The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better?

I couldn’t become affectionate enough to the book ergo I didn’t read it (let’s put the word so far here just in case :)).

What I read though was the reviews done by some journalists at “The Sunday Times” and “The Guardian” and to my utter amazement I couldn’t find the answer to the big question in any of those.

The scatter-graphs resembled Y= aX+b arrows with US & UK as tip and Japan & the Scandinavian countries as tail, replicated for different values of a & b ;-) but I have to admit they were interesting up to a certain point.

Apart from the descriptive nature of these resources (the reviews and the graphs), I couldn’t notice the Why-Because tandem anywhere. That worried me by the way because that was the reason I was going to “buy the ticket” in first place, which fortunately didn’t do (so far) :).

However there was something that really triggered my mind and that is the issue of anxiety since it has direct effects on many analyzed criteria in the book like: suicide rates, crime rates, obesity, drug addiction, heart disease etc.

Why anxiety is more prevalent in polarized societies? I think it is closely related to the issue of Meritocracy.

To paraphrase Alain de Botton: “Meritocracy is presumed to be a positive thing in the sense that whoever deserves to be at the top, will get at the top no matter what. If someone has the ideas, skill, talent, energy and determinacy to jump at the top nothing should hold him/her back. However If somebody complies with this, he/she by implication reconciles with the idea that whoever deserves to get to the bottom should be at the bottom and stay there.”

Simply put your position in life doesn’t seem to be accidental but merited and deserved instead and this does nothing but make failure seem much more crushing.

Now since most of the societies nowadays are meritocratic at certain extents and since everything strongly depends on relativity, I think I am allowed to deduce that: “The more polarized a society is, the more crushing a failure seems to be hence creating more anxiety among individuals”.

BR
S.K.