Rather than postulating entirely new causal processes we are therefore only providing a bit more information about the relationships that have always been recognised.

People who have studied the graphs on this web site and in The Spirit Level carefully will have noticed that there is a clear tendency for countries which do badly on one outcome to do badly on others. We show evidence that 10 or 12 different problems tend to move together. That implies that they share an underlying cause. The association between inequality and our Index of Health and Social Problems is very close and no one has yet suggested an alternative.

Lastly, as the different chapters in our book show, many of the causal processes leading from inequality to the various health and social problems are already known. For example, the effects of social status on health have been demonstrated among monkeys in experiments which kept diet and material conditions the same while altering social status by moving animals into new groups and the effects of chronic stress on the immune and cardiovascular systems are increasingly well understood. Similarly, violence is more common in more unequal societies (where status competition is intensified) because it is so often triggered by people feeling looked down on, disrespected and humiliated.
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http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence/frequently-asked-questions#causality
 
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Also:

  • Doesn’t causality go in the opposite direction – more social problems leading to wider income differences?
From time to time changes on income distribution may be triggered by new governments with different philosophies or economic theories. This happened in a number of countries when monetarism and neo-liberal ideas became common during the 1980s. Legislation was introduced to weaken trade union powers and changes in taxes and benefits were introduced which contributed to a widening in income differences. However, although it can be said that a change in political and economic ideology contributed to widening income differences, there is no doubt that governments did not intend to weaken community life or to increase levels of violence, teenage birth rates, drug abuse or any of the other problems which go with greater inequality. These were all unintended consequences of widening income differences.

Nor can an increase in health and social problems be the cause of widening income differences. As we have seen, a wide range of health and social problems tend to move together – countries which do badly (or well) on one outcome tend to do badly (or well) on others. If they were not all results of inequality but were instead separate causes of inequality, that would not explain why they move together. Indeed it is not plausible to think that problems such as homicide, obesity and low standards of child wellbeing – which are all associated with inequality – could be a cause of it.
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[opinion]

Inequality is not the problem. The concept of "fairness" is.

People are born unequal - that is, no two people are the same. Even identical twins have subtle differences. Some people are strong, some have greater dexterity, and others are healthier than their peers.

It's when people lacking in some ability (or maybe the initiative to actually earn their way) seek to legislate equality and demand the same benefits as the more "gifted" people without having earned those benefits that is one of the roots of the problem.

Another root is the idea that if legislation can not elevate the lesser-gifted folks to the ranks of the greater-gifted, then the lesser folks are somehow "entitled" to drag everyone else down to their level through legislation ... or revolution.

People are not equal in ability even though they may have equal rights - some are just more (or less) equal than others.

[/opinion]
 
Francesca R said:
I haven't looked very closely but what is their metric for income inequality?
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In our book, for all of our international comparisons, we use the 20:20 ratio measure of income inequality from the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Indicators, 2003-6. As survey dates vary for different countries (from 1992 to 2001), and as the lag time for effects will vary for the different outcome we examine, we took the average across the reporting years 2003-6. For the US comparisons we use the 1999 state-level Gini coefficient based on household income produced by the US Census Bureau.
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http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence/methods
 
I think the "remedies" section of their stuff presupposes cause and effect.

It also has no consideration I can see of undesired consequences of the remedies themselves, as in "Anything that moves inequality back the other way must be net positive".

Finally I think the "economic democracy" idea will not be (and never has been) terribly viable regardless of public support for it, though the tax and redistribute one generally is (as long as electorates are supportive which they usually are).

That's a quite quick examination of this so it's quite possible it could be taken to pieces.
 
Sorry-- also it's true that correlation doesn't imply causality. But it seems to me there's another fallacy here: throwing out the meaningfulness of any correlational data for that reason, as causality does imply correlation.

I think the data pattern is so well established that critics need to go beyond asserting the correlation doesn't imply causation fallacy and come up with the 3rd variables (jenson's factor x's) that really explain these relationships.
 
Just to clarify bpesta (its not clear from your posts whether you realised this), the OP isn't talking about linking the outcomes to socioeconomic status, but to income inequality - even when overall wealth of the area is taken into account.

This set of powerpoints shows the relationships between these outcomes and average incomes in states/countries (not much of a relationship) and with income inequality (strong relationship).

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/docs/spirit-level-slides-from-the-equality-trust.ppt#268,14,Slide 10
 
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Fnord said:
People are born unequal - that is, no two people are the same... It's when people lacking in some ability (or maybe the initiative to actually earn their way) seek to legislate equality and demand the same benefits as the more "gifted" people without having earned those benefits that is one of the roots of the problem... People are not equal in ability even though they may have equal rights
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OK, so the person running a company usually has greater ability and initiative than the lowest-paid employee... but how much so? Is (s)he twice as good as them? Or fifty times? Or ten thousand times?

To defend a given level of income disparity on that general basis is to assert not merely that those at the top are worth more than those at the bottom, but that they are worth more by a specific amount which their incomes accurately reflect. The problem is that the amount of difference between the top and bottom incomes varies wildly from company to company, government agency to government agency, and population to population, much more than the difference between top and bottom usefulness/worth could be said to vary. In other words, why does the Big Boss make 15x as much money as the Common Lackey in one place, while at another place it's 3x and at another place it 952x? Can anyone seriously say that one place's Big Boss is worth 15x as much as his Lackeys are and another place's Big Boss is worth 952x as much as hers?

