The Spirit Level

"The Spirit Level” has been generally acknowledged as an important contemporary text - the underlying argument being that where societies are “more unequal” in terms of the distribution of income they also suffer from a much greater range of social problems than their “less unequal” counterparts.

Wilkinson and Pickett argue that we can demonstrate empirically how “more equal” societies perform better across a range of social indicators (such as education, health and, most significantly for our purposes here, crime) than their “less equal” counterparts.