This virtuous book describes in a very convincing manner that economic equality is good for society. It exposes the falsity of the belief that massive inequalities are a necessary condition for improving the quality of life in contemporary developed societies.
The authors argue that very skewed distributions of income influence in the rise of a large range of social anomalies, with the result that everyone suffers. Inequality in their view is not just bad for the poor, it’s also bad for the rich. Analyzing data from many developed countries it is observed a close relation between the level of inequality in each country (or state) and a range of outcomes: levels of trust, mental illness, life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, children’s educational performance, number of teenage births, murders, imprisonment rates and social mobility. The higher inequality is, the lower is the trust, the more the mental illnesses are present, the higher are the murder rates and so on.
The main theme in the book is that rather than securing further economic growth, inequality is now the big challenge facing developed societies: for the vast majority of people in affluent countries the difficulties of life are no longer about filling our stomachs, having clear water and keeping warm. Most of us now wish we could eat less rather than more. And, for the first time in history, the poor are generally fatter than the rich.”
The book has many virtues, the chief of which is to provide a mass of empirical evidence that societies with greater equality of income almost always do better than societies with more inequality, on a wide range of indicators.
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