"The Spirit Level"

This post is about "Equality, a True Soul Food," By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF in today's New York Times. This is the sort of article that makes The New York Times a great newspaper.

I had read Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level" last year. It was an eye-opening experience. I remember finding it difficult to understand why a book with such deep policy implications had been by and large neglected by the mainstream media.

I discussed Wilkinson and Pickett's findings in my Behavioral Economics course in the recently concluded fall semester -- the PowerPoint presentation that I used is available here.

Traditional economics -- which is usually concerned with the nature of a society made up of rational people -- finds it hard to understand why the mere fact of inequality would affect a rational individual: after all, why should your happiness depend on someone else's income or wealth?

Heterodox economists -- most prominently Thorstein Veblen in "The Theory of the Leisure Class" -- knew that there was something missing in the economist's disregard for the effect of inequality on our psyches. So did the American humorist H.L. Mencken. In "A Mencken Chrestomathy" (1949), he defined "wealth" as "any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband!" (By the way, the inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that $100 in 1949 is equivalent to $919.34 in 2010.)

Wilkinson and Pickett show that -- like it or not -- inequality affects us in a profound way. It corrodes our souls, and, eventually, our bodies too.

Please see their web site for more about the data underlying their book.