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In the London Review of Books University of Cambridge lecturer David Runciman said that the book fudged the issue of its subtitle thesis of its UK first edition, and asked whether it is that “in more equal societies almost everyone does better, or is it simply that everyone does better on average?".......
In the European Sociological Review, sociologist John Goldthorpe argued that the book relied too heavily on income inequality over other forms of inequality (including broader economic inequality), and demonstrated a one-dimensional understanding of social stratification, with social class being in effect treated as merely a marker for income. He concluded that much more research was needed to support either the Wilkinson and Pickett "account of the psychosocial generation of the contextual effects of inequality on health or the rival neo-materialist account".[12]
Richard Reeves in The Guardian ........said there were problems with the book's approach. "Drawing a line through a series of data points signals nothing concrete about statistical significance [...] since they do not provide any statistical analyses, this can't be verified."......
John Kay in The Financial Times said that "the evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams, with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests".
Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, described it as "an intellectual flagship of post-crisis compassion, this reader-friendly fusion of number-crunching and moral uplift has helped steer a debate about the route to a kinder, fairer nation.
........Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph declared it to be "more a socialist tract than an objective analysis of poverty"..........
Gerry Hassan in The Scotsman said that Wilkinson and Pickett's claim that "more equal societies almost always do better" was "a universal, sweeping statement - which cannot be substantiated by most of their data."
In 2010, Tino Sanandaji and others wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they said, "when we attempted to duplicate their findings with data from the U.N. and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we found no such correlation".
The same group of researchers published a report for the Taxpayer's Alliance[22] providing details of their data analysis and coming to the conclusion that "the most straightforward measure of health simply has no robust correlation to income inequality when comparing industrialized countries using standard OECD and UN statistics".
Peter Robert Saunders, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Sussex University, published a report for the think tank Policy Exchange questioning the statistics in The Spirit Level. He claimed that only one of the correlations in the book—that between infant mortality and income inequality—stood up to scrutiny, and that the rest were either false or ambiguous.
Christopher Snowdon, an independent researcher and adjunct scholar at the Democracy Institute,[27][28] published a book largely devoted to a critique of The Spirit Level, entitled, The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything.[29] One of its central claims is that Wilkinson excludes certain countries from his data without justification, such as South Korea and the Czech Republic. It also argues that Wilkinson and Pickett falsely claim the existence of a scientific consensus when much of the literature disagrees with their findings. ...........
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