Richard G. Wilkinson > Quotes

“The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement ‘I am an important person’, but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent. So what could have been going on? People becoming much more self‐confident doesn’t seem to fit with them also becoming much more anxious and depressed. The answer turns out to be a picture of increasing anxieties about how we are seen and what others think of us which has, in turn, produced a kind of defensive attempt to shore up our confidence in the face of those insecurities.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“You can predict a country’s performance on one outcome from a knowledge of others. If – for instance – a country does badly on health, you can predict with some confidence that it will also imprison a larger proportion of its population, have more teenage pregnancies, lower literacy scores, more obesity, worse mental health, and so on. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements in the real quality of life – in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship and community life, which really matters. However, rather than simply having fewer of all the luxuries which substitute for and prevent us recognizing our more fundamental needs, inequality has to be reduced simultaneously.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“The truth is that modern inequality exists because democracy is excluded from the economic sphere. It needs therefore to be dealt with by an extension of democracy into the workplace. We need to experiment with every form of economic democracy – employee ownership, producer and consumer co-operatives, employee representatives on company boards and so on.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“A common response to research findings in the social sciences is for people to say they are obvious, and then perhaps to add a little scornfully, that there was no need to do all that expensive work to tell us what we already knew. Very often, however, that sense of knowing only seeps in with the benefit of hindsight, after research results have been made known.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Once we have enough of the basic necessities for comfort, possessions matter less and less in themselves, and are used more and more for what they say about their owners. Ideally, our impressions of each other would depend on face‐to‐face interactions in the course of community life, rather than on outward appearances in the absence of real knowledge of each other.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others’ eyes.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Despite the modern impression of the permanence and universality of inequality, in the time‐scale of human history and prehistory, it is the current highly unequal societies which are exceptional. For over 90 per cent of our existence as human beings we lived, almost exclusively, in highly egalitarian societies. For perhaps as much as the last two million years, covering the vast majority of the time we have been ‘anatomically modern’ (that is to say, looking much as we do now), human beings lived in remarkably egalitarian hunting and gathering – or foraging – groups.332–5 Modern inequality arose and spread with the development of agriculture. The characteristics which would have been selected as successful in more egalitarian societies would have been very different from those selected in dominance hierarchies.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Studies in the USA often report even larger differences, such as a 28‐year difference in life expectancy at age 16 between blacks and whites living in some of the poorest and some of the richest areas”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“How much people’s desire for more income is really a desire for higher status has been demonstrated in a simple experiment. People were asked to say whether they’d prefer to be less well‐off than others in a rich society, or have a much lower income in a poorer society but be better‐off than others. Fifty per cent of the participants thought they would trade as much as half their real income if they could live in a society in which they would be better off than others.355 This shows how much we value status”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“The reality is that inequality causes real suffering, regardless of how we choose to label such distress. Greater inequality heightens social threat and status anxiety, evoking feelings of shame which feed into our instincts for withdrawal, submission and subordination: when the social pyramid gets higher and steeper and status insecurity increases, there are widespread psychological costs. Status competition and anxiety increase, people become less friendly, less altruistic and more likely to put others down.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-being

“Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.’350”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“In conventional employment people are specifically hired to work for purposes which are not their own. They”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“While Americans are more likely to attribute individual successes to their own abilities and their failures to external factors, the Japanese tend to do just the opposite.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement ‘I am an important person’, but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“In the past, there was a strong tendency simply to regard children who had had a very stressful early life as ‘damaged’. But it looks increasingly as if what is happening is that early experience is being used to adapt the child to deal with contrasting kinds of social reality. The emotional make‐up which prepares you to live in a society in which you have to fend for yourself, watch your back and fight for every bit you can get, is very different from what is needed if you grow up in a society in which (to take the opposite extreme) you depend on empathy, reciprocity and co‐operation, and in which your security depends on maintaining good relations with others.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. John Donne, Meditation XVII”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“The evidence of our sensitivity to ‘social evaluative threat’, coupled with Twenge’s evidence of long‐term rises in anxiety and narcissism, suggests that we may – by the standards of any previous society – have become highly self‐conscious, obsessed with how we appear to others, worried that we might come across as unattractive, boring, stupid or whatever, and constantly trying to manage the impressions we make.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Our addiction to shopping and spending makes many people think that we have already lost the battle against global warming. As well as leading most of us into an ostrich‐like denial of its implications for our way of life, the strength of our consumerist tendencies has reduced governments to a state of paralysis, too nervous of the electorate to implement any policy capable of making a real difference. How are we to transform this culture and make it possible to reduce the threat to the planet?”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“Employee‐ownership has the advantage of increasing equality specifically by extending liberty and democracy. It is bottom‐up rather than top‐down. Although we don’t know what scale of income differences people would think fair, it seems likely that they might agree that the chief executive of the company they work for should be paid a salary several times as big as their own – maybe three, or perhaps even ten, times as big. But it is unlikely that they would say several hundred times as big. Indeed, such huge differentials can probably only be maintained by denying any measure of economic democracy.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“The recognition that what we have seen is the rise of an insecure narcissism – particularly among young people – rather than a rise in genuine self‐esteem now seems widely accepted.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth: the issue is now community and how we relate to each other.”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

“A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley”
― Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone