The Spirit Level

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Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In Piketty’s runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the chief proposals for fighting inequality are an annual global wealth tax of up to 10 percent a year, and a self-described “confiscatory” top marginal income tax rate as high as 80 percent.12 For some, even this doesn’t go far enough. There are critics of economic inequality who are largely indifferent to its impact on opportunity and want to level down society even if it means crippling economic progress. In their popular critique of economic inequality, The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett tell us that “we need to limit economic growth severely in rich countries,” because “[o]nce we have enough of the necessities of life, it is the relativities which matter.”13 Similarly, best-selling author Naomi Klein argues that to truly deal with the problem of inequality, we must reject capitalism altogether, give up on the idea of economic progress, and embrace a decentralized agrarian form of socialism.14 Left-wing radio host Thom Hartmann will settle merely for banning billionaires: “I say it’s time we outlaw billionaires by placing a 100% tax on any wealth over $999,999,999.

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In the race of life, according to the Rawlsian view, everyone should have a fair shot at success; just as a track meet would be unfair if some people started halfway to the finish line, so it’s critical that the government help even out the opportunities we encounter in life—to level the playing field by taking away advantages from the fortunate (e.g., huge inheritance taxes) and giving advantages to the less fortunate (e.g., government provision of health care and education).49 This idea of equality of opportunity is appealing to many people, even those untroubled by unequal economic outcomes. As the authors of The Spirit Level point out, “Unlike greater equality itself, equality of opportunity is valued across the political spectrum, at least in theory.”50 The reason it’s so appealing is that it taps in to our sense of fairness: in any game, we want everyone to play by the same rules. But life is not a game, and achieving equality of initial chances means forcing people to play by different rules.

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Is mobility alive and well in America today? That is not an easy thing to measure, and the approach taken by the inequality critics (and most everyone today) confuses more than it clarifies. There are basically two ways researchers try to measure mobility. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explain in their book The Spirit Level, “people can move up or down within their lifetime (intragenerational mobility) or offspring can move up and down relative to their parents (intergenerational mobility).” Note that when they say “move up and down relative to their parents,” Wilkinson and Pickett don’t mean simply that children make more money than their parents, so-called absolute mobility.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

Up until this point, I thought we were going to have to address poverty and inequality by a combination of moral persuasion and social imperative (to avoid local and global political instability). It appears there is another reason we should do so, one that is likely to be far more influential than moral persuasion. This new research was presented in the book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and was the result of comprehensive analysis by its authors over many years into the impact of inequality on a huge range of social indicators of progress. Its conclusions are startling. It turns out that the greatest predictor of social ills, across an incredible range of phenomena, is not the absolute level of poverty or disadvantage.

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The problem is that the process of acquiring it, rather than actually satisfying our needs, drives a self-replicating cycle of dissatisfaction and greater want. We believe more wealth will satisfy us, but what actually happens is that the process actually drives inequality, which increases dissatisfaction, which we try to satisfy with more of the same! Research in The Spirit Level explains this with new data, confirming what has been argued by many others, like Professor Tim Kasser. It seems inequality is one of the greatest drivers to consume. Status competition drives consumption, and inequality exacerbates status competition as we try anxiously to keep up, driven by marketers who exploit our state of anxiety.

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In other words, much of our personal behavior and aspirations are driven by the desire to feel like a respectable and successful member of our community. It’s just that of late, we have come to define that by the possession of ever more material goods. This latter point is what creates the opportunity for marketers. While we cannot argue they are the cause of it, marketers exploit our tendency with very negative results, as argued in The Spirit Level, referring to Tim Kasser’s work: Young adults who focus on money, image and fame tend to be more depressed, have less enthusiasm for life and suffer more physical symptoms such as headaches and sore throats than others (The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press, 2002). Kasser believes that people tend to embrace material values when they are feeling insecure (retail therapy, anyone?).

398 DIY Tips, Tricks & Techniques: Practical Advice for New Home Improvement Enthusiasts by Ian Anderson

air gap, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, The Spirit Level

This way any inaccuracy within the spirit level itself will even out. If you keep the spirit level the same way each time you move (and it’s 1mm inaccurate), your line could be several mm’s out of level by the time you get across the room. 143. Check the Level For Accuracy You can double-check a spirit level for accuracy by placing it on something horizontal and turning it around through 180° lengthways. The bubble should be in the middle both ways to be truly level. If it shows correct one-way but slightly out when turned around, there may be a problem with the spirit level. 144. It Looks All Right, But… Optical illusions sometimes make things look bad, so very occasionally it’s best to go with what looks right, regardless of what the spirit level bubble is saying.

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It Looks All Right, But… Optical illusions sometimes make things look bad, so very occasionally it’s best to go with what looks right, regardless of what the spirit level bubble is saying. For example, a bookcase close to a doorway might look better fitted an equal distance from the architrave, creating a parallel gap, even if it’s then slightly out of plumb. This is because stuff that tapers can draw the eye and look ‘wrong’. A mate of mine used to work the cruise liners, renovating a certain number of cabins each trip. He said you could always tell the new guys as they still had spirit levels… 145.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

., a nationwide poll showed that most Americans want society to “move away from greed and excess toward a way of life more centred on values, community and family.” Quoted in: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2010) p. 4. 25. Paraphrased from the movie Fight Club, Professor of Sustainable Development Tim Jackson, and hundreds of other variations on this quote. 26. Quoted in: Don Peck, “How A New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” The Atlantic (March 2010). http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/307919/ 27. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, p. 34. 28. World Health Organization, “Health for the World’s Adolescents.

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.” – Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Blank Slate and The Better Angels of Our Nature “This book is brilliant. Everyone should read it. Bregman shows us we’ve been looking at the world inside out. Turned right way out we suddenly see fundamentally new ways forward. If we can get enough people to read this book, the world will start to become a better place.” – Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better “Rutger Bregman makes a compelling case for Universal Basic Income with a wealth of data and rooted in a keen understanding of the political and intellectual history of capitalism. He shows the many ways in which human progress has turned a Utopia into a Eutopia – a positive future that we can achieve with the right policies.” – Albert Wenger, entrepreneur and partner at Union Square Ventures, early backers of Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, and Kickstarter “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions.

