WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS ONE?

(h/t John Hellegers at Informed Comment)

Helleger links to a review of "The Spirit Level" (2009) in the London Review of Books. You may be aware of how often the wingnuts tell us that the poorest American is still better off than most of the rest of the world in order to justify obscene wealth in America. Well, like most wingnut narratives, it isn't true:

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.