Greater inequality

The happiness literature is unanimous on the claim that societies with high levels of inequality have less happiness than ones with more. The US, a highly wealthy and highly stratified society, has the same average level of happiness as Costa Rica, a country with much lower levels of inequality and much less per capital wealth. Costa Rica also has much lower levels of per capita greenhouse gas emissions. In a society with high levels of inequality those at the top are generally, on average, happier than those lower down. Other research has shown that status anxiety, or a worry about one’s place in society, is higher in a highly unequal society, even for those at the top, than it is for people at the bottom in relatively egalitarian societies. Since a significant driver of the human desire for more comes as a result of life in a society with high levels of inequality, a crucial part of our work to build a world where we can all live well must be focused on building a socially just society with high levels of equality.

In a society with a high level of inequality, having more does, on average, make a person happier than a person who has less. But that isn’t that more stuff makes you happier. Rather, in a stratified society, having more stuff than other people makes you happier than them. People are not innately driven to seek after more things. They are driven to feel good about themselves, and in an unequal society, where status comes from having more than the next person, we are on a treadmill of destruction to use our resources in ways that feed people’s status anxiety while enriching those who profit from it. High levels of inequality drive the engine of status seeking and status seeking is one of the drivers of environmentally destructive consumerism.

A crucial step to building a sustainable society, then, is challenging inequality. In The Spirit Level: Why Great Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson make a very compelling case, backed by strong empirical evidence, that inequality is a primary driver of many forms of social dysfunction. They argue that on many measures of social wellbeing, societies with higher levels of inequality have worse social outcomes. Their examples include mental health, incarceration rates, mortality, educational attainment, teen pregnancy, lower levels of social mobility, and more.

They find that the negative impacts are not just for the poor, or for the society on average, but that the well off in unequal countries also do worse on these measures. They also argue that the negative impacts of inequality are one of the most important drivers of a wide variety of bad social outcomes. They argue that there is a tendency for some countries to do well on just about everything and others to do badly. You can predict a countries’ performance on one outcome from a knowledge of others. If – for instance – a country does badly on health, you can predict with some confidence that it will also imprison a larger proportion of its population, have more teenage pregnancies, lower literacy scores, more obesity, worse mental health, and so on. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes.

Excerpted: ‘Consumerism, Inequality, and the Climate Crisis’

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