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., by contrast, people are less likely (as the World Values Survey shows) to consider their successes a product of luck or circumstance. 22. Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, “Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth,” IMF (April 2014). http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf 23. Wilkinson and Pickett’s findings caused quite a stir, but since the publication of The Spirit Level there have been dozens more studies confirming their thesis. In 2011, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conducted an independent analysis of their evidence, and concluded that there is indeed wide scientific consensus on the correlation between inequality and social problems. And, crucially, there is also a sizeable share of data to support causality.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

This masks the social and economic conditions that may have caused the problem. Mindfulness programs pay little attention to the complex dynamics of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives that shape capitalist culture. Yet as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level, evidence from social epidemiology shows that stress and psychosomatic illnesses are concentrated in highly unequal societies, with strongly materialist, competitive values.11 Although the focus of corporate mindfulness is on changing behavior at the level of individuals, mere “lifestyle choices” make little difference.

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Stress is demonstrably linked to social hierarchies, and researchers such as Nancy Adler at the University of California San Francisco have shown that perceived socioeconomic status is a robust predictor of a range of ailments, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, stress and depression.12 Meanwhile, the quality of social relations depends on adequate material foundations. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett observe that “the scale of inequality provides a powerful policy lever on the psychological wellbeing of all of us.”13 None of this is mentioned in A Mindful Nation. Instead, Ryan claims that the issues afflicting society are caused by our distraction from our authentic inner selves.

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HarperOne, 2014. p.134 5 https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2267-workplace-stress-health-epidemic-perventable-employee-assistance-programs.html 6 https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/162953/tackle-employees-stagnating-engagement.aspx 7 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240240954_Stress-management_interventions_in_the_workplace_Stress_counselling_and_stress_audits 8 Tim Newton, Managing Stress: Emotion and Power at Work. Sage Publications, 1995. p. 244 9 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 10 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html 11 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2011. 12 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-your-work-place-might-be-killing-you 13 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. p.97 14 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Skeggs, ‘Haunted by the Spectre of Judgement: Respectability, Value and Affect in Class Relations’, in K.P. Sveinsson (ed.) and Runnymede Trust, Who Cares about the White Working Class? (London, 2009), pp. 36–44; Walkerdine, ‘Reclassifying Upward Mobility’. 58. ‘The Spirit Level’, Guardian (14 August 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk​/books/2010/aug/14/the-spirit​-level-equality-thinktanks​?intcmp=239, (consulted 21 January 2013). 59. British Future, State of the Nation (London, 2013), p. 3. 60. BritainThinks, Middle English, p. 37. 61. ‘What is Working Class?’, BBC Magazine, http://news.bbc.co.uk​/1/hi/magazine/6295743​.stm (consulted 20 September 2013). 62.

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Meanwhile, the least wealthy half of society – millions of pensioners, manual workers, call centre and care home staff, nurses, teaching assistants, cleaners and office workers, as well as those who couldn’t find work or were sick – lived on less than one-quarter of the national income.2 Rising inequality made people unhealthy and unhappy. In their meticulously researched The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett reveal that as economic inequality increased, so too did anxiety disorders and depression. These rose most among the poorest, but thousands of other people, including professional, salaried workers and their children, were also suffering.

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As the sociologists Bev Skeggs and Valerie Walkerdine have revealed, these attitudes aren’t confined to north-east England: women from working-class backgrounds whom they interviewed in southern England similarly saw their appearance and personality as determining their lives, and any failure led to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression.57 Yet as my classmates prepared to turn forty, attitudes towards class and inequality did appear to be changing in Britain. The success of The Spirit Level provided a clue: this academic study of ‘why inequality is bad for all of us’, written by two social scientists, became a surprise bestseller when it was published in 2010.58 Owen Jones’s Chavs achieved similar success a year later. Increasing numbers of people described themselves as working class.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Research from Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels has found that, while manufacturing employment has fallen in most developed countries between 1996 and 2012, it has fallen less sharply where investment in robotics has been greatest. 4 ‘Automation and anxiety’, The Economist, 25 June 2016. 5 According to Martin Ford, futurist and author of the award winning book Rise of the Robots it won’t happen immediately but within a decade or so. 6 Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work, March 2017, Centre for Global Policy Solutions. 7 Mark Fahey, ‘Driverless cars will kill the most jobs in select US states’, www.cnbc.com, 2 September 2016. 8 ‘Real wages have been falling for longest period for at least 50 years, ONS says’, Guardian, 31 January 2014. ‘The World’s 8 Richest Men Are Now as Wealthy as Half the World’s Population’, www.fortune.com, 16 January 2017. 9 David Madland, ‘Growth and the Middle Class’ (Spring 2011), Democracy Journal, 20. 10 Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2009). 11 Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level, pp.272-273. 12 Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay. 13 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (Bodley Head, 2015). Chapter 5: The Everything Monopoly 1 Douglas Rushkoff, one of the more self-aware of these people come close to an apology for his previous work in his recent book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Penguin, 2016). 2 Before he become Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian wrote a book called Information Rules (Harvard Business Review Press, 1998), where he summed this all up very well: ‘positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes.’ 3 This, according to data available through Nielsen SoundScan, cited in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff. 4 Duncan Robinson, ‘Google heads queue to lobby Brussels’, Financial Times, 24 June 2015.

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It’s a warning rather than a roadmap: if we can imagine a future, perhaps we can also figure out how to avert it. Growing inequality, which I think seems unavoidable at this point, would worsen many social problems, including depression, alcoholism and crime. As Pickett and Wilkinson argue in The Spirit Level, greater economic inequality in a country results in more big government because the demand for police, healthcare, prisons and social services all go up. And yet simultaneously the tax base would be falling, due to that unholy alliance of the gig economy, offshore monopolies and cryptocurrencies.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

RICHARD WILKINSON AND KATE PICKETT The Spirit Level Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger BLOOMSBURY PRESS New York Berlin London Contents Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Note on Graphs PART ONE Material Success, Social Failure 1 The end of an era 2 Poverty or inequality? 3 How inequality gets under the skin PART TWO The Costs of Inequality 4 Community life and social relations 5 Mental health and drug use 6 Physical health and life expectancy 7 Obesity: wider income gaps, wider waists 8 Educational performance 9 Teenage births: recycling deprivation 10 Violence: gaining respect 11 Imprisonment and punishment 12 Social mobility: unequal opportunities PART THREE A Better Society 13 Dysfunctional societies 14 Our social inheritance 15 Equality and sustainability 16 Building the future Appendix References Foreword ROBERT B.

