The Spirit Level Delusion redux

My last book The Spirit Level Delusion is now available on the Kindle at the throughly egalitarian price of £2.99. This is a second edition with a new chapter dealing with the aftermath of the book's publication and the, ahem, mature and thoughtful response from The Spirit Level's authors ("idea wreckers", "Nazis", "merchants of doubt" etc.)

It is, if I say so myself, a must-read for anyone interested in the misuse of statistics in the modern world. It's interesting how gullible people can be when presented with 'evidence' that fits their own preconceptions. If you and I went to see a psychic perform, we would—I trust—see through the cheap tricks and cold-reading very easily. We would not be fooled, but then we would not be the target audience. The target audience is people who already believe in spiritualism and have been recently bereaved. It's so much easier to trick people when they want to be tricked.

So it is with The Spirit Level, which is much closer to good old fashioned woo than to the social science it claims to be. Just as we might admire the performance of a good cold-reader, The Spirit Level is impressive as a clever mix of fact and fiction which disorientates the reader until the illusion becomes real. Those who want to be convinced—like Ed Miliband—have been. Those who are not emotionally wedded to its political message have looked at its empirical claims and found it wanting.

You don't have to have read The Spirit Level to enjoy this book so if you've got one of those new-fangled Kindles, make your own mind up for less than the price of a pint. If you, like me, haven't got one, it's still available in trusty ink and paper. The US Kindle edition will be available shortly.

Buy it from Amazon for £2.99 

"If you haven’t read a book that made you laugh out loud on the bus or the Tube in a while, try Christopher Snowdon’s superb release, The Spirit Level Delusion. But the book’s subtle humour is not the reason I am recommending it. The Spirit Level Delusion is, above all, a book that delivers and goes well beyond the promise of its subtitle – 'fact-checking the left’s new theory of everything'... It may well be that the next big battle for a free society will be fought against the new anti-wealth egalitarianism. Christopher Snowdon has provided defenders of freedom with powerful ammunition."

— Kristian Niemietz, Institute of Economic Affairs

"Snowdon picks so many holes in the theory that were it a building it wouldn’t be passed as structurally sound by the most crooked of third world local government surveyors... Next time someone starts spouting off about “equality” – a goal that has dug more graves than all the gods in history combined – send them a copy of Snowdon’s excellent book and make sure they read it from cover to cover."

— Ed West, The Telegraph

"The Spirit Level Delusion not only successfully and dramatically undermines much of the evidence in The Spirit Level, but also takes on the other fashionable opponents of economic growth... His engaging discussion unpicks the evidence of the anti-growth brigade and demonstrates that it is selective and partial. This book is excellent “tube reading”.

— Philip Booth, City AM

"This year’s most important publication"

— James Delingpole, The Telegraph 

"Comprehensive in its demolition...well written, amusingly thorough and easy to digest...You need this book."

— An Englishman's Castle

"As with Velvet Fist, Iron Glove, the entire volume is well-researched, very readable (I whizzed through it in one sitting) and utterly comprehensive in its demolition of The Spirit Level's data and conclusions."

—The Devil's Kitchen

"The Spirit Level Delusion is a masterful book, written in a calm fashion which is both informative and wide-ranging, whilst also being very entertaining."

— Dick Puddlecote

"A wonderful critique"

— Thomas DiLorenzo, Mises Institute

"A well-argued, well-written and convincing rebuttal ... essential reading."

—Londonbookreview.com

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, here's an overview I wrote for the journal Economic Affairs and another one for the Wall Street Journal.

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Does the Better Life Index support The Spirit Level?

Yesterday, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the Better Life Index. This project aims to measure the quality-of-life in countries using eleven criteria.

Since it was founded in 1961, the OECD has helped governments design better policies for better lives for their citizens. More recently, the OECD has been keenly involved in the debate on measuring well-being. Based on this experience, these 11 topics reflect what the OECD has identified as essential to well-being in terms of material living conditions (housing, income, jobs) and quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance).

Having gone to all this trouble to create a reliable index of well-being, it's worth asking whether the OECD data supports The Spirit Level's hypothesis that "more equal societies almost always do better"?

No, it doesn't. The poorest country—Portugal—does worst, but the data points appear to be scattered randomly.

In fact, if we drill down into the data we can see that not only is well-being not better in "more equal" countries, but the OECD's figures do not support The Spirit Level's key argument—that "more equal" countries have stronger social support networks which lead to a healthier and happier population.

Quality of social support network:

Life expectancy:

Self-reported health:

Life satisfaction:

There is no association between inequality and any of these variables. Indeed, with the exception of self-reported health—which seems to show the opposite of what The Spirit Level says—the regression lines are about as straight as you could expect from a randomly assorted set of data.

Taken together, the OECD's Better Life Index appears to support the view of a previous effort by The Economist to devise a quality-of-life index, which concluded:

There is no evidence for an explanation sometimes proffered for the apparent paradox of increasing incomes and stagnant life-satisfaction scores: the idea that an increase in someone’s income causes envy and reduces the welfare and satisfaction of others. In our estimates, the level of income inequality had no impact on levels of life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is primarily determined by absolute, rather than relative, status (related to states of mind and aspirations).

(Note on data: The first graph shows an index of all the OECD's criteria with each given equal weight. Singapore and Hong Kong are not OECD members so they do not feature in the list. Their absence can only benefit The Spirit Level's case here because these unequal countries tend to perform well under most criteria. As per The Spirit Level, tax havens and countries without equality data are excluded. All other counties with wealth greater than Portugal are included. The OECD produces well-respected inequality figures but these are not used in The Spirit Level (perhaps because they show Japan to be quite unequal). I have used The Spirit Level's preferred inequality figures here and throughout The Spirit Level Delusion.)

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The Spirit Level Delusion: Chapter 10 available for download

The new chapter of The Spirit Level Delusion, containing updates and additional material is now available for free download.

See the IEA blog for details.

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A week's levelling

Over at Ep-ology, Carl Philips has turned his critical eye towards a subject close to my heart—the eye-watering, near-medieval pseudo-science of The Spirit Level.

