The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything [Paperback]

What motivated Christopher Snowden to turned his intelligence and skill to debunking the anti smoking lobby (earlier book) and the anti inequality movement? Perhaps his next book will debunk global warming. I am reminded of the plethora of research in the USA in the 60s which aimed to show that blacks were less intelligent than whites. For what purpose? The Education System should educate all to the best of their ability whatever this is. Similarly, smoking is bad for health, and the huge disparity in wealth and power between those who have and have not, in the UK is, to any fair minded person, unacceptable. And it needs to be addressed now, not, as and when, the free market gets around to it.

Snowden's introduction is in my view a simplistic distortion of what The Spirit Level is about and at times, reads like a rant (p10 3rd paragraph onwards) rather than a rational criticism. What Snowden demonstrates very well in his book is that where data and statistical analyses are concerned, the arguments and counter arguments can run and run. He questions the data and methodology underlying the conclusions drawn by the authors of the Spirit Level and attributes their motivations to left wing ideology. The same accusations could be made about Snowden's cherry picking of data and his obvious anti-left ideology. He is motivated to throw in anything which muddies the waters, creates a smoke screen and under minds his targets - Wilkinson, Pickett, Layard, James and Lawson. Me thinks the man protests too much.

There is much of interest in Snowden's analysis of data but this is spoilt by what he selects, says and how he says it. He uses ridicule, innuendo, personal slurs and takes points of view to the extreme and in doing so, reduces them to the absurd. Such tactics render him far from an objective reporter/analyst. By comparison The Spirit Level is a scholarly book. Snowden correctly says we should be cautious of any claim that is too neat to be true but his total dismissal of all that The Spirit Level offers, is equally suspect. Snowden doesn't have one integrated point of view he takes any point of view which is anti the ideas put forward in The Spirit Level . He says, correctly, that The Spirit Level is a political book - as if his book isn't! Arguing for the maintenance of the status quo in not apolitical it is a hugely political viewpoint.

To me Snowden's book misses the point. In the UK the prison population is rising, obesity levels are increasing, depression and anxiety levels in adults and children have skyrocketed (even if this is due to self-diagnosis, the question is, how come?) Profits from the diet and cosmetic surgery industries are rising dramatically year on year. This information hardly adds up to a contented society. Isn't it a about time we tried something else? A mistake is something hindsight reveals. Folly is when you persist with a course of action which is demonstrably failing but this can't be admitted because deeply held beliefs would be seriously challenged. So is more not less unrestrained capitalism the way forward? Folly indeed.

The most telling omission in Snowden's book is the lack of any attention to global warming, something which is mention often in the Spirit Level. So, Christopher Snowden, how is free market global capitalism going to solve this major problem? Ah, perhaps this is going to be his next book!

Admittedly, I have only read part of this book, but that was enough. There is a profound asymmetry between these two books, which seems to have been overlooked in a spirit of post-modern relativism. The Spirit Level is the culmination of hundreds of research years of rigorously peer reviewed, intellectually honest research, by hundreds of researchers from many different countries, and many different backgrounds. This book is an attempt to nullify the findings of this research in one fell swoop, based on the prior assumption that market forces are righteous, and governments are evil. It is cynical in its view both of the scientific method, and of the intelligence of the general book-buying public. I recommend reading and making sure you understand The Spirit Level, before bothering to tackle this attempt to retard rationally-directed progress, for ideological ends.

After reading Wilkinson's and Pickets `The Spirit Level' I picked up a copy of this rebuttal by Christopher Snowdon, in the interests of fairness.

The problem Snowdon has are first perceptions; what is he trying to say? That Wilkinson and Pickett are wrong and the UK is actually a more equal place than they describe, or that its societal inequalities are actually acceptable, that in fact a small minority of people should be allowed to be `super-rich,' for the `benefit of all', and an increasingly marginalised underclass is a fair price to pay for this, particularly as they usually deserve to be there through their own failings, anyway?

The first stumbling block this book has to get over [and fails] is that any ordinary person [i.e. 95% of the population] can see day in day out that Britain is a very unequal society and we are, frankly, in a social and economic mess where any sense of community is barely a memory now for much of its population. The vast majority of people can sense there is something very wrong with this, even if they cannot fully articulate it.

So again the question begs to be answered: what is Snowdon trying to prove? His association with a right wing libertarian think tank probably explains a lot, and the speed of this rebuttal to the publication of `The Spirit Level' clearly shows Wilkinson and Pickett's book must have disturbed the libertarian right considerably, but having said that Snowdon's book is well written and, as a couple of reviewers have said, is a good `tube read' which is no bad thing, but probably sums up its `academic' weight. The fact is unfortunately, apart from spending a lot of time trying to shoot down Wilkinson and Pickett's figures and methodology, Snowdon comes up with very little counter-analysis of his own.

Wilkinson and Pickett's `The Spirit Level' is far from perfect, but its overall findings are solid and its argument is convincing, striking a cord I would imagine with the underlying feelings of very many people. Snowdon's rebuttal is interesting but at the end of the day, a paper tiger. Certain points made in the `Spirit Level' are obsessed over as incorrectly/disingenuously presented, yet they are nonetheless fully explained by Wilkinson and Pickett in their book. For example much is made of the sample group of rich countries, yet the criteria for their selection is fully explained by W & P, so places like Singapore- small city states with fairly authoritarian governance anyway, are understandably left out of a study that says from the outset it is concerned with the larger populated democracies of the developed world..

The fact remains, despite its occasional airbrushing over of a few details, `The Spirit Level' is a highly successful, peer reviewed work that will have a positive impact for years to come. Snowdon's critique though, cannot escape the feeling of being an exasperated bleat of indignation from the neoliberal right, who are trying to maintain their well-worn strategy of the past 30 years of muddying reality with disinformation and spin. It has worked for a couple of decades, but this book shows that these techniques may well now have run its course, and neoliberalism is on the run. And it is the majority of the UK/US population who will benefit from this, which is no bad thing.