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It has taken two experts from the field of public health to deliver a major study of the effects of inequality on society. Though Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are British, their research explores the United States in depth, and their work is an important contribution to the debate our country needs. The Spirit Level looks at the negative social effects of wide inequality—among them, more physical and mental illness not only among those at the lower ranks, but even those at the top of the scale. The authors find, not surprisingly, that where there are great disparities in wealth, there are heightened levels of social distrust.

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And it breeds cynicism among the rest of us. This is not to say that the superrich are at fault. By and large, “the market” is generating these outlandish results. But the market is a creation of public policies. And public policies, as the authors make clear, can reorganize the market to reverse these trends. The Spirit Level shows why the effort to do so is a vital one for the health of our society. Berkeley, California July 2009 Preface People usually exaggerate the importance of their own work and we worry about claiming too much. But this book is not just another set of nostrums and prejudices about how to put the world to rights.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Ossa, F. (2016) ‘The economist who brought you Thomas Piketty sees “perfect storm” of inequality ahead’, New York Magazine, 24 March 2016, available at: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/milanovic-millennial-on-millennial-war-is-next.html 16. Newsnight interview with Tony Blair and Jeremy Paxman, 4 June 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1372220.stm 17. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level. London: Penguin. 18. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2014) ‘The Spirit Level authors: why society is more unequal than ever’, Guardian, 9 March 2014, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/society-unequal-the-spirit-level 19. West, D. (2014) Billionaires: Darrell West’s reflections on the Upper Crust. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brookings-now/posts/2014/10/watch-rural-dairy-farm-writing-billionaires-political-power-great-wealth 20.

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‘Of all the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution,’ wrote the influential economist Robert Lucas in 2004.14 For most of the last 20 years at the World Bank, according to one of its lead economists, Branko Milanovic, ‘even the word inequality was not politically acceptable, because it seemed like something wild or socialist’.15 For others, the acceptable degree of social inequality came to be a matter of personal or political preference – as Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair quipped of the UK’s top footballer, ‘It’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.’16 Over the past decade, however, perspectives on inequality have shifted dramatically as its systemically damaging effects – social, political, ecological and economic – have become all too clear. Societies can be deeply undermined by income inequality. When epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett studied a range of high-income countries in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, they discovered that it is national inequality, not national wealth, that most influences nations’ social welfare. More unequal countries, they found, tend to have more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drug use, obesity, prisoners, school dropouts, and community breakdown, along with lower life expectancy, lower status for women, and lower levels of trust.17 ‘The effects of inequality are not confined to the poor,’ they concluded; ‘inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society.’18 More equal societies, be they rich or poor, turn out to be healthier and happier.

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Isle of Wight: Ellen McArthur Foundation. Wiedmann, T. O. et al. (2015) ‘The material footprint of nations’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112: 20, pp. 6271–6276. Wijkman, A. and Skanberg, K. (2015) The Circular Economy and Benefits for Society. Zurich: Club of Rome. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level. London: Penguin. World Bank (1978) World Development Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Economic Forum (2016) The Future of Jobs. Geneva: World Economic Forum. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book comes out of 25 years of learning, unlearning, and relearning economics and there are many people I would like to thank because they have inspired me on that long journey.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

‘A positive social ranking produces an inner glow that is also matched with a clear advantage in life expectation and health’, argues Avner Offer.13 But if this process is, as the previous chapter suggested, little more than a zero sum game, then there is little to lose, and perhaps quite a lot to gain, by changing it. A different form of social organisation – a more equal society – in which social positioning is either less important or signalled differently – is a clear possibility. This suggestion is borne out by the remarkable evidence marshalled by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level. Looking at a range of health and social issues across OECD nations they conclude that the benefits of equality don’t just accrue to the less fortunate members of society. Inequality has damaging impacts across the nation as a whole.14 Clearly, we would still need to confront the social logic that conspires to lock people into positional competition (Chapter 6).

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Unproductive status competition increases material throughput and creates both psychological distress and social unrest. The British clinical psychologist Oliver James has argued that more unequal societies systematically report higher levels of distress than more equal societies.31 This same point has been made by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level draws together astonishing evidence of the costs of inequality in terms of health and social problems. The broad hypothesis is clearly illustrated in Figure 10.1, which shows a high positive correlation between health and social problems and rising inequality in OECD nations.32 Figure 10.1 The health and social benefits of equality Source: Data from the Equality Trust (see note 30) Life expectancy, child wellbeing, literacy, social mobility and trust are all better in more equal societies.

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On São Paolo’s Lei Limpa Cuidade, see ‘São Paulo: a city without ads’, David Evan Harris, Adbusters, September–October 2007. 28 See ILSR (2014). 29 See www.fairtrade.org.uk/ (accessed 14 May 2016). 30 Cooper (2010), EMF (2015). 31 James (2007: appendix 1 and 2). 32 Data are taken from the Spirit Level data (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) published on the Equality Trust website at www.equalitytrust.org.uk/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5 (accessed 11 May 2016). The index of ‘health and social problems’ on the y-axis in Figure 10.1 includes life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, homicide, imprisonment, teenage births, trust, obesity, mental illness (including alcohol and drug addiction) and social mobility.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

According to WHO figures, over 20 per cent of the populations of the more unequal rich countries are likely to suffer forms of mental illness – such as depression, anxiety disorders, drug or alcohol addiction – each year. Rates may be three times as high as in the most equal countries. At the same time, measures of the strength of community life and whether people feel they can trust others also show that more equal societies do very much better. As discussed in The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2010), tackling inequality is an important step towards achieving sustainability and high levels of well-being. As the populations of the developed world have gained unprecedented standards of comfort and material prosperity, further increases in those standards make less and less difference to well-being.