The difference between the ratios at these two places has to be influenced largely by some other factors. And saying that it's necessary for there to be top and bottom incomes and a gap between them doesn't address the question of how big that gap should be or why it's different (and/or SHOULD be different) in different places.

Also, the fact that we're comparing various populations with different top-to-bottom distributions of income means that IQ's ability to explain or predict the difference between the top people and bottom people in the same population is irrelevant. Discussing the likelihood of the smartest person around getting the highest income around does nothing to address that same person's counterparts in another population, who also have the highest IQ and income around, still have a lot more or less income than the person we were originally talking about. The only way IQ can come into this issue at all is not with the well-worn data on individuals top-to-bottom in the same population group; it's is if the two populations have radically different average IQs or radically different IQ distributions (both of which seem very unlikely, especially on the large scale that seems to be required here).
 
Inequality is the natrure of the world and stimulus for evolution. We evolved to live in stratified societies. There is no way to remove it.
 
Dogdoctor said:
Inequality is the natrure of the world and stimulus for evolution. We evolved to live in stratified societies. There is no way to remove it.
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Firstly, this is something we call the naturalistic fallacy and it's a load of bollocks.

Secondly, even if we were such prisoners of evolution that we could never have an economically egalitarian society, that would have absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether less unequal societies, all else being equal, are better.

Regardless of what you think about human nature, it's just a brute fact that some societies are more unequal than others.
 
Dogdoctor said:
Inequality is the natrure of the world and stimulus for evolution. We evolved to live in stratified societies. There is no way to remove it.
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Laying aside the naturalistic fallacy, there actually isn't much social stratification in many modern hunter/gatherer societies (which is closer to our evolutionary roots), and what stratification exists is nothing close to what you see in post-agriculture large societies.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
Firstly, this is something we call the naturalistic fallacy and it's a load of bollocks.

Secondly, even if we were such prisoners of evolution that we could never have an economically egalitarian society, that would have absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether less unequal societies, all else being equal, are better.

Regardless of what you think about human nature, it's just a brute fact that some societies are more unequal than others.
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We are not prisoners of evolution. We can change things but if you look at human societies they are all unequal. Certain members of each society have higher standings than the rest. Yeah some are more unequal than others. We are however prisoners of our genetic codes. What our genetics willl allow is what we can do. If it is such a good idea why didn't a society develop based on this idea? I would say that because human societies are stratified it's a good bet that our genetics are to blame. People are not equal, how can they be?
 
kellyb said:
Laying aside the naturalistic fallacy, there actually isn't much social stratification in many modern hunter/gatherer societies (which is closer to our evolutionary roots), and what stratification exists is nothing close to what you see in post-agriculture large societies.
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Hunter gatherer societies live with less of a buffer from death than we do in modern societies. If they don't pull their weight they will and do die. It's a motivation for them to be reasonably productive and cooperative. We don't live in those conditions and what works for them doesn't work in modern society. What do hunter gatherer societies do with members who are non productive? I'm not sure but bet there are harsh realities that we don't face.
 
I agree (in part for religious reasons, which most people on this board wouldn't be interested in...) that on some levels everyone is equal. That does not, of course, as others have noted, mean every is equal in their abilities etc. and trying to "force" such an equality is a problem. However, there are many areas of "unfair" inequality, and I think it is ignoring that unfair inequalities exist and becoming a more static, stratified society, that worsens the problem (others have written about that, I mean generally not in this thread, I don't want to go too far off-topic, as a for-instance, the increasing and in my view unnecessary insistence upon people having college or university degrees as a de facto prerequisite for many jobs that many people without such degrees could do equally well).

While the U.S. and Canada (for example) are much better than most countries at allowing opportunities to advance for those with intelligence/skills/motivation, it is very far from perfect. Unfortunately, I think too many people have an idealized view and somehow think that there is a high correlation/causal relationship between success and skill. I've known people (as we all have) who've gotten jobs because of family connections or "luck" despite not "deserving" those jobs compared to others, and people who although smart and skilled and driven have relatively low-paying jobs because of bad luck or "good" choices which hurt their income potential (e.g. they needed to help support an ill family member and so had to enter the workforce sooner before college/university or whatever).

So to assume that people who earn more or less or are otherwise unequal are necessarily deserving of such unequal treatment is specious (I use "deserving" here in a non-moralistic sense, i.e. being a better athlete in a more popular sport or a better corporate executive or a better-looking and more skilled actor, whatever). There's what for want of a pithier term one may call a "luck factor".

To take the "hunter gatherer" society example. A strong, agile guy in such a society would be a lot more successful than a weaker, clumsier but smarter person in most circumstances. In a more modern society the advantages are reversed (except for professional athletics or possibly acting). The family you're born into (I mean here not genetics, but the socioeconomic circumstances, skin colour, gender, etc.) makes a huge difference even now. You happen to have an upset stomach and a bad headache the day you write your SAT. Whatever.
 
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