Reddit reviews The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything

Sorry, but that was a really poor article and conflates different kinds of inequality.

> inequality contributed to the financial crisis.

Yes, trying to fix inequality by encouraging people to buy homes who couldn't afford them.

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> (some) inequality is bad for economic growth.

Talks about gender equality in education. Focuses on correlation (using regression analysis), not causation. The paper does suggest some possible underlying causes (high mortality rate for women, so-called 'missing women'), but doesn't dive further into explanation.

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> inequality is bad politics.

This is a really weak argument. Politicians may have some incentives to visibly favor equality, but behind the scene they have incentives to favor inequality (lobbying, cronyism, campaign finance).

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> inequality slows down poverty reduction

If you define poverty as "the bottom 20%", then yes inequality matters. That's a tautology, which raises the question of what is a meaningful way to observe and measure poverty.

Btw, since redistributive policies has started in the US, the poverty rate (as define by an income threshold) hasn't improved anymore.

It is important to try and understand poverty, which is more subtle than some simple high-level aggregates suggest. For example, there are significant demographic factors which differ across income groups (young and retired, single parent families, people lacking full-time employment tend to have less income, duh).

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> the moral case is a good one

The moral case for less coerced redistribution is also a good one. Also, it depends how you ask the question (framing). Most people are really not that impacted by inequality in their daily lives (you don't live or interact with Bill Gates much).

Finally, the correlation between inequality and various bad social effects (crime, health, etc.) have been widely debunked (the data doesn't support the claims that were made in the first place). See The Spirit Level Delusion.

All that being said, I sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street movement's concerns. But most of the symptoms are caused by cronism, not a lack of redistribution.

Oh dear.

Those graphs are from The Spirit Level, so notorious for cherry picking its data that it's now been thoroughly debunked.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0956226515?pc_redir=1412589373&robot_redir=1

Well worth a read to see why.

I wouldn't say that inequality isn't an issue, but I'm instantly wary of anything that tries to assert "facts" based on that data.

A theory of everything that explains nothing

Is The Spirit Level right about inequality and obesity?

The-spirit-level-revisited

The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything

edit:- Found this report

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/beware%20false%20prophets%20-%20jul%2010.pdf

>Wilkinson and Pickett’s empirical claims are critically re-examined using (a) their own data on 23 countries, (b) more up-to-date statistics on a larger sample of 44 countries, and (c) data on the US states. Very few of their empirical claims survive intact.

The use of box-plots to adjust for outliers is a pretty important statistical technique missing from the original studies.

Which is pretty much what my guesstimation amounted to. I.e. them cherries dun been picked. I'd welcome to see a rebuttal to this report though. You have to skip through quite some pages to get to the data but there's a lot of it.

>Because it is neither an independent state or a democracy.

And that matters why? You're agreeing with me that these data points would radically alter this persons claims of correlation, yet you're dismissing them on spurious grounds, which seems like what someone would do if they wanted the correlation to be true.

We're talking about how inequality effects life outcomes in societies. It's more arbitrary cherry picking to say "nope, that one doesn't count for reason X". Who decided reason X was an important criteria? Why does reason X effect what effect income inequality has, or the outcomes its linked two? Those are the only two instances where adjustment is necessary.

Are we saying that if a place is not an independent state or a democracy then inequality becomes a good thing?

If Hong Kong has some magical property that makes inequality a positive thing, might we not want to apply that to other inequal nations?

Or more likely, it actually doesn't matter, and Hong Kong actually has significant levels of political autonomy and is a prime example of a nation with an inequal income distribution but strong metrics in life outcomes. Hong Kong would almost entirely cancel out effect of the US on those graphs and that would bring the whole thing closer to statistical insignificance.

Unless you're going to include all nations in the analysis then

>Talk about cherry picking. :) Aren't you the one that tries to argue that there isn't only one cause of inequality?

That's exactly my point.

You're saying American has problems with inequality because its government is not progressive enough. I brought up an example of a country with high income inequality but much more progressive laws. If you have a strong theoretical framework to prove that in you should be able to explain then why a nation with a strong welfare state, progressive taxation and progressive employment laws has high levels of inequality as well.

Otherwise to pick America and say "this has not very progressive laws and inequality so regressive laws cause inequality" is just anecdotal evidence.

>How did you draw that conclusion?

By not including states very similar to Portugal in standard of living, economy type and democratic system but who's only significant difference is a slightly lower GDP per capita.

You need some kind of mathematical criteria to exclude data points, you can't just "reckon" that certain countries aren't good examples, you need to show your working. If you can't likely you don't have enough maths in your work to say anything meaningful. In fact excluding data points is generally bad practise if the data itself is sound. its much better to include the data point and the adjustments you make to compensate for obfuscating factors as you get a better set of data all togther.

>If Wilkinson really is so guilty of cherry picking as you claim, I am sure that some of his critics have provided better statistics.

That's not necessarily the case at all. Sloppy data methods are everywhere, especially in soft sciences like economics.

This book claims to have fact checking of the claims of the Spirit Level, however since I've read neither the Spirit Level now the critique book I don't feel I have a place to recommend either.

This quote of a review of the book:

>It starts by exposing the empirical flaws in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (SL), which claims that just about every social problem is caused by income inequality. Using where possible the same data sources as the authors, Snowdon shows that the results have been influenced by the choice of countries and indicators. Including just a handful of additional countries is enough to make many of the SL graphs, which show data points scattering around a straight line, dissolve into shapeless point clouds

Seems to tally with the limited search I've done of it so far. The point isn't that adding a few countries proves there's no correlation, but that the dataset is clearly not extensive enough if viable example countries can be found which will spoil the correlation.

To produce my own accurate analysis of the impact of income inequality would take hundreds of hours of research and would take hundreds of pages to write. I'm not going to do it. Even if I was you wouldn't bother to read it, and its not necessary for me to do it to recognize cherry picking when I see it. He needs a credible reason to exclude eastern european states that would ruin his correlation, but still include states like Portugal and Greece which are similarly borderline 2nd world countries.

If someone comes to me and say "hey I've measured a bunch of different countries and it turns out inequality is strongly linked with bad life outcomes", and I can within a few minutes of looking on wikipedia see several countries that would dramatically alter that correlation, and there's no compelling reason, I don't have to do 100s of hours of research to do a better analysis to say why it is cherry picking.

Link to the book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Delusion-Fact-Checking-Everything/dp/0956226515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1272529304&sr=1-1-spell