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Indeed, anxiety about making ends meet can put relationships under stress, and cause shame and mental illness. So redistribution of income and power from the rich and affluent to those on low incomes would produce an overall net improvement in well-being. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential book, The Spirit Level, also shows that insatiable acquisitiveness is not the route to well-being. Rather than rely just on people’s own assessments of their happiness, it looks at data on things like life expectancy, health, violence, crime, education, trust and social mobility.22 Again, they find that once average incomes in countries reach a certain point, further increases make little difference to well-being as measured by indicators of these things.

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The percentage of people who say “Most people can be trusted” is only 30 per cent of people in the U.K. and U.S., compared to 60 per cent some 40 years ago. But in Scandinavia the level is still over 60 per cent, and these are the happiest countries too.’24 Figure 20.1: Health and social problems are worse in more unequal countries Source: Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level, London: Allen Lane Happiness research shows that whether people are happy tends to depend first on what they’re used to, and on how they compare to others – on habituation and social comparison, in other words.25 The habituation effect is like a ratchet: as income rises, so too do our ideas about what we need in order to be happy – except that beyond the threshold we don’t actually gain much.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

This book will look at how chav-hate is far from an isolated phenomenon. In part, itis the product of a deeply unequal society. 'In my view, one of the key effects of greater inequality is toincrease feelings of superiority and inferiority in society,' says Richard Wilkinson, coauthor of the seminal The Spirit Level, a book that effectively demonstrates thelinkbetween inequality and a range of social problems. And indeed inequality is much greater today than it has been for most of our history. 'A widespread inequality is an extremely recent thing for most of the world,' argues the professor of human geography and' inequality expert', Danny Dorling.

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'I wouldn't try and do anything about correcting the inequalities,' he explained, 'because the inequalities are widened by people getting richer, not by the poor getting poor-but by the rich getting richer. And frankly, so long as they generate wealth for the economy, so long as they generate tax income and so on, then I'm comfortable with it.' I pointed out the recent groundbreaking research by academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level. They used irrefutable statistics to show that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it has-like crime and poor health, for example. In other words, more equal societies were happier societies. David Davis gave the book short shrift. 'It's bullshit,' he said. 'It's bullshi: ...

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At the heart of this scandal is the destruction of the power of workers as an organized force-that is, the trade unions. 'There are studies that show that one of the features of more equal societies is stronger trade union movements,' says Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of seminal book The Spirit Level. I think the ability of people at the top, the bankers and chief executives and so on, to give themselves these huge bonuses reflects the fact they're in a situation where there are no constraints on them. If there were strong trade unions and perhaps a union or employee representative on the company's board, it would become more embarrassing for CEOs to award themselves huge pay increases and bonuses while holding down wage demands from employees.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

And they considered this unacceptable in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. For these younger people, social mobility was not a solution to inequality. And in arguing their case, they drew on perspectives that had found wider popularity since the financial crash. Over the next decade, books like Kate Pickett’s and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level, Danny Dorling’s Inequality and the 1%, and Owen Jones’s Chavs: The demonization of the working class and The Establishment became surprise bestsellers. These researchers revealed a Britain divided between a small wealthy elite and everyone else. They also showed that the existence of a wealthy elite didn’t create greater opportunity, but instead caused the growing poverty and insecurity that everyone else experienced.

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., Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 237–38; Duncan Gallie, ‘The Labour Force’, in Albert H. Halsey, ed., with Josephine Webb, Twentieth-Century British Social Trends, Macmillan, 2000, p. 316. 6 A. B. Atkinson, ‘Distribution of Income and Wealth’, in Albert Halsey with Webb, pp. 360–6; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Penguin, 2010, chapter 12. 7 ‘A bitter touch of class’, Daily Mail, 10 January 1980, p. 15. 8 Keith Waterhouse, ‘The Cowboy Tendency’, Daily Mirror, 17 January 1980, p. 11. 9 Chris Rhodes, Manufacturing: statistics and policy, House of Commons Briefing Paper, HMSO, 2017, p. 7. 10 Interview with Alan Watkins by Hilary Young, 2008. 11 Ibid. 12 Jane Ritchie, Thirty Families: Their living standards in unemployment, HMSO, 1990, p. 22. 13 Gallie, ‘The Labour Force’, in Halsey, ed., with Webb, pp. 316–17, and for details of women’s employment see Jean Martin and Ceridwen Roberts, Women and Employment A Lifetime Perspective, HMSO, 1984. 14 Patrick Heady and Malcolm Smyth, Living Standards during unemployment: A survey of families headed by unemployed people – carried out by Social Survey Division of OPCS on behalf of the Department of Social Security, HMSO, 1989, vol. 1, p. 36.