Snowdon's book (and associated interviews and blog posts) do a thorough job of debunking Wilkinson & Pickett and showing that [The Spirit Level] is utter junk science. I am confident that no serious reader who was genuinely interested in learning the truth could read what he wrote and still believe that there was a legitimate debate about whether W&P's analysis was legitimate.

You might surmise from this that Dr Philips—like many serious academics—is less than convinced by the evidence presented for Wilkinson and Pickett's curious brand of 'scientific socialism'. And you'd be right. He's writing about one of the five new articles I put up on The Spirit Level Delusion website last week. These are excerpts from a new chapter of the book that will be available shortly as a free download.

I hadn't intended to write more on this subject but Wilkinson and Pickett (The Spirit Level's authors) forced my hand when they published a new edition of the book attacking their critics for being professional "merchants of doubt" who are making "foul attacks" on their work because they're "free market fundamentalists". (As opposed to being normal, educated people who thought that empirical claims were there to be tested.) This paranoid and borderline libellous fairy-tale demands rebuttal, as do their other distortions and inaccuracies.

Specifically, it needs to be said that...

• They are deceiving their readers by suggesting that The Spirit Level reflects any sort of  scientific consensus

• They frequently misrepresent the views and findings of other academics

• They routinely ignore the real differences between societies

• Their work has been criticised around the world by many academics from across the political spectrum

• Contrary to their claim of consistency, they frequently chop and change between sets of data to achieve the desired result

I've exhausted everything I can say about The Spirit Level (for now at least). I've never had any illusions about how far people's minds can be changed through the use of mere facts, logic and evidence. Ultimately, the great majority of people believe what they want to believe and I'm mildly annoyed at having spent so much time writing about all this when there are so many good books out there still to read. Nevertheless, The Spirit Level remains a fascinating case study of how far the credulity of reasonably intelligent people can be stretched so long as they are told what they want to hear. For that reason alone, it should be of interest to anyone interested in today's intellectual environment.

I'll leave the last word to Carl, who makes some interesting points about trust and whose post—as with all his posts—should be read in full:

Of course, W&P made it easy for Snowdon to shatter their credibility by making it so brittle. They put the reader in the position of either believing they have unequivocal evidence for a "new theory of everything" (to quote from Snowdon's snarky subtitle), or concluding that they were just pulling a sales-job on the reader. If they had behaved like scientists – recognizing the best contrary evidence and being properly equivocal – rather than peddlers or evangelists, it would have been necessary to explore the merits of their argument to challenge their claims and credibility.

Still, it is useful to figure out how to debunk as easy a target as is The Spirit Level. We need to start with the challenge of winning one-sided debates before we can take on arguments that have some credibility.

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Pursue the truth wherever it leads

An anonymous commenter has alerted me to an article in the Financial Times calling for an end to "propaganda disguised as science". Most aptly, it cites the heart miracles of England and Scotland as cases in point:

What of the claim that the smoking ban reduced the incidence of what lay people call heart attacks in England by 2.4 per cent? This follows the more extravagant claim that the similar ban in Scotland had an effect of 17 per cent. The evidence for the former proposal is weak, and the latter claim is implausible. The incidence of heart attacks is falling steadily in both countries by around 3 to 4 per cent per year, with fluctuations but no obvious break in this trend. Better health education and reduction in smoking are part of the explanation.

In the year after the English ban, the fall in reported cases was 4.3 per cent. The effect claimed for the ban is the difference between the actual figure and that predicted by a model constructed by the researchers. In Scotland there was an above average fall in heart attacks – though nearer 7 per cent than 17 per cent – immediately after the ban, but this seems to have been a freak, since it was reversed the following year. The researchers derived their conclusions from a specially compiled dataset constructed over a limited period.

All of which will be familiar to regular readers of Spiked and of this blog (eg. here and here).

The studies I have cited are carefully referenced and use advanced statistical techniques. But sophistication of method is used to torture data to reveal conclusions that do not obviously follow from them, but which fit either the researchers’ preconceptions or the sponsor’s policy objectives, or both.

Indeed so. "Advanced statistical techniques" cover a multitude of sins. Far from providing empirical evidence, they offer unlimited scope for manipulation and require blind faith in return—the classic case being Anna Gilmore's risible computer model (which claims to be able to predict the annual number of heart attacks based on nothing but average air temperature and knowing which day of the week Christmas falls on).

Bad arguments do not necessarily invalidate the causes in which they are deployed. People should not drink and drive. Smoking is unpleasant and perhaps harmful to non-smokers. But these observations do not justify blurring the distinction between genuine scientific analysis and propaganda disguised as science. Policy should follow evidence, not evidence policy. It is time to reassert the principle that research must pursue the truth wherever it leads: the principle on which the social and economic progress of the past few centuries has depended.

Well said, that man. That man being John Kay, professor of economics at the London Business School, with whom I am already familiar since he is one of several serious academics to have criticised The Spirit Level—another fine example of propaganda disguised as science. He said of that book:

"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. If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers."

As usual, when presented with substantive criticism, The Spirit Level's authors resorted to feeble put-downs "He didn't read the book thoroughly, obviously," Kate Pickett said of the Financial Times' book reviewer (on the BBC's More or Less programme).

And they're at it again today in the New Statesman, plumbing new depths of ad hominem:

In their book Merchants of Doubt, the American academics Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway suggest that the defence of a kind of free-market fundamentalism is the most plausible explanation of why the same individuals and institutions are often involved in attacks on research in areas as diverse as tobacco control and the evidence on climate change. As well as defending the free market, they see themselves as countering tendencies to big government and protecting democracy. The same beliefs are likely to guide the attacks on the evidence of inequality's socially damaging effects.

This is an incoherent, self-aggrandising and paranoid argument. Incoherent because The Spirit Level has been criticised from people across the political spectrum, including John Kay who is "sympathetic to its basic stance". It is self-aggrandising because it equates their own social science with the physical sciences, and paranoid because even if such a cadre of powerful 'free-market fundamentalists" (ie. anyone to the right of them) existed, they would scarcely bother to direct their fire at a soft target like The Spirit Level.

