Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

200 R. Smith
It is an interesting question whether these diagrams themselves constitute a kind
of rhetoric. The vividness with which evidence is presented – why, there are the
Scandinavian countries again! – has the effect of silencing awkward questions. But
there are such questions to be asked. For instance, is it possible that the data are
skewed by ‘outliers’, particularly Japan at one extreme and the USA at the other?
The assumption must be that all the countries that appear have relevantly similar
societies, or there is no basis for comparison. Yet, Japan is a very different society
from the USA, being characterised for instance by Shinto traditions, strong family
ties, deference (particularly to the older generation) and conformity. It is different
again from the Scandinavian societies that model the correlation between equality
and other social goods. If Japan and the USA are removed from the graphs then the
pattern of co-ordinated points looks far less regular. Wilkinson and Pickett might
respond that this actually strengthens their point. It doesn’t matter how you achieve
income equality: however you do so, the other benefits flow.
Rather more tellingly, the causal relationship here is obscure. If more equal societies
lock up a smaller proportion of their population in prison, is this less because
greater equality somehow produces such an outcome and more because the kind
of society that values high levels of equality is also likely to be cautious about
the effects of imprisonment on relatively minor offenders, along with being more
enthusiastic about the promotion of green initiatives such as recycling (see the scatter
diagram on p. 228)? This point is made sharply by one reviewer, who concludes
that the book’s analysis is ‘diminished by the sense that the authors have simply
scoured the data for signs of malignancy in unequal societies’ (Reeves, 2009).
Wilkinson and Pickett are well aware that the causal relationship needs to be
illuminated. They address it directly in Chapter 3, ‘How inequality gets under the
skin’, and return to it at intervals throughout the book, especially in Chapter 13,
‘Dysfunctional societies’, and its subsection ‘Causality’. In general their answers
turn on the idea of social status and self-esteem. Unequal income leads to unequal
status, and in a world where people are alert to and anxious about where they are
positioned on the social ladder, mental and physical health are both affected by this
anxiety: self-esteem suffers. Where the ladder or hierarchy is particularly steep the
middle classes suffer no less than disadvantaged groups.
A highly inconvenient fact here, which Wilkinson and Pickett fully acknowledge,
is that over the time-scale under consideration, self-esteem also ‘showed a
very clear long-term upward trend. It looked as if, despite the rising anxiety levels,
people were also taking a more positive view of themselves over time’ (p. 36).
Surely, it would seem, anxiety about status should be reflected in lower, not higher,
self-esteem. Wilkinson and Pickett’s solution is to distinguish ‘healthy’ self-esteem
from the defensive kind found in those prone to violence, racism and insensitivity to
others. This latter kind is fragile and more akin to ‘whistling in the dark’ (p. 37); we
might compare Ruth Cigman’s discussion of ‘psychological fraudsters’ (Cigman,
2004). In the context this looks like a rather desperate strategy on Wilkinson and
Pickett’s part to save the explanation in terms of status. At the least we need some
careful exploration of psychological self-aggrandisement (self-promotion, bravado,
etc.) and its opposites (self-deprecation, humility, diffidence, modesty). Wilkinson