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, https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/general-election-2010/money-spent-nhs, both consulted 18 March 2018. 49 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 50 Selina Todd, The People: the rise and fall of the working class 1910–2010, John Murray, 2014, p. 349. 51 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, M5113. 52 Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change, p. 2. 53 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, J5734. 54 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Dwelling Stock Estimates, England: 2017, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/710382/Dwelling_Stock_Estimates_2017_England.pdf/. 55 Dorling, p. 103. 56 Interview with Don Milligan by Jim Hinks. 57 Dorling, pp. 103–5. 58 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, R5429. 59 Ibid. 60 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 61 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Penguin, 2010, chapter 6 and 13; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being, Penguin, 2018, chapter 9. 62 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 63 Rebecca Tunstall and Ruth Lupton, Mixed Communities, Department for Communities and Local Government, 2010. 64 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Inner Level, chapter 9; Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, S4002. 65 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, T4715. 66 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, State of the Nation in 2015, HMSO, 2015, p. v. 67 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, J5734. 68 https://www.speakers4schools.org/about-us/, consulted 20 July 2019. 69 ‘Kenneth Olisa: “To improve social mobility, we must raise children’s aspirations”’, Guardian, 9 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/09/kenneth-olisa-social-mobility-raise-childrens-aspirations, consulted 20 July 2019. 70 Quoted in Armstrong, p. 27. 71 https://www.speakers4schools.org/about-us/. 72 Danny Dorling, ‘Who should and who shouldn’t come up to Oxford as an undergraduate’, 8th Annual Access Lecture, University College Oxford, 2017, http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/8th-annual-access-lecture-2017, consulted 8 January 2020. 73 Interview with Helen Abeda by Andrea Thomson. 74 Interview with Richard Campbell by Andrea Thomson. 75 Walter Benn Michaels, ‘The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty’, Liberal Education, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 14-19; Floya Anthias and Cathie Lloyd, ‘Introduction’, in Anthias and Lloyd, eds., Rethinking anti-racisms: from theory to practice, Routledge, 2003; Pragna Patel, ‘Back to the Future.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015, half of all assets around the world are now controlled by the richest 1% of the global population, while “the lower half of the global population collectively own less than 1% of global wealth”.53 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that the average income of the richest 10% of the population in OECD countries is approximately nine times that of the poorest 10%.54 Further, inequality within most countries is rising, even in those that have experienced rapid growth across all income groups and dramatic drops in the number of people living in poverty. China’s Gini Index, for example, rose from approximately 30 in the 1980s to over 45 by 2010.55 Rising inequality is more than an economic phenomenon of some concern – it is a major challenge for societies. In their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put forward data indicating that unequal societies tend to be more violent, have higher numbers of people in prison, experience greater levels of mental illness and obesity, and have lower life expectancies and lower levels of trust.

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fileid=F2425415-DCA7-80B8-EAD989AF9341D47E 54 OECD, “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising”, 2011. http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49499779.pdf 55 Frederick Solt, “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database,” Working paper, SWIID, Version 5.0, October 2014. http://myweb.uiowa.edu/fsolt/swiid/swiid.html 56 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2009. 57 Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “More unequal and more separate: Growth in the residential segregation of families by income, 1970-2009”, US 2010 Project, 2011. http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Projects/Reports.htm http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/more-unequal-and-more-separate-growth-residential-segregation-families-income-1970-2009 58 Eleanor Goldberg, “Facebook, Google are Saving Refugees and Migrants from Traffickers”, Huffington Post, 10 September 2015.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 21. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2013). It should be noted that Wilkinson and Pickett’s methodology, evidence, and conclusions have been challenged. See, for instance, Peter Saunders, “Beware False Prophets: Equality, the Good Society and the Spirit Level,” Policy Exchange, July 8, 2010. 22. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 4, 2010. 23.

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Family ties, collegial relations, and old friendships can be soured by envy on the one side and arrogance on the other, particularly where the inequality becomes very great over a relatively short period. And inequality is also likely to undermine the benefits of wealth to society at large, an idea made familiar recently by works like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality.21 According to Wilkinson and Pickett, among wealthy societies, those where income inequality is greater suffer more from a variety of social ills, including higher rates of physical illness, mental illness, and violence, along with lower levels of education, social mobility, and trust.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

In 2007, three UK education authorities sent 100 British teachers to visit the Penn Resilience Project, so as to recreate it in the UK. 6‘Work for World Peace Starting Now – Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” Can Help’, huffingtonpost.com, 27 March 2012. 7Sarah Knapton, ‘Stressed Council House Residents Get £2,000 Happiness Gurus’, telegraph.co.uk, 9 October 2008. 8Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda and Fabrice Bartolomei, ‘Induction of a Sense of Bliss by Electrical Stimulation of the Anterior Insula’, Cortex 49: 10, 2013; ‘Pain “Dimmer Switch” Discovered by UK Scientists’, bbc.com, 5 February 2014. 9Gary Wolf, ‘Measuring Mood: Current Research and New Ideas’, quantifiedself.com, 11 February 2009. 10Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, New York: Penguin, 1990, 33. 11Campbell and Simmons, ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk’. 12See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane, 2009. Work by Carles Muntaner explores this issue further. 13Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report 2013, 2013 14Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock, ‘Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 111: 24, 2014. 15F.

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014; Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, London: Pluto Press, 2014. 5 The Crisis of Authority 1‘Full Text: Blair’s Newsnight Interview’, theguardian.com, 21 April 2005. 2Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. 3ESPNcricinfo staff, ‘We Urge the Development of Inner Fitness’, espncricinfo.com, 1 April 2014. 4‘Competitiveness and Perfectionism: Common Traits of Both Athletic Performance and Disordered Eating’, medicalnewstoday.com, 22 May 2009. 5Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 6See Toben Nelson et al., ‘Do Youth Sports Prevent Pediatric Obesity?

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Not If the Algorithms Say You’re Not’, smithsonianmag.com, 27 August, 2013. 21Cass Sunstein, ‘Shopping Made Psychic’, nytimes.com, 20 August 2014. 22Rian Boden, ‘Alfa-Bank Uses Activity Trackers to Offer Higher Interest Rates to Customers Who Exercise’, nfcworld.com, 30 May 2014. 23‘Moscow Subway Station Lets Passengers Pay Fare in Squats’, forbes.com, 14 November 2013. 8 Critical Animals 1Lizzie Davies and Simon Rogers, ‘Wellbeing Index Points Way to Bliss: Live on a Remote Island, and Don’t Work’, theguardian.com, 24 July 2012. 2Cari Nierenberg, ‘A Green Scene Sparks Our Creativity’, bodyodd.nbcnews.com, 28 March 2012. 3In Spring 2011, the British Psychological Society published an open letter, authored by clinical psychologists, criticizing the DSM-V. 4See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. 5One calculation produced by the British happiness economist Andrew Oswald suggests that an unemployed person would need benefits of £250,000 a year to compensate them for the negative psychological impact of unemployment. 6Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny, ‘Acute Stressors and Cortisol Responses: A Theoretical Integration and Synthesis of Laboratory Research’, Psychological Bulletin 130: 3, 2004; Robert Karasek and Tores Theorell, Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life, New York: Basic Books, 1992. 7Ronald McQuaid et al., ‘Fit for Work: Health and Wellbeing of Employees in Employee Owned Businesses’, employeeownership.co.uk, 2012. 8David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 9See the CIPD Absence Management Annual Survey, cipd.co.uk, 2013. 10Tim Kasser and Aaron Ahuvia, ‘Materialistic Values and Well-Being in Business Students’, European Journal of Social Psychology 32: 1, 2002. 11Miriam Tatzel, M.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Contrary to an earlier belief that people are so mindful of their richer compatriots that they keep resetting their internal happiness meter to the baseline no matter how well they are doing, we will see in chapter 18 that richer people and people in richer countries are (on average) happier than poorer people and people in poorer countries.13 But even if people are happier when they and their countries get richer, might they become more miserable if others around them are still richer than they are—that is, as economic inequality increases? In their well-known book The Spirit Level, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett claim that countries with greater income inequality also have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, physical and mental illness, social distrust, obesity, and substance abuse.14 The economic inequality causes the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people feel that they are pitted in a winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the stress makes them sick and self-destructive. The Spirit Level theory has been called “the left’s new theory of everything,” and it is as problematic as any other theory that leaps from a tangle of correlations to a single-cause explanation.

