Wealth Redistributions is Bad for your Health

Especially if you’re poor. The weird lefty bugaboo (if it really is a bugaboo, and not just a social pry-bar) of trying to construct ‘sameness of income’ in society is a crock.

It is not the fact that Swedes in in Malmö and Vellinge are rich that is CAUSING Rosengård dysfunctional, as Wilkinson claims. If Vellinge had an economic crisis and became poor, this would have no effect of health in Rosengård (or probably a negative effect, since the hospitals would have less money). The causality is more complex.

People in corrupt southern Italy have lower health outcomes and lower economic outcomes than North Italians. The casual link is that Mafia, lack of trust, and low education make south Italians poorer, and it makes them have lower health outcomes.

The Spirit Level thinking instead childishly interprets the complex relationship that North Italians are rich makes South Italians unhealthy, because of the stress of knowing they are doing worse than North Italy.

In other words, whatever effect a social scientist wants to assume to produce an outcome is piled in, even though the data never seems to bear it out, but dispelling fond assumptions about the link between poverty and crime, (or in the case of the new left: differential income or any sort,) and so on.

Using levels for OECD countries we have no statistically significant relationship. Using levels for UN we still have no statistically significant relationship, and even find the opposite of what the book claims. Using change we find no statistically significant relationship, and the opposite of what they claim.

This does not mean Wilkinson is wrong. It just means he has no evidence for his hypothesis. Wilkinson and people who think inequality causes lower health (for example through stress) need to find exogenous experiment to verify their hypothesis. Until they have done that we cannot accept they claims as science. But not only have they not done that (to my knowledge), they are going ahead and selling their story as if they had evidence!

This is deeply unethical, because ordinary people trust academics.

Actually, I think that very few people still trust academics, which on one hand might lead to outbursts of the calling the public ignorant, anti-intellectual, or the sort, but that would be specious. For one thing, people know the stench fairly well at this point, and know that the frustrated critic is expecting the public to have the same level of aptitude in their field as they, the “expert” would.

Another fishy looking claim in "The Spirit Level" is that more equal countries are more innovative.

The funny thing is that when it comes to addressing what looks like a social stunt using statistical buckshot, for the most part, they do know a lot more about the reality of society that the crash-test dummy manipulating the science for the sake of politics or their own miserable Niedkultur:

Notice that the United States is one of the least innovative countries according to "The Spirit Level". Now, no matter how dogmatically leftists you are, it is hard to claim that the U.S., the most technologically advanced country in the world, winner of 60% of scientific Nobel prizes in the post war period, is one of the least innovative advanced nations on earth, no more innovative than Portugal.

So what it all amounts to is a study that measures the world’s ability to have the same priorities as the studies’ framers, the UK’s “Equality Trust” which says that their theory (essentially holding up communist economics as a cure for humanity’s ills, not to mention the allpowerful autocracy that it will need to do it) EXPLAINS things like individual childhood illnesses. Among their many goals for the whole of humanity:

For centuries the best way of improving the quality of life has been to raise material living standards. But we have now come to the end of what economic growth can do for developed countries. Measures of well-being or of happiness no longer rise with economic growth. Even though health goes on improving in rich countries, that improvement is no longer related to economic growth. We also know that rates of depression and anxiety have risen over the last fifty years or so.

Not only has economic growth in the rich countries ceased to bring the social benefits it once brought (and continues to bring in poorer countries), but it now threatens the planet. We are therefore the first generation to have to find new ways of improving the real quality of life. The evidence suggests that we need to shift our attention away from increasing material wealth, to the social environment and the quality of social relations in our societies.

Got that? It’s the hushed leftist argument of explaining to people how compassionate they are, even though advancements in health are only for those with economic (or political) utility to the managed society, not for the sake of the flowering of the individual, the morality of withdrawing support, or a basic respect for the dignity of the individual. The managed society (read: the state) is more relevant that the dignity of the individual, as if the existence of a good society would require the vernichtung of the autonomous individual, the retired, and the like. It leads to classic European superman theory, with Communism and Fascism fighting to lead the left. It also comes with the same tactics too: like arguments that one-party states were the real democracies, simply inverting the meaning of things, in this case calling a society where your means were less likely to rise a place that has more “social mobility”.



The evidence of statistics is not causal. It does not make you pick a column and want to join up to a behaviour. And to think that they are tacitly implying that the PUBLIC is stupid, as is obvious from signing up a bad Señor Wences impersonator as their spokes-sock.

Ignoring the evidence of the income equalized societies in the past, including their ultimate need to employ social oppressions to “keep the magic” of passivated equality construction alive, they aren’t accounting for the life-quality aspect of what they eventually led to: failed societies that couldn’t evolve, and ended up with revolutions.