Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and CapitalismIt is well known that the US has unusually high ratesof homicide, obesity and imprisonment. In The Spirit Level,this is taken as evidence that inequality lies at the heartof these issues, but if we look at all the rich countries, it isclear that the US is an outlier. There are many reasons whyAmerica has such a high homicide rate, but if inequalitywas one of them, we would expect countries like Britainand Singapore to have a comparably high murder rate. AsFigure 14 shows, they do not. The correlation between inequalityand homicide in this graph is not statistically significant(meaning that there is no correlation in statisticalterms) and the only reason that the line is not completelyflat is that it is being pulled up by a single outlier.Wilkinson and Pickett make much out of their claimthat there are higher levels of trust in more equal societies.Figure 15 shows the percentage of people in each countrywho say that ‘most people can be trusted’ in the World ValuesSurvey. Because Wilkinson and Pickett exclude severalcountries and use old data for some of those that they doinclude, the graph in The Spirit Level shows a stronger associationthan actually exists, but even that correlation isdriven by the unusually high trust scores of the Scandinaviancountries. There is no correlation whatsoever amongthe rest of the countries, with unequal societies such as theUS and New Zealand outperforming the two most equalsocieties, Japan and the Czech Republic. In truth, the onlything we can tell from Figure 15 is that Scandinavians aremore trusting than people in other wealthy nations. Whateverthe reason for this, the position of the other countriesdoes not support the hypothesis that the difference is144