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Chicago: National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Snow, C. P. 1959/1998. The two cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press. Snow, C. P. 1961. The moral un-neutrality of science. Science, 133, 256–59. Snowdon, C. 2010. The spirit level delusion: Fact-checking the left’s new theory of everything. Ripon, UK: Little Dice. Snowdon, C. 2016. The Spirit Level Delusion (blog). http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.co.uk/. Snyder, T. D., ed. 1993. 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait. Washington: National Center for Educational Statistics. Somin, I. 2016. Democracy and political ignorance: Why smaller government is smarter (2nd ed.).

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Social comparison theory comes from Leon Festinger; the theory of reference groups comes from Robert Merton and from Samuel Stouffer. See Kelley & Evans 2016 for a review and citations. 12. Amartya Sen (1987) makes a similar argument. 13. Wealth and happiness: Stevenson & Wolfers 2008a; Veenhoven 2010; see also chapter 18. 14. Wilkinson & Pickett 2009. 15. Problems with The Spirit Level: Saunders 2010; Snowdon 2010, 2016; Winship 2013. 16. Inequality and subjective well-being: Kelley & Evans 2016. See chapter 18 for an explanation of how happiness is measured. 17. Starmans, Sheskin, & Bloom 2017. 18. Ethnic minorities perceived as cheaters: Sowell 1980, 1994, 1996, 2015. 19.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Turkey, Mexico and Portugal have low levels of trust, low living standards and high levels of income inequality. It would seem to follow, then, that reducing income inequality should raise levels of trust and, at the very least, make societies a bit happier. Plenty of people have been happy to make the argument. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue powerfully in favour of greater equality, concluding: We know that greater equality will help us rein in consumerism and ease the introduction of policies to tackle global warming. We can see how the introduction of modern technology makes profit-making institutions appear increasingly anti-social as they find themselves threatened by the rapidly expanding potential for public good which new technology offers … We have seen that the rich countries have got to the end of the really important contributions which economic growth can make to the quality of life …5 If only things were that simple.

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In this respect, he has something in common with the family of George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 3. S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Knopf, New York, 1989). 4. Specifically, King James II was deposed, the risk of a Catholic monarchy was reduced, William and Mary took the throne and Parliament reigned supreme. 5. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (Allen Lane, London, 2009). 6. See F. Roth, ‘Trust and Economic Growth: Conflicting Results between Cross-Sectional and Panel Analysis’, Program on the Future of the European Social Model, Göttingen, 2007. 7. ‘Economy Rankings’, Doing Business Project: Measuring Business Regulations, International Finance Corporation/World Bank, 2012, at http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings/ (accessed Jan. 2013). 8.

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The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Revised 1920 Edition, trans. and updated by Stephen Kalberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011 Weinberg, D. H. ‘US Neighbourhood Income Inequality in the 2005–2009 Period’, American Community Survey Reports, United States Census Bureau, Washington, DC, Oct. 2011 Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, Allen Lane, London, 2009 Wood, J. and Berg, P. ‘Rebuilding Trust in Banks’, Gallup Business Journal, at http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/148049/rebuilding-trust-banks.aspx#2 (accessed Jan. 2013) Yellen, J. ‘Housing Bubbles and Monetary Policy’, Speech to the Fourth Haas Gala, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, San Francisco, 21 Oct. 2005 Yellen, J.

Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World by Dominic Chinea

Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, The Spirit Level

John Rabone & Sons supplied tape measures for the British war effort – if you ever come across one you can tell because they feature a small arrow on the brass handle, a symbol known as the “broad arrow” mark. The original tape measures were made of flat steel wound up inside a leather case. g MEASURING & MARKING g Contents Tool No. 12 SPIRIT LEVEL The spirit level – a sealed glass tube containing alcohol and an air bubble – was invented around 1661 by Frenchman Melchisédech Thévenot. He was a colourful character, serving as Ambassador to Rome in the 1650s and appointed the Royal Librarian to King Louis XIV in 1684. He also wrote a famous book on swimming that popularized breaststroke.

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At some point, lead became the metal of choice for the weight suspended from the apex of the “A”, and this is where the word “plumb”, meaning exactly vertical, originates, sometime in the early 14th century. “Plumb” comes from the Old French word plombe, which comes from the Latin word plumbum, meaning lead. Although the spirit level had been invented in 1661, it was mainly used for telescopes and specialized surveying equipment, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that spirit levels produced in factories, resembling those we still use today, started to be used widely by carpenters. g MEASURING & MARKING g Contents Tool No. 13 THREAD PITCH GAUGE Imagine I’m taking something apart that your grandad had made, to restore it.

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

., “A Primer on the Macroeconomic Implications of Population Aging” (https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/FEDS/2007/200701/200701pap.pdf) and Niklas Engbom, “Firm and Worker Dynamics in an Aging Labor Market” (https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp756.pdf). On micro-level stressors in our daily lives, Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) is a great place to start. Then try Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2010) for an argument about the epidemiological effects of sustained inequality. Finally, Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s paper “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century” (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf) is a tragic indictment of how we cope with such stressors and the costs of doing so.

