Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and CapitalismWilkinson in 2010 when he told International Socialismmagazine (Ferguson 2010):There are about 200 papers on health and inequality inlots of different settings, probably 40 or 50 looking at violencein relation to inequality, and very few looking at anyof the other things in relation to inequality. In a way, thenew work in the book is all these other variables – teenagebirths, mental illness, prison populations and so on– and the major contribution is bringing all of that into apicture that had previously been just health and violence.For the most part, therefore, these are very muchWilkinson and Pickett’s own ideas and their main evidenceconsists of the kind of scatterplots discussed above.It was only after The Spirit Level began to be criticised onempirical grounds that its authors started to insist that ascientific consensus was behind them and that their bookwas a distilled version of mainstream research (Wilkinsonand Pickett (2010b: 1); see Goldthorpe (2009), Kay (2009),Snowdon (2010), Saunders (2010a), Sanandaji et al. (2010)and Bjornskov (2010) for some of the early critical appraisals).In fact, there is no consensus on the inequality-healthquestion and very little research at all behind most of theirother claims. In an open letter to Wilkinson and Pickett,the sociologist Colin Mills (2012) wrote: ‘Over and overagain you tell us that the weight of the evidence is on yourside and that there is a broad consensus amongst expertsworking in the field. But this simply isn’t true, is it?’ Indeedit is not.160