The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
Penguin Books, 2018. 352 pp.
One of the most talked-about books of 2009 was The Spirit Level, by the social epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. They have now released a sequel, The Inner Level, the theme and format of which is uncannily similar to the original.
A series of chapters make the case for income inequality causing a wide range of social ills before the authors round off with a rallying cry for “radical egalitarianism” and “economic democracy.”
The Spirit Level relied on a succession of dubious scatterplots for evidence. The Inner Level has no shortage of similar graphs, but is more focused on explaining how inequality is supposed to cause so many problems. At the heart of their explanation is the claim that “modern, free-market societies” cause status anxiety.
To “keep up with the Joneses,” people work ever longer hours and immerse themselves in consumerism. This, so the argument goes, leads to mental-health disorders and substance abuse which, in turn, lead to worse parenting. And so the cycle continues.
If you are predisposed to believe that “lack of confidence and a sense...
Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left. Giles Udy.
London: Biteback Publishing, 2017. 688 pages.
When was the date of guilty knowledge for defenders of Soviet communism? At what point did Western supporters of the regime cease to be merely naive and became knowingly complicit? Commenting on the "pyramid of corpses" that the Bolsheviks had built, George Orwell remarked in 1941 that "[a]ll people who are morally sound have known since about 1931 that the Russian regime stinks." Reading Giles Udy’s excellent new book Labour and the Gulag, it is difficult to put the date of guilty knowledge any later than that.
In January 1930, the New Statesman reported that dekulakisation was a "cruel experiment" involving "imprisonment and execution." Over the next two years, 1.8 million kulaks were arrested and deported to the North. Some 240,000 died. By 1931, 60,000 Russians had been arrested on religious grounds and 5,000 shot. The exact numbers may not have been known in the West, but the basic facts of Soviet mass murder, disenfranchisement, and slave labour were available to any literate Briton by the end of the 1920s.
More than a million people in Europe took part in "Prayers...
First published in the Netherlands in 2014 and now republished in English with a retina-burning, bright orange jacket, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists has become an international bestseller thanks to three big ideas: open borders, a basic income, and a shorter working week. At least two of these proposals have been of longstanding interest to libertarians. It is good to see them making waves on the centre-Left. Bregman’s passion for the basic income, in particular, is beyond doubt although it sometimes comes at the expense of objectivity. If you have studied any of these ideas before and are sceptical, Bregman’s analysis is unlikely to convince you, but there is enough original material to give most readers something to think about.
The book begins with an invigorating summary of the benefits of free trade and globalisation, which starts where Johan Norberg’s excellent Progress left off. The extraordinary, unprecedented rise of economic prosperity and all its attendant benefits in recent generations cannot be lauded too often, and Bregman pays fitting tribute before turning on a sixpence to discuss the problems that have turned our "Land of Plenty" into a "dystopia": anxiety, narcissism, boredom, apathy and – above all – the inability...