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, CESifo Working Paper Series, 7159 (2018), 5. 16.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Report on the economic wellbeing of US households in 2017”, 1; https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-report-economic-well-being-us-households-201805.pdf. 17.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FEDS Notes, “A wealthless recovery”; https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asset-ownership-and-the-uneven-recovery-from-the-great-recession-20180913.htm. 18.Anne Case & Angus Deaton, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, spring 2017; https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf. 19.See Stephen Margolin & Juliet Schor, The Golden Age of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 20.See Eric Helleiner, States and the Re-emergence of Global Finance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 21.See Juliet Johnson, The Priests of Prosperity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 22.See “Citibank launches $100 million ad campaign”; https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/citibank-launches-100-million-ad. 23.See Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 24.See respectively, Carl Frey & Michael Osborne, “The future of employment” (2013); https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf; Bank of England, “Will a robot takeover my job”; https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/will-a-robot-takeover-my-job and OECD, “Automation, skills use and training” (2018); https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/fr/employment/automation-skills-use-and-training_2e2f4eea-en. 25.A search of the Financial Times archives from 2009 to 2020 on the topic “robots and employment” yields 403 results. 26.See Matthew Tracey & Joachim Fels, “70 is the new 65”, Pimco (2016); https://www.pimco.com/en-us/insights/viewpoints/in-depth/70-is-the-new-65-demographics-still-support-lower-rates-for-longer. 27.See Timo Fetzer, “Did austerity cause Brexit?”

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Marriage Choices and Class Boundaries: Social Endogamy in History. International Review of Social History Supplement 13. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge. Weitz, Rose. 2013. The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care: A Critical Approach. Boston: Wadsworth. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Willenbacher, Barbara. 2003. “Individualism and Traditionalism in Inheritance Law in Germany, France, England, and the United States.” Journal of Family History 28, no. 1: 208–25. ———. 2012. “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class.”

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There are several policy options, all of which depend on the will of those in charge. In the final analysis, policy is determined by the outcome of political contests. These contests reflect competing visions regarding what kind of society people think we ought to have or what is desirable. In the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009), epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett provide compelling cross-cultural evidence showing that countries with high levels of economic inequality are associated with a variety of what most would agree are undesirable outcomes such as poor physical health (including lower levels of life expectancy and higher rates of infant mortality), higher rates of stress and mental illness, higher rates of drug abuse, lower levels of overall childhood well-being (as well as higher rates of childhood obesity, lower levels of student math and literacy scores, and higher teenage rates of pregnancy), higher levels of violence (including homicide rates), higher rates of incarceration, and lower levels of social mobility.

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New York: Basic Books. Waters, Mary C. 2012. “Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy.” In The New Guilded Age: The Critical Inequality Debates of Our Time, ed. David B. Grusky and Tamar Kricheli-Katz, 230–46. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winant, Howard. 2012. “A Dream Deferred: Toward a U.S. Racial Future.” In The New Gilded Age: The Critical Inequality Debates of Our Time, ed.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Inequality leads to inferior social outcomes Recently, studies have come out to show that inequality leads to poor outcomes in health and other social indicators of human well-being. And this is independently of the sheer effect of higher inequality producing a higher number of poor people, who are bound to perform worse in these regards. This argument has been made popular recently by the book The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The book examined the data from two dozen or so rich countries (roughly countries with per capita incomes above the level of Portugal, which is around $20,000). It argues that more unequal countries definitely do worse in terms of infant mortality, teenage births, educational performance, homicide and imprisonment, and also possibly in terms of life expectancy, mental illness and obesity.3 More egalitarian societies have grown faster in many cases Not only is there a lot of evidence showing that higher inequality produces more negative economic and social outcomes, there are quite a few examples of more egalitarian societies growing much faster than comparable but more unequal societies.4 During their ‘miracle’ years between the 1950s and the 1980s, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan grew much faster than comparable countries despite having lower inequalities.

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MILANOVIC The Haves and the Have-Nots (New York: Basic Books, 2011). A. SEN Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). J. STIGLITZ The Price of Inequality (London: Allen Lane, 2012). D. STUCKLER AND S. BASU The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (London: Basic Books, 2013). R. WILKINSON AND K. PICKETT The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). ‘Lady Glossop: Do you work, Mr Wooster? Bertie: What, work, as in honest toil, you mean? Lady Glossop: Yes. Bertie: Hewing the wood and drawing the old wet stuff and so forth? Lady Glossop: Quite. Bertie: Well, I’ve known a few people who’ve worked.

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See OECD, Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2011), and ILO, World of Work 2012 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2012). 10. The following Gini coefficients are for 2010 from ILO, World of Work 2012, p. 15, figure 1.9. Figures for Botswana and Namibia are from older sources. 11. Interestingly, the dividing line here is similar to what some of the friendly critics of The Spirit Level use when they say that inequality produces negative social outcomes in countries above a certain level of inequality. 12. UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 2012 (Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2012), Chapter 3, p. 66, chart 3.6. The fifteen countries studied were Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, (South) Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Thailand, the UK and the US.

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

There is, in Japan, a shared commitment to success. We see it in relatively narrow income inequalities, low rates of poverty, low rates of crime, care for older people – and the longest life expectancy in the world. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett captured public imagination with their book The Spirit Level.27 It contains a simple and powerful idea: inequalities of income damage the health and well-being of all of us, rich, poor, or somewhere in between. I have co-edited books with Richard Wilkinson, and co-written a paper defending his ideas against some of his critics. I agree that social and economic inequalities are bad for health inequalities.

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OECD Stat Extracts: Income Distribution and Poverty – Poverty rate after taxes and transfers, poverty line 60% 2013 [14/04/2014]. Available from: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD. 19Galbraith JK. The Affluent Society. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. 20Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009. 21Lewis M. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. London: Allen Lane, 2011. 22Hampshire S. Justice Is Conflict. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 23New Policy Institute, MacInnes T, Aldridge H, Bushe S, Kenway P, Tinson A.

