study, the British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offered in their landmark book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger the most comprehensive cross-national overview we have of studies on the well-being of adults.26 Drawing on 400 scholarly studies, the authors compared twenty-three of the richest countries in the world, looking at such things as rates of obesity, violence, drug abuse, mental illness, teen births, suicide, levels of social trust, school performance, social mobility, infant mortality rates, and overall health and life expectancy. Using studies based on data gathered by the United Nations, the OECD, and WHO, among others, Wilkinson and Pickett divided nations not by their wealth or government support for working families but by the gap between each nation’s richest and poorest 20 percent.27 In nearly all measures of human well-being, the low-gap nations were far better off than the high-gap nations—namely, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and especially the United States.
People in high-gap societies, they reported, suffer a homicide rate ten times that of people in low-gap nations as well as eight times the per capita rate of teen births and three times the rate of mental illness. Populations in high-gap societies are more likely than those in low-gap societies to disagree with the statement “most people can be trusted.” They worry more about muggings and rape, their children are exposed to more violence, and they live with larger prison systems. Again, it is not a nation’s GDP that correlates with these problem rates but, along with other factors, the size of the gap between rich and poor.
It is not simply that unequal societies have more poor people and the poor are more distressed than the rich. Even middle-class people in high-gap societies, the authors found, suffer poorer health, more mental illness and obesity, and feel less safe in their communities than do the reasonably affluent in low-gap societies. Those earning household incomes of $60,000 in high-gap countries suffer higher rates of death from all causes than do the $60,000-income people living in low-gap countries.28 Similarly, infant mortality is lower in low-gap Sweden than in high-gap England for families at every occupational level.29 Within the United States, Wilkinson and Pickett also compared low-gap states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and North Dakota with high-gap states such as Texas and Louisiana, where homicide, teen pregnancy, and high school dropout rates are higher.30
Evaluating Wilkinson and Pickett’s research, some scholars have confirrmed the authors’ findings regarding different rates of distress but have pointed out inconsistencies, too. Claude Fischer notes that between 1970 and 2003, U.S. homicide rates dropped by 30 percent even while inequality rose. However, he also concludes that “even the skeptics . . . do not argue that inequality is good for anyone but those on the top of the pyramid.”31 Another critic has questioned why the authors analyzed drug use instead of alcoholism, which is a bigger problem in low-gap Scandinavia than in the high-gap United States.32
As the “good outcome” nations are nearly all Scandinavian and the “bad outcome” nations are Anglo-American, Fischer observed, we are comparing the culture of “Sven” to that of “Jack.” Surely he is right that national culture matters. But if the political policies that result from Jack’s approach hurt families, maybe Jack should take a cue from Sven.
Another study of change over time in the United States provides powerful support for Wilkerson and Pickett’s thesis. In his book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010, the conservative political scientist Charles Murray traces the move between 1960 and 2010, during which the U.S. shifted from being a low-gap society to a high-gap one.33 Drawing on five decades of U.S. government data as well as a host of national attitude surveys, Murray compares the top 20 percent of non-Hispanic whites in the United States (those with bachelor’s degrees or higher, who are employed as managers or professionals) with the bottom 30 percent (those with high school diplomas or none, employed in blue-collar or low-level white-collar jobs).
In 1960, he found, rich whites (in their 30s and 40s) fairly similar to poor ones. Most were married, went to church, took pride in their work, and felt attached to their communities. Children were born to married mothers, and most couples stayed married and raised their kids together.
A half century later, family life was pretty much the same at the top and drastically worse at the bottom. In 2010, prime-age whites at the top pretty much fit the profile of prime-age whites in 1960: married, working, and involved in the community. But life for their lower-class counterparts had greatly changed. The lower-class mother who was likely to be married in 1960 was very likely to be single in 2010. Three percent of upper-class children but 22 percent of lower-class ones in 2010 lived with their single moms.34 Women in the bottom 20 percent have become less likely to go to church, to volunteer in their schools or communities, to trust their neighbors, or to say they were happy than were their counterparts in 1960. Men have come to work shorter hours. Unemployed men passed up low-wage jobs and became absent to their children. In their new leisure, they did not take classes, do things with their kids, or help around the home. Instead, white men in the bottom 30 percent did two things more than either their counterparts of 1960 or their upscale contemporaries of 2010: they slept longer, and watched more television.
Although such men say they want to work hard and have strong families, Murray argues that they have lost the moral values they would need to achieve those ends. But that leads us to wonder why the bottom fifth in low-gap societies such as Norway and Finland do not fit this picture of the slacker. And we can wonder why even the rich appear to suffer when they become so much richer than the poor. In 2010, Murray found that the poorest 20 percent had come to distrust other people more, and to feel less supported and less happy than their counterparts from when America was a more equal society. But so, too, did people at the top.35 In the General Social Survey data Murray uses, rich as well as poor were asked, “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” “Generally speaking, would you say that people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” In their answers, both rich and poor were more distrustful in the more unequal America of 2010 than in the more equal era of 1960. When trust breaks down, Murray observes, it does so “across the board.”36
What Wilkerson and Pickett discovered in their cross-national survey, Murray confirmed for prime-age whites in America. While the two studies tell the same story, they propose very different remedies. The authors of the Spirit Level call on governments to do the progressive “Sven” thing and develop policies to reduce the troubling class gap. The author of Coming Apart accepts the widened class gap, rejects government solutions, and urges rich kids to get to know poor kids and to join the conservative Heritage Foundation.37
Missing from both accounts is the deeper emotional story of the prime-age, blue-collar man. Shorn of his way of life, at the bottom of the heap in the job and marriage markets, he has quietly sunk into a dead-end crisis. His sleep and his television watching suggest less a loss of morals than a loss of morale. What is he watching on television? Ads for high-end vacations, scuba diving in Belize, mountain climbing in Switzerland, and whizzing through the Arizona desert in a luxury car. The rich often isolate themselves from the poor, but the poor tune in on the lifestyles of the rich every day.
Unable to support a family on his own wage as his father and grandfather did, the blue-collar man finds himself at the bottom in a high-gap society. This descent is evocative of a story Valerie Walkerdine and Luis Jiminez describe in their book Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialization, in which the honor, pride, and identity of men evaporated when iron and steel left a small town in southern Wales. They describe men in this former mining town in a form of “collective grief,” which passed from man to woman and father to son.38
The engines of much of this are American multinational companies that, faced with new competition for market share, have off-shored their assembly lines to cheaper labor pools in Mexico, China, and India.39