To tie this fantasy together with the phrase "the same beliefs are likely to guide attacks [on us]..." is to employ the weasliest of weasel words. But now that John Kay has implicitly criticised tobacco control (albeit in a very roundabout way), Wilkinson and Pickett can rest easy in the renewed belief that they are the subject of an organised rightwing posse, rather than a few individuals who bothered to test their claims.

Speaking of whom, while I was incommunicado I received an e-mail from Dr. Mick O'Connell at University College Dublin, who has also taken an interest in Wilkinson and Pickett's work ("I purchased their book with high hopes of a convincing read, and the disappointment in the content propelled me to write a critique.") His working paper is titled 'Affluence versus Equality? A critique of Wilkinson and Pickett’s book The Spirit Level' and can be downloaded here. This is a sample:

Part of the implicit Spirit Level thesis is an obsession with consumerism – the latter authors pinpoint “our consumerism [and] addiction to shopping and spending” (p. 221). One has to wonder whether these people have tried high-street shopping recently? Am I alone in thinking it borders on the hellish?

Shopping, like air travel, perhaps once conferred a kind of jetset mystique, a bit like cheesy-pineapples on a stick. But now the negotiation of a busy shopping mall, or a thronged airport is about as glamorous as, well, cheesy-pineapple appetizers. Most of us, I contend, dislike shopping, but do it because we have to, because the kids demand Cheerios, the baby needs Pampers and the cat gets pretty mean without her Whiskas.

Of course, there is also a small but determined subset of people who still like air travel or shopping. But these people should be seen for what they are - strange eccentrics, not a substantial social trend. How do we know this? Because shops have to spend a fortune advertising just to try to get us through their door, and change their look and design every year to persuade us to stay.

Our ‘addiction’ to brands is actually so slight that as soon as ‘hard discounters’ like Lidl and Aldi expanded beyond their German base into the European grocery market, they enjoyed spectacular success. ‘Hard discounters’ offer a limited product range and a predominance oflow-price generic brands. “Second-class goods make us look like second-class people” argues The Spirit Level, (p. 222) – this is why we’re supposed to be obsessed with luxury goods. Not a bit of it – decent low-priced goods make us look like smart and astute people. Bye-bye Whiskas, hallo Katzen-Imbiss!

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Argumentum ad peer review

A good article by Sandy Starr about the argumentum ad peer review in Times Higher Education, which echoes what Brendan O'Neil wrote in Spiked back in August.

This part particularly appealed to me, for obvious reasons:

Once politicised in this way, peer review becomes a sort of quarantine, where ideas can be contested only by a select few before being presented to us as a fait accompli. Take, for example, the attitude of epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of the book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. They state imperiously: “Almost all of the research presented and synthesised in The Spirit Level had previously been peer-reviewed…In order to distinguish between well-founded criticism and unsubstantiated claims made for political purposes, all future debate should take place in peer-reviewed publications.”

Such disdain for arguments motivated by “political purposes” speaks (non-peer-reviewed) volumes.

As I have said before, there is no better alternative to peer review and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. The only problem with peer review is its public perception as a stamp of absolute truth. While honest academics in any field tend to be realistic about their limitations, something about human nature requires things to be seen in black and white, good and evil, right and wrong.

That peer review is merely a form of editorial control, which—at times—represents nothing more than allowing colleagues to publish an article the house magazine is a truth that is lost in the rush for certainty. As a rule of thumb, anyone who defends their work on the appeal to peer review and the appeal to authority alone, while shying away from debate about the work itself, should be treated with suspicion.

Starr concludes:

Peer review is valuable and worth defending, but only inasmuch as it promotes impartiality and standards within specialist fields. It should not be used as an arbiter of how we run our affairs. We already have a system for that – it’s called politics. And we are all qualified to participate in it, by virtue of being born human.

Please go read.

Sandy Starr will be appearing at the Battle of Ideas in London at the end of the month. Should be interesting.

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The curious case of The Spirit Level

Myths rarely turn into conventional wisdom overnight. Usually they evolve gradually, exaggerated and embellished in the retelling. But in the case of The Spirit Level, a work of political science published last year, the transition from legend to gospel has been made with dizzying speed.

As its subtitle suggests, The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better argues that the success of entire nations depends not on their absolute wealth but on the size of the gap between the highest and lowest earners. The ‘less equal’ nations suffer most severely from health and social problems, while the ‘more equal’ countries—particularly the Nordic states—are happier, healthier, more trusting, slimmer, more charitable and more socially cohesive.

The book’s authors—social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett—insist that this phenomenon is not due to poverty, but is the result of the ‘psychosocial’ stress of living in an “unfair” country. Inequality, they say, acts like a “pollutant spread throughout society” with rich and poor equally susceptible to its toxic effects. The lesson is clear—if you want to mend the broken society, reject free market capitalism and adopt the Scandinavian model.

What raises The Spirit Level above the average left-wing polemic is what The Guardian described as its “inarguable battery of evidence”. This takes the form of a series of scatter graphs which, while crude, are consistent in their message: nearly all undesirable outcomes are more common in less equal countries. So neatly does this “battery of evidence” appeal to those who thought Gordon Brown was too right-wing, that it has been readily embraced by many on the left, including both Milliband brothers. A hotly debated political issue has, it seems, now been answered by science; an ethical question that has exercised the greatest minds for centuries has been answered with hard data.

If only things were so simple. In reality, The Spirit Level presents the world as its authors would like to see it, with inconvenient facts ignored and whole nations erased from the narrative. While claiming to study all rich market economies, countries such as Czech Republic, South Korea, Slovenia and Hong Kong never feature. If they had, the reader would see that the latter performs very well under almost every criteria despite extreme inequality (as does Singapore), while the Czech Republic and Slovenia do much less well despite having a very narrow gap between rich and poor.

If the sample group seems oddly selective, so too are the criteria of what makes a country “do better”. Wilkinson and Pickett focus on Scandinavia’s relatively low rate of illegal drug use without mentioning its high rate of alcoholism. They devote a chapter to the higher rate of imprisonment in less equal countries without discussing the more pertinent—and hardly coincidental—fact that these countries also have less crime. They confidently assert that people in egalitarian societies are more philanthropic, have stronger family relationships and are more involved in the local community. Had they sought empirical evidence for any of this, they would have found that it is actually the people in less equal countries who give more to charity, have fewer divorces and are most likely to be a member of a local club or association.

And so it goes on. Remarkably few of The Spirit Level’s claims stand up to scrutiny. If the book demonstrates anything, it is how easily statistics can be transformed into the proverbial ‘damned lies’. Nonetheless, it is a book that should not be ignored. Not only has it built up a large and avid readership, but it represents a milestone for those who view the narrowing the wealth gap as more important than creating wealth. While the traditional aim of the left was to alleviate poverty by making the poor richer, inequality can be alleviated by narrowing inequality in ways that need not make anyone richer.

Indeed, Wilkinson and Pickett seem indifferent to how inequality is reduced and explicitly state that economic growth is not the answer. By their rationale, society would improve if the poor got 5% poorer so long as the rich got 20% poorer. Rounding up Britain’s millionaires and sailing them to the Antarctic would not only make life better for the poor but, still less improbably, would make life better for everyone. But without a compelling reason to believe such a reduction will materially benefit the working class, the authors leave themselves open to accusations of trading in the politics of envy.

Herein lies the problem with focusing on relative income instead of absolute income. There are things we can do to make the poor richer which might also reduce inequality, and vice versa, but the two objectives are not always compatible. The government’s recent decision to raise the tax threshold to £10,000, for example, should make the poor richer, but if the rich find ways to get even richer in the mean time, will the resulting inequality make things worse? It is not obvious how or why, but the logic of The Spirit Level says it must.

In the end, the case for reducing inequality remains a moral and political question. It is not one that be answered by science. The Spirit Level represents an ingenuous attempt to bridge the gap between faith and reason but, like all grand unifying theories, it can be filed under ‘too good to be true’.

[Originally published at the Cobden Centre]

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Collective delusions

One of the most entertaining parts of Tony Blair's autobiography is his account of Labour's lurch to the left in the 1980s. Blair admits that even he didn't think a Labour government was the best thing for the country in 1983, despite being a Labour candidate himself. He also recalls his bewilderment as activist upon activist declares that the country voted for Thatcher in 1979 because Labour wasn't left-wing enough.

The comparison with Labour today is striking, and few in the party seem able to learn the lessons from history. Two articles appeared today—one by me—involving the word 'delusion'. Over at Spiked, Brendan O'Neil marvels at Labour's cognitive dissonance.

After it ditched everything it once claimed to believe in, launched three disastrous wars, obliterated key freedoms, and went from viewing the working classes as potential voters to branding them a dumb, unhealthy blob in need of constant policing, you might think there is nothing left to admire in the Labour Party. But there is one thing. Its powers of self-delusion.

These are so strong, so unshakeable, that they cannot help but inspire a kind of bizarre, wide-eyed awe in anyone who beholds them. And they have been on full display following the election of Ed Miliband as the new Labour leader.

And at the Institute of Economics Affairs blog, I discuss Milliband Minor's wide-eyed faith in a certain piece of political junk science.

As Labour draws backs into its left-wing comfort zone, the easy answers being peddled in The Spirit Level will continue to hold a certain allure. Buttressed by soft science and sold under the guise of equality, the reheated policies of the Michael Foot era can almost appear new and exciting. In truth, reducing income inequality is easily achieved, if there is a will to do so and if one is prepared for the unintended consequences. There are no such easy answers for reviving the economy and tackling complex social problems.

The electorate understands this. Across Europe, the economic crisis has failed to provoke the backlash against capitalism that was predicted (and hoped for) in some quarters. Even in Sweden, voters have condemned the Social Democratic Party and its Spirit Level-loving leader to an unprecedented second successive electoral defeat. If he wants to avoid the same fate, Labour’s new leader will have to draw on more than populist paperbacks and wishful thinking.

Please take a look...

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Kate Pickett on More or Less

One of the few podcasts I subscribe to is BBC Radio 4's More or Less, which looks at the facts behind well publicised statistics. The show is presented by the author of The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, who has been mentioned before on this blog.

So I was intrigued to hear that the first show of the new series was promising to 'decode The Spirit Level debate'. For a show dedicated to debunking junk statistics it was obvious subject matter, but I wondered how Harford could 'decode' such a voluminous topic in the space of ten minutes.

In the end, he didn't need to. From the outset, Harford admitted there were too many competing claims to fit into a magazine show, and instead interviewed The Spirit Level's co-author Kate Pickett, who did more damage to the reputation of The Spirit Level in the space of ten minutes than any number of supposed "idea wreckers".

The interview (listen here for the next couple of days, or subscribe to the podcast) is essential listening if you've been following the controversy, as Pickett struggles to answer some fair and simple questions. Strangely enough, Wilkinson and Pickett's Equality Trust website—which is normally so quick to let people know when The Spirit Level has been mentioned in the media—have yet to post a link to this interview. And since the audio file won't be available for much longer, I've transcribed some of the key moments for posterity...


Falling back on other people's research

Wilkinson and Pickett's first line of defence is to claim that there are 100s of peer-reviewed studies which support their conclusion. As I have said before, this is just not true. Most of the studies they reference in The Spirit Level do not even mention income inequality.

In the More or Less interview, Kate Pickett once again claimed there was a "vast body of research" behind The Spirit Level. Tim Harford picked her up on it...

KP: We wrote a book that's intended to be a synthesis of a very vast body of research. Not only our own, but those of other people... There is a consistent and robust and large body of evidence showing the same relationship.

TH: That's an interesting point that you make. Often, in response to critics, you have referred not to your own book, not to your own data but to other published research. I'd really like to focus on the research that's presented in your book. It's very easy to say there are 50 papers, there are 200 papers, that support our research but we don't really know how you've selected those papers.

KP: We actually have completed a systematic review of all of the studies of income inequality and health, and we reference that in our book. We do examine things systematically and certainly—when we are doing our own research, publishing in peer-reviewed journals—we have to be aware of all the literature in the field. But that doesn't mean that every paper in the field has good methods, comes to the right conclusion, studies the right thing.

