“Just what these times are crying out for” says the quote on the front cover from Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics. With a commendation like that, Kate Pickett’s new book “The Good Society – And How We Make It” calls out to be read. NOW’s Director, Roger Higman, took a look inside.
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Kate Pickett first came to my attention in 2009, as co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of the Spirit Level – Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Using data on a range of social indicators in different developed countries, they showed how fairer societies, with more equal income distributions, tended to be associated with better social outcomes – from life expectancy to education, crime and drug dependency. What made their argument even more impressive was that they backed up their findings with detailed comparisons of the same data in the different states of the USA – thus showing that the they didn’t arise simply as a result of cultural differences.
Nine years later, Wilkinson and Pickett published “The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing” which applied a similar approach to the growing incidence of mental illness in developed countries.
It was with great interest, therefore that I picked up a copy of Kate’s latest book “The Good Society and How We Can Make It”, which was published earlier this year. In it, she looks in detail are the UK’s failure to tackle a range of social issues including ill-health, care, education and prison reform. In each case, she shows how Britain’s relative failure, as compared to countries such as Finland, depends not only on detailed policy but a failure to apply upstream solutions. Her central argument resides in a simple analogy: far too much of our attention is paid on helping people who have fallen over a cliff, much as this is vital, but far too little on stopping them falling in the first place.
And she shows as previously, that greater income equality is central to stopping people falling over the cliff.
Along the way, she makes some cogent points about the wellness industry: “Most of what the so-called wellness industry would like to sell you is a pup. Most of what will really keep you healthy is non-commercial, free or cheap: friendship, doing things that give you a sense of purpose (preferably with other people), a walk or a run, a diet majoring on vegetables, fruit and whole grains, laying off the tobacco and the booze”.
But she adds: the things that are most likely to keep an individual well are not the same as those that keep a society healthy. “To have healthy society we, all of us, need to have enough money so that we don’t have sleepless nights worrying how to pay the bills. We all need to have enough money for a secure, warm, dry home thay isn’t overcrowded; we all need to have secure employment, with sufficient benefits available when we need them so that we don’t feel precarious. We need to not be poor”.
If the answers lay in economics, what are they? Economic growth is not necessarily the solution. Recent growth has tended to further enrich the already wealthy without improving the lives of people who need wealth most. The change we need to see lies in how we measure progress. “We have a fundamental disconnect between economic theory and lived reality, because the measures we use to judge economic success – GDP growth, productivity gains, corporate profits – tell us nothing about whether that success is shared or whether it’s improving people’s lives”.
Pickett quotes David Graeber who argued that “economic theory, as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools”. She calls instead for a new economics based around environmental limits, natural capital and equality. She argues for progressive taxation, stronger workers rights and social safety nets – and for a universal basic income, wealth taxes, citizens assemblies and science checks led by distinguished academics (to counter disinformation).
Many people would agree. But how do we get governments to implement these in a world dominated by media moguls and tech billionaires?
It is, at this final hurdle, that Kate Pickett’s argument seems at its weakest. She doesn’t give easy answers probably because there are no easy answers.
Yet, as I write, a new report from the Health Foundation has been published, showing that healthy life expectancy in the UK is now in decline, in contrast to “most comparable high-income countries”.
It is in making similar comparisons that I believe Kate Pickett’s book is at its strongest. Why is it that places like Denmark, Sweden and Finland do so much better in terms of health outcomes than ourselves? Surely it is not too much to ask that we could emulate their success?
At the Network of Wellbeing, we believe that by connecting people, supporting projects and inspiring action for the wellbeing of people and the planet, we can create grassroots fora for the discussion of ideas like these and build a movement of people to support them. Hopefully, in our small way, we can help bring about the changes that Kate Pickett has so clearly shown need to be made.