Poverty and Progress

by Richard G. Wilkinson

Originally published in 1973 and now reissued with a new Preface, this striking book challenges the whole structure of our thinking on how societies develop – why some are primitive and others advanced. It demonstrates that the pursuit of progress is not the real driving force behind change. Economic development, it argues, is simply the escape route of societies caught in the ecological pincers of population growth and scarce resources. The author explains the processes by which industrialization is forced upon societies by the progressive scarcity of all land-based resources. The things we think of as the fruits of man's search for progress including increasingly sophisticated technology, labour-saving machinery and the rest - are in fact part of the struggle to keep up with the growing productive task created by ecological pressures. ln this light primitive societies appear less poor than we imagine, and advanced ones less rich.

254 pages, Hardcover

Published July 1, 2022

About the author

Richard G. Wilkinson (Richard Gerald Wilkinson; born 1943) is a British researcher in social inequalities in health and the social determinants of health. He is Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, having retired in 2008. He is also Honorary Professor at University College London.

He is best known for his 2009 book (with Kate Pickett) The Spirit Level, in which he argues that societies with more a equal distribution of incomes have better health outcomes than ones in which the gap between richest and poorest parts society is greater. His 1996 book Unhealthy Societies: The Affliction of Inequality had made the same argument a decade earlier.