TH: I absolutely agree. One of the papers that you refer to in support of your argument on women's empowerment and women's status which was published in 1999 by Kawachi and some other authors, you claim supports your findings on women's status and income inequality. I've looked at their abstract. It doesn't seem to attack that question at all. It's simply on another subject—a somewhat related subject but not on the subject of income inequality.

KP: They've definitely published and we may have inadvertently put the wrong reference into that document [laughing nervously]. But Kawachi and Kennedy have certainly published finding a relationship between income inequality and women's status. The paper is Women's Status and the Health of Women and Men: a view from the States and it was published in Social Science and Medicine in 1999.

TH: That's the one I'm looking at.

Note: On page 58 of The Spirit Level, it states: "Researchers at Harvard University showed that women's status was linked to state-level income inequality. (36)"

Reference 36 is the Kawachi study ('Women's status and the health of women and men: a view from the States', 1999). As its title suggests, this study compared women's status with health, not with inequality. Indeed, the authors found a correlation between women's status and health even after controlling for income inequality.

Failure to look at other variables

The Spirit Level relies on the conceit that countries are fundamentally the same, with income inequality being the main variable that distinguishes them. This allows Wilkinson and Pickett to disregard other variables such as income, culture, history, demography, ethnicity, geography, law, politics and climate. Ignoring other variables and confounding factors would be a flaw in any study—as Harford points out, it breaks a basic rule of epidemiology—but when entire countries are being studied, this flaw becomes overwhelming. Pickett's response is revealing: she and Wilkinson do not "believe" that factors other than income inequality have an effect on a country's performance, so they don't bother looking at them.

TH: All of your studies are what are called bivariate analysis. In other words, they're all income inequality plotted against some other variable. Now, my understanding of best practice in social sciences is that you would always control for other variables. You would include 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 other variables and...

KP: Well, you wouldn't do that arbitrarily. You would do that if you believed those variables were potential alternative explanations of the relationship you're looking at.

TH: So, if I understand your statement correctly, you didn't include any multiple variable analysis because you just think that actually none of these variables are of interest—none of them are potential alternative explanations and you can just do the simple income inequality versus x analyses?

KP: That's right, but of course, again, other researchers have conducted studies that do control for more, where, as well as examining the effect of income inequality at the level of the whole society, people include individual's own levels of income or levels of education in those analyses and, again, those bear out our findings in relation to health.

TH: We come again to...you're basically rowing back from your analysis and saying...

KP: No. Indeed I'm not...

TH: "Don't look at our analysis, look at these other people because they support us."

KP: We believe that to control for individual income is actually over-controlling, so we would not consider that best practice.

Academic criticism

Although well received by some journalists and politicians, The Spirit Level has received a much cooler reaction from academics. One of the few serious academics to have reviewed the book was John Kay, Professor of Economics at London Business School and former Director of Institute of Fiscal Studies. Pickett's response to Kay's review speaks volumes...

TH: When John Kay reviewed your book in the Financial Times —and I believe John Kay would be broadly sympathetic to your idea that egalitarianism is important—he wrote: "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. If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers." Do you think that's fair?

KP: No, I don't think it's fair. [Testily] He didn't read the book thoroughly, obviously.

Outlandish claims 

In the last chapter of The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett make some extraordinary claims about what could happen if Britain reduced income inequality to Scandinavian levels. These include: teen births falling to a third of current rates, mental illness being halved, life expectancy rising by a year and the murder rate falling by three-quarters. Harford asks her about the last of these predictions.

TH: Clearly your book is a systematical analysis and partly also a political book. You have a political case to make—there's nothing wrong with that. You have public policy actions that you would like to see taken. But do you think you may have overstated some of those? Let me give you an example. On page 268 of you book—towards the conclusion—you say that if Britain became as equal as Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland, homicide rates could fall by 75%. But as I'm sure you've had pointed out to you by now, the UK's homicide rate is already below the average of those four countries.

KP: It's not actually. It's been pointed out that it's below Sweden. It's not below the average of those countries. Those claims [ie. in The Spirit Level], they're based on regression models and of course they're only as good as they're model they're based on.

TH: [Incredulously] But.. sorry... but you've made that claim!

KP: Yes, yes, we do...

TH: And you stand by it?

KP: Yes. That Britain would become a much healthier and more socially better functioning place if it were more equal.

TH: You said that if Britain became as equal as these four countries, homicide rates could fall by 75%. Do you not feel that's really overstating the case, or do you stand by that?

KP: That's based on the model. I mean, I think we could try it and see.

[end of interview]

TH: Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level. We did go to her Equality Trust website, by the way, and downloaded the data on homicide rates in the UK and in the relevant four countries and it does seem that I was right to say that the UK's homicide rate is already below the average of those four countries. You're listening to More or Less...

Stuart Austin has also blogged about this here. You can buy The Spirit Level Delusion here or here.

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On the level about epidemiology

[This is a guest post by Rob Lyons, deputy editor of Spiked] 

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have made great play of the fact that The Spirit Level is based on what they see as a science: ‘social epidemiology’. Leaving aside the dubious nature of their conclusions, it is worth noting that since the field of epidemiology has expanded, its explanatory powers have shrunk. While the ability to examine the spread of infectious disease has been invaluable, employing epidemiology beyond this has been - for the most part - bad news for our understanding of health. It's even worse as a method of understanding society.

The most famous early example of the application of epidemiological ideas is the ingenious manner in which John Snow, a London physician, managed to identify the source of a cholera outbreak in Broad Street, Soho in 1854. Simply by mapping the cases of cholera, he found they were clustered around one particular well. Whether Snow’s intervention to disable the well by removing the handle of its pump really saved the day is a matter of some dispute, but his method of plotting cases and looking for concrete causes was inspirational.

Fast forward to the 1950s, where a classic study by Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll identified for the first time (at least, outside Germany) the link between smoking and lung cancer. Bradford Hill and Doll sent a questionnaire to doctors to measure their smoking habits, then followed up the questionnaire some years later. Those doctors who smoked were much more likely to have developed the disease and no one would seriously disagree now that active smoking is a very significant risk factor for lung cancer.

There is a proviso, however: even with smoking, the most famous of these epidemiological connections, most of those engaged in the risky behaviour - smoking - do not die from lung cancer while there are a small number of non-smokers who die from lung cancer, too. Other explanatory factors, like a genetic predisposition to developing certain cancers, a less-than-ideal diet and sheer luck seem to come together, too.

Despite the search for other similar environmental health risk factors, from passive smoking to bacon butties, epidemiology has proven to be a fairly crude tool. Austin Bradford Hill, despite the success of his groundbreaking study, advised that epidemiological methods should be applied cautiously. He listed a variety of tests that should be applied to any putative connection between a risk factor and a disease, summarised in John Brignell’s book The Epidemiologists (see my review here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/2446/).

1. Strength: Is the association strong enough that we can rule out other factors?
2. Consistency: Have the results been replicated by different researchers, and under different conditions?
3. Specificity: Is the exposure associated with a very specific disease as opposed to a wide range of diseases?
4. Temporality: Did the exposure precede the disease?
5. Biological gradient: Are increasing exposures associated with increasing risk of disease?
6. Plausibility: Is there a credible scientific mechanism that can explain the association?
7. Coherence: Is the association consistent with the natural history of the disease?
8. Experimental evidence: Does a physical intervention show results consistent with the association?
9. Analogy: Is there a similar result to which we can draw a relationship?

When these tests are applied rigorously, nearly all the postulated links between risk factors and harmful effects fall apart. For example, in the case of passive smoking and lung cancer, the association is weak, it is not consistent, exposure is usually assumed rather than measured, and so on. In other words, an association between passive smoking and lung cancer is either non-existent or too weak to worth worrying about.

Let’s now turn to this new field of ‘social epidemiology’. We can see in The Spirit Level that Wilkinson and Pickett’s claims fall flat on their faces when Bradford Hill’s tests are applied. The associations are not strong, rarely rising much above ‘apparently random’; other explanations are usually both available and more plausible than the idea of inequality leading to status anxiety; other researchers, simply by minor tweaks in the data, have seen the associations disappear; and the wide selection of social problems deemed to arise from inequality is a long way from ‘specific’.

As someone who would broadly see themselves as left-wing, I find there is a more pressing problem with The Spirit Level: that it dumbs down the fight between different groups in society over the carving up of the wealth we produce from a genuine struggle for material betterment to a psychological disorder demanding intervention from on high. Seeing inequality in terms of status envy is thus actually disempowering rather than liberating. But regardless of our attitude to the political question of wealth distribution, The Spirit Level is well worth criticising as bad epidemiology, too.

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What's Swedish for 'appeal to authority'?

This morning saw the launch of the Swedish edition of The Spirit Level Delusion and an accompanying debate. If you speak Swedish, you can watch it here. I don't, so I've had to rely on reports of what was said, and was amused to see that The Spirit Level's Scandinavnian defenders resort to the same fallacious reasoning as those closer to home. With a mass of empirical evidence to discuss and dozens of questions to answer, this was the socialist response:

Journalist Ulrika Borg, who praised The Spirit Level as a new science, stressed that Wilkinson was a professor at three universities and has written for several major scientific journals, while the critics do not have such qualifications. She returned full time to what the majority of established scientists believe, and argued that critics are not worth listening to. Instead of discussing The Spirit Level, she seemed to imply that we should trust those with the finest qualifications and leave everything for them.

That's us told, then. Shut up and trust two social epidemiologists.

Alternatively, of course, you could listen to what these highly qualified academics have said...

"The bottom line is that this is a well-written, stimulating polemic. It nevertheless suffers from the same problems as one-trick ponies: if the one trick does not impress you, the show is a failure. Wilkinson and Pickett’s trick simply does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. When assessing this book as a contribution to the debate on the “right” level of income differences in modern society, it is a highly interesting, sympathetic attempt at addressing some of the important problems of Western societies. Yet, when assessing this book from a scientific point of view, one is forced to conclude that it is a failure."

Christian Bjornskov, Professor of Economics, University of Aarhus

"Wilkinson and Pickett have no time for nicely balanced judgements.  They believe that the evidence they present shows beyond doubt that more equal societies ‘do better’, and they are also confident that they have the right explanation for why this is so... Their case is by no means so securely established as they try to make out... it has been called into question by other leading figures in the field – a fact that WP might have more fully acknowledged... WP’s inadequate, one-dimensional understanding of social stratification leads to major problems in their account of how the contextual effect is produced."

John Goldthorpe, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Nuffield College, Oxford

"The book [The Spirit Level] will probably irritate most economists, including those like me who are sympathetic to its basic stance... One source of irritation is the authors’ apparent belief that the application of regression methods to economic and social statistics is as novel to social science as it apparently is to medicine.  The evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams with a regression line drawn through them.  If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers...

An obvious conclusion is that there are many societies which perform well in terms of their own criteria.  America, Sweden and Japan are just different from each other.  Their achievements are not really commensurable. But Wilkinson and Pickett are not content with this relativist position."

John Kay, Professor of Economics at London Business School and former Director of Institute of Fiscal Studies

"The evidence in The Spirit Level is weak, the analysis is superficial and the theory is unsupported."

Peter Saunders, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex

"I had strong suspicions about [The Spirit Level's] hypothesis and now a book has come along which I strongly recommend. The Spirit Level Delusion not only successfully and dramatically undermines much of the evidence in The Spirit Level, but also takes on the other fashionable opponents of economic growth. Author Christopher Snowden finds that social ills have many causes and that we need an economic system – free-market capitalism – that encourages economic growth if we are to have a flourishing society. His engaging discussion unpicks the evidence of the anti-growth brigade and demonstrates that it is selective and partial."

Professor Phillip Booth, Institute of Economic Affairs

“The analyses reported here have provided strong evidence that Wilkinson’s ecological approach to the study of the links between income, income inequality and health status is potentially flawed; his claim for a contextual relationship is not sustained when an underlying compositional relationship is also tested for... Wilkinson’s argument regarding contextual influences was based on a statistical artifact.”

Min Hua Jen, Imperial College, Kelvyn Jones, Professor of Human Quantitative Geography, Univ of Bristol, Ron Johnston, Professor of Geography, University of Bristol

"Although many aspects of this debate are still unresolved, it has recently become clear that the findings of that paper [Wilkinson, BMJ, 1992] were an artifact of the selection of countries... the evidence for a correlation between income inequality and the health of the population is slowly dissipating’

Johan Mackenbach, Professor of Public Health, University of Rotterdam

"Much of the literature needs to be treated sceptically, if only because of the low quality of much of the data on income inequality. Although there are many puzzles that remain, I conclude that there is no direct link from income inequality to ill-health; individuals are no more likely to die if they live in more unequal places.”

Prof. Angus Deaton, Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and the Economics Department at Princeton

"The preponderance of evidence suggests that the relationship between income inequality and health is either non-existent or too fragile to show up in a robustly estimated panel specification.  The best cross-national studies now uniformly fail to find a statistically reliable relationship between economic inequality and longevity."

Andrew Leigh, Professor of Economics, Australian National University, Christopher Jencks, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Timothy Smeeding, Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin (The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality, 2009)

The choice is yours.


[PS. If any Swedish visitors do watch the video, can you let me know how it went?]

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Equality bluff

It's time to say hello to the Swedish visitors to this blog (yes, we have some). Hej! I greet you with the following message:

Välkommen till boklansering: Jämlikhetsbluffen.

Årets akademiska kioskvältare, Jämlikhetsanden av Richard Wilkinson och Kate Pickett, har hyllats i Sverige för sina "forskningsunderbyggda argument" och för "övertygande och välargumenterade förslag". "Jämlikhetsforskarna" menar att graden av ojämlikhet i ett samhälle påverkar hur vi mår både fysiskt och psykiskt; hur länge vi lever; hur mycket kriminalitet och våld som finns; kort och gott är orsak till alla samhällsproblem.

I boken Jämlikhetsbluffen granskar journalisten Christopher Snowdon dessa påståenden. Han visar hur forskarna jämfört äpplen och päron. Och hur de konsekvent undvikit siffror och obekväma sanningar som riskerar att underminera deras tes. På sida efter sida smular Christopher Snowdon metodiskt sönder Wilkinsons och Picketts undermåliga argument och ofullständiga underlag.

På seminariet presenteras Jämlikhetsbluffen av välfärdsforskaren Andreas Bergh som skrivit förordet. Boken kommenteras av Ulrika Kärnborg och Daniel Suhonen. Moderator är Håkan Tribell.

Andreas Bergh är välfärdsforskare vid Lunds Universitet, Ratio och IFN. Föreläsare i nationalekonomi och författare till ett flertal böcker.

Ulrika Kärnborg är journalist och författare. Hon var länge litteraturkritiker i Dagens Nyheter och är i dag frilansskribent.

Daniel Suhonen är chefredaktör för SSU:s tidskrift Tvärdrag. Han är redaktör till antologin Vårt sätt att leva kommer att ändras (Leopard 2010).

Håkan Tribell är chef för Timbro Idé.

Roughly translated, that means that The Spirit Level Delusion is published in Sweden this week (as Equality Bluff, Equality Scam or, most likely, Equality Delusion). There is a book launch and a debate in Stockholm tomorrow. I won't be there because, despite the millions I supposedly rake in from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Burgers and all of the other cigar-chomping capitalists who secretly run the world, I haven't got a penny to my name.

However, the publishers have assembled a distinguished panel who will debate the issues. Let's hope it relies a bit less on paranoid and unfounded ad hominem attacks than the current debate in the UK. Details here.

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Peer review, The Spirit Level and the appeal to authority

Brendan O'Neil has written a great piece at Spiked on the subject of peer review (with a few quotes from me). The article was inspired by the ongoing debate about The Spirit Level, and its authors attempt to confine it to peer reviewed journals.

The irony is that the authors owe their success in spreading their political message to writing a book for the mass market. This book was not peer-reviewed (obviously - although it refers to peer-reviewed studies, as mine does), and many of the statements they have made in the mainstream media would never get past peer review. Having engaged with the real world, they seem keen to withdraw to the confines of academia at the first sign of trouble.

Since it was published last year, The Spirit Level – Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s book on why equal societies do better than unequal ones – has become a sparkplug for heated, testy debate. Not one, not two, but three pamphlet-length critiques of it have been published, while others have rushed to man the book’s intellectual barricades (‘This book’s inconvenient truths must be faced’, said a Guardian editorial).

Yet now Pickett and Wilkinson have imposed an extraordinary condition on future debate about their book. Because much of the criticism of The Spirit Level has consisted of ‘unsubstantiated claims made for political purposes’ (in their view), ‘all future debate should take place in peer-reviewed journals’, they decree.

Wow. In one fell swoop they have painted any criticism of their book that appears in non-peer-reviewed journals as somehow illegitimate. They snootily say that ‘none of [the] critiques are peer-reviewed’ and announce that from now on they’ll only engage in discussions that ‘take place in peer-reviewed journals’. So any peep of a critique that appears in a newspaper, a book published by a publishing house that doesn’t do peer review, a non-academic magazine, an online magazine, a blog or a radio show – never mind those criticisms aired in sweaty seminar rooms, bars or on park benches – is unworthy because it hasn’t been stamped with that modern-day mark of decency, that indicator of seriousness, that licence which proves you’re a Person Worth Listening To: the two magic words ‘Peer Reviewed.’

This is not to say that peer review isn't important. It is clearly better than the alternative. The problem, as Brendan says, is more to do with public perception and the inclination of some researchers to appeal to authority.

Being peer-reviewed no longer simply means that you wrote an academic report that was considered by other academics to be serious enough for publication – it means you possess the truth, Pure Knowledge, elevated insights that are not available to mere mortals who have not been PR’d...

To be peer-reviewed is to have the right to speak publicly on important matters – to be non-peer-reviewed makes you immediately untrustworthy, a bit of an intellectual charlatan, possibly even suspect in your motives.

