thesocialsciences.com

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
Allen Lane, 331 pp, £20.00, March 2009, ISBN 978 1 84614 039 6

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. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’.

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From Jerry A. Jacobs, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Recently we’ve heard a lot of talk about interdisciplinarity, along with claims that traditional academic departments are limiting the ability of the modern university to meet the world’s most daunting intellectual challenges. Will the disciplines soon be seen as anachronisms, holdovers from an outdated 20th-century model? In my view, efforts to reorganize academe based on interdisciplinary principles would have disastrous consequences in the short term—and would end up reproducing our disciplinary or departmental structure in the long term.

While calls for stronger interdisciplinary ties have a long history, in recent years the movement has had a strong wind behind its sails. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have set aside funds for interdisciplinary research, and leading research institutions have undertaken sweeping efforts. For example, in late 2007, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced plans to hire 100 faculty members over five years “in areas that advance interdisciplinary teaching and research.” A national survey of faculty members in American colleges, conducted before the current economic crisis by the sociologist Neil Gross, of the University of British Columbia, and colleagues, reveals that interdisciplinarity as a concept is broadly popular with faculty members as well.

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