From David Runciman, The London Review of Books
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming.
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From Lawrence Lessig, Books and Arts
In 2006, the Sunlight Foundation launched a campaign to get members of Congress to post their daily calendars on the Internet. “The Punch-Clock Campaign” collected pledges from ninety-two candidates for Congress, and one of them was elected. I remember when the project was described to me by one of its developers. She assumed that I would be struck by its brilliance. I was not. It seemed to me that there were too many legitimate reasons why someone might not want his or her “daily official work schedule” available to anyone with an Internet connection. Still, I didn’t challenge her. I was just coming into the “transparency movement.” Surely these things would become clearer, so to speak, later on.
In any case, the momentum was on her side. The “transparency movement” was about to achieve an extraordinary victory in the election of Barack Obama. Indeed, practically nobody any longer questions the wisdom in Brandeis’s famous remark–it has become one of the reigning clichés of the transparency movement–that “sunlight is … the best of disinfectants.” Like the decision to go to war in Iraq, transparency has become an unquestionable bipartisan value.
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Views from the Inside: Participant Perspectives on Community Leadership by Joy Murray, Jodi-Lee Rash, Rej Creaton, Peter Cooley and Donna McClelland is available from The Social Sciences imprint.
This book tells five stories of a three-year leadership capacity building program designed for residents of government housing estates in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. It tells its stories through the voices of the project leader and four participants. While the project leader explains the workings of the project each of the participants tells how it fitted into their life-story. They talk of their childhood and growing up and sometimes precarious survival at the poor end of town.
The four insider stories are set beside the program’s intentions as seen by government funding body and program managers, and the philosophical understanding that underpinned the program leader’s actions.
In so doing the book explores the relationship between: one person’s theory; a community development program in practice; and real life experience. It does this not through a voice of authority commenting on people’s lived experience and attempting to relate this to the theory, but by showing what the program meant to the project leader and what it meant to each of the four participants. It tries to demonstrate, but not explain, how these disparate meanings connected, or otherwise, with the theory that the project leader believed she was applying; and how in the end all knowledge is personal, built up over a life time and stitched together with the threads of our relationships in whatever environment we happen to inhabit.
Rom Harré, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA
www.SocialSciencesConference.com
Rom Harré was for many years the University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Fellow of Linacre College. Currently he is Distinguished Research Professor in the Psychology Department of Georgetown University in Washington DC, teaching there in the Spring Semester. He combines this with the post of Director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social sciences at the London School of Economics. He began his career in mathematics and physics, turning later to the foundations of psychology. More…