The Spirit Level provides a useful example here. It owes much of its success to the simplicity of its evidence, but this simplicity—and the fact that all the data used are publicly available—makes it easy for anybody to check. It doesn't require a PhD in social epidemiology to take data from the United Nations website and plot it on a graph. And, as I show in my most recent book, the evidence simply doesn't stand up (and, if you want to appeal to authority, several distinguished professors have said the same thing).

Remember, we're not talking nuclear physics here. We're talking about the most basic statistical fact-checking of the most basic type of epidemiological study. If a scientist tells me there are black holes in the Universe I'm happy to take his word for it. If a social epidemiologist tells me that life expectancy is higher in Cuba than it is in America, I'm going to check it. And if she's wrong I'm going to say so.

As Brendan concludes:

It is ironic that Pickett and Wilkinson, so very keen on the idea of equality, don’t like the idea of an equal right to speak and critique. In this area of life, their attitude is: ‘If you’ve been peer-reviewed, let’s talk. If not? Screw you.’

Go read.


UPDATE

More Spirit Level-related discussion at The Taxpayers' Alliance. There is also an exhaustive list of links covering the debate of the last month on the right-hand side of The Spirit Level Delusion website.

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The little green book

A quick word about the book with the green cover advertised on the right hand side of this blog. If you're wondering what it's about and why you should read it, this article in Spiked gives a brief overview.

A ‘theory of everything’ that explains nothing

The author of The Spirit Level Delusion explains why Britain’s chattering classes were so wrong to embrace The Spirit Level and its argument that all of society’s problems are caused by inequality...

Read the rest here

A number of bloggers have now read and reviewed the book, including the Devil's Kitchen:

As with Velvet Fist, Iron Glove, the entire volume is well-researched, very readable (I whizzed through it in one sitting) and utterly comprehensive in its demolition of The Spirit Level's data and conclusions.

...The Spirit Level's pseudo-scientific rhetoric appears to have convinced those at high level in our society—including our idiot Prime Minister—that reducing inequality is not simply a necessary evil, but an important moral crusade.

You need The Spirit Level Delusion because our leaders are in the grip of The Spirit Level's delusion.

As DK's reference to "pseudo-scientific rhetoric" suggests, part of this little green book is about the misuse of statistics for political ends (one of my favourite topics, as readers will know). Those political ends can be broadly described as anti-capitalist with strong undertones of what Daniel Ben-Ami calls 'growth scepticism'. 

All of which would be of little significance had this pseudo-science not convinced a number of politicians and opinion-formers—who should really know better—that the case for bigger government is not a mere ideological preference but a scientifically proven imperative.

And that's why I think it's important. As the review at An Englishman's Castle says:

We are going to hear a lot more about how limiting growth and reducing inequality will make everyone happier and how we must legislate to make this happen. You need the evidence to show it is guff, you need this book.

The Spirit Level Delusion has also recently been mentioned by Rob Fisher, Vladimir and Stuart Austin and Tim Worstall. 

If any of that whets your appetite, you can get a copy here (UK) or here (worldwide).

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Book launch at the IEA

My new book, The Spirit Level Delusion will be launched at the Institute of Economic Affairs on Tuesday 11th May at 6.15 pm. You are very welcome to join us.

Christopher Snowdon’s new book — The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's new theory of everything — shines the light of reason onto some of the wilder claims made by the Left in the last decade, not just in The Spirit Level but in such books as Affluenza, Happiness, All Consuming and The Selfish Capitalist.

If you've ever heard that Cubans live longer than Americans, that capitalism leads to mental illness or that income inequality is the root of all evil, you need to hear Mr Snowdon dismember these and other statist myths.

RSVP here.

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On the Level

For anyone who's just popped over from the Adam Smith Institute, there is an embryonic Spirit Level Delusion website here.

Including:

20 questions for Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Case study: life expectancy

Thanks to Tim Worstall

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The Spirit Level Delusion

Anyone who believes that the age of innocence belongs to the past should read some of the reviews devoted to The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better (2009). The basic premise of the book should immediately raise suspicions. It is nothing short of a theory of everything, which finds a single factor responsible for almost every health and social problem in the Western world.

The natural response to someone who claims to have suddenly found a grand unifying theory of life is—or should be—profound scepticism. On this occasion, however, many readers and reviewers suspended disbelief (but not all of them). In some circles, the findings of The Spirit Level have become the conventional wisdom.

The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, the book appeared under the halo of science (statistics, in reality). Secondly, the theory of everything revolved around income inequality, and so appealed to many on the Left of politics. Put simply, the argument is that 'more equal' countries (principally the Scandinavian states) do better under almost any criteria you can think of than 'less equal' countries (principally the USA, UK and Portugal). The evidence for this is shown on a series of scatter graphs which are—prepare for an understatement—not always totally reliable (for an example, click here).

I hold no brief for extending inequality—I happen to be in the bottom 10% of earners myself—but if the argument for bigger government and higher taxes is to be made, it shouldn't be made on the junk economics and voodoo science of The Spirit Level.

Regular readers will know that I am interested in the misuse of statistics. That is what first attracted me to The Spirit Level. My new book—The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's new theory of everything—tries to shine the light of reason onto some of the wilder claims made by the Left in the last decade, not just in The Spirit Level but in such books as Affluenza, Happiness, All Consuming and The Selfish Capitalist. 

So if you've ever heard that Cubans live longer than Americans, that Oscar winners live longer than other actors, that capitalism leads to mental illness, or that income inequality is the root of all evil, I hope you'll buy a copy. It will be available from the usual retailers (Amazon, Tower, Barnes & Noble etc.) shortly. I also have a limited number of copies here if anyone would like one a bit sooner. Postage and packing is free and overseas orders will be sent by air-mail.

UK and Europe (£)

Signed copy £8.99 Unsigned copy £8.99

North America (US$)

Signed copy $15.99 Unsigned copy $15.99

The Spirit Level Delusion:Fact-checking the Left's new theory of everything

by Christopher Snowdon (with a foreword by Patrick Basham)

Democracy Institute/Little Dice - published May 17 2010

www.spiritleveldelusion.com

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