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Family and Childcare Trust, 2014. 25Ferguson D. The costs of childcare: how Britain compares with Sweden. The Guardian. 31 May 2014. 26Mackenbach JP. The persistence of health inequalities in modern welfare states: The explanation of a paradox. Social Science & Medicine. 2012; 75(4): 761–9. 27Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009. 28Marmot MG, Sapolsky R. Of Baboons and Men: Social Circumstances, Biology, and the Social Gradient in Health. In: Weinstein M, Lane MA, editors. Sociality, Hierarchy, Health: Comparative Biodemography: A Collection of Papers.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

As a 2007 UN-Habitat report concludes: Significant impacts of gating are seen in the real and potential spatial and social fragmentation of cities, leading to the diminished use and availability of public space and increased socio-economic polarisation … even increasing crime and the fear of crime as the middle classes abandon public streets to the vulnerable poor, to street children and families, and to offenders who prey on them.23 Distrust goes hand in hand with the rise of inequality, and becomes ingrained into the very fabric of the city itself. As Uslaner points out, inequality undermines the sense of common purpose and ownership, it attacks optimism and a sense of being in control of one’s fate. This is the same conclusion that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett came to in The Spirit Level: ‘Think of trust as an important marker of the ways in which greater material equality can help create a cohesive, cooperative community, to the benefit of all.’24 In almost every statistic on the subject, however, society has been growing increasingly unequal since the 1970s, and we are only now starting to audit the consequences.

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., 2011, p. 263. 21. arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/53-of-mobile-users-happy-to-hand-over-location-data-for-coupons.ars 22. www.theinternetofthings.eu/content/new-years-contest-panopticon-metaphor-internet-things---why-not-if-it-were-opposite 23. Goodyear, S., ‘Do Gated Communities Threaten Society?’, 11 April 2012, www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/04/do-gated-communities-threaten-society/1737 24. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K., The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin, 2010, p. 62. 25. Dorling, D., So You Think You Know About Britain, 2011, p. 73. 26. Milanovic, B., The Haves and the Have-Nots, Basic Books, 2012, p. 72. 27. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html?

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., ‘Science and Complexity’, American Scientist 36, 1948 Welter, V. M., Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, MIT Press, 2002 Whyte, W. H., City: Rediscovering the Centre, Doubleday, 1988 Whyte, W. H. (ed. Goldberger, P.), The Essential William H. Whyte, Fordham University Press, 2000 Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K., The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin, 2010 Williams, A. and Donald, A., The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs, Pluto Press, 2011 Wilson, J. Q. and Kelling, G. L., ‘Broken Windows’, Atlantic Monthly, 1982, from www.manhattan-institute.org Wirth, L., ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology, 1938 Wood, A.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

CONSEQUENCES OF INEQUALITY FOR WELL-BEING In the absence of any evidence on the impact on growth per se, what about evidence of the impact of inequality on more direct measures of well-being? Some researchers are passionate advocates of a causal link between increased inequality and worse outcomes in a wide range of social indicators, from health and life expectancy to teenage pregnancy and crime. In their recent book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett make exactly this argument and what’s more suggest that in an unequal society even the people at the top of the pile in terms of income have a reduced level of welfare compared to their counterparts in more equal places. Much of their evidence consists of presenting simple correlations between measures of inequality in different countries and measures of some social bad such a depression rates or prevalence of heart disease.

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Economic Growth in the Information Age.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1, pp. 125–211. Kaletsky, Anatole. 2010. Capitalism 4.0. London: Bloomsbury. Kamarck, Elaine. 2003. “Government Innovation around the World.” Cambridge, MA: John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Kay, John. 2009a. “Review of The Spirit Level.” Financial Times, 23 March 2009. ———. 2009b. “Labour’s Love Affair with Bankers Is to Blame for This Sorry State.” Financial Times, 25 April 2009. ———. 2010. Obliquity. London: Profile. Keefer, P., and S. Knack. 1997. “Does Social Capital Have An Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation.”

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Waal, Frans de. 2008. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weale, Martin. 2009. “Saving and the National Economy.” Discussion Paper No. 340. London: National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Wilkinson, Will. 2007. “In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is it Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy.” Policy Analysis, No. 590, 11 April 2007, Washington DC: Cato Institute. Willetts, David. 2010. The Pinch. London: Atlantic Books.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Such has been the corruption of American politics since then. But the problem of economic inequality goes even wider and deeper. A mountain of research has been generated in the past decade on the consequences of growing inequality for the health of American society—or any nation, for that matter. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level has earned justifiable acclaim for its documentation of how increasing inequality—far more than simply the actual amount of wealth in the elites of society—damages almost every measure of well-being, from life expectancy and mental health to violence and human happiness. This is largely true for the very rich, ironically enough, as well as the poor.

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Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012). 36. Drake Bennett, “Commentary: The Inequality Delusion,” BloombergBusinessweek.com, Oct. 21, 2010; and Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 214–15. 37. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). 38. Stiglitz, Price of Inequality, 43. 39. Thorstein Veblen, arguably the most original and greatest American economist of all time, was the first to grasp this fundamental change in capitalism, though many, of course, have followed in his wake.

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., 263n81 Sirota, David, 178 Skype, 138, 150 slavery, 25, 54, 191 smartphones, 112, 120, 128–29, 131, 135, 139 as data tracking devices, 150, 151, 152 as news platforms, 187, 188–89 patents, 260n25 used for unpaid overtime, 218 Smith, Adam, 218 social class. See class socialists and socialism, 229, 244–45n5 social media, 11, 12, 139, 149, 152, 157, 165, 243n102 Arab Spring role, 234n36 See also Facebook; MySpace Solove, Daniel, 169 Sony, 120, 256n134 Soviet Union, 17 Spanish-language newspaper editions, 277n104 The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett), 36 sports media, 193 stagnation, 20, 24, 30, 47, 48, 49, 221, 227 Stallman, Richard, 103 Starkman, Dean, 273n37 StatSheet, 193 “stealth marketing,” 147, 149 Stearns, Josh, 181, 197, 200 steel industry, 224, 225 Stiglitz, Joseph, 30, 37, 39, 138, 220, 224, 225, 226, 251n14 stimulation, economic.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

So it seemed like there might be something in the theory that depression and anxiety are a response to the constant status anxiety many of us live with today. But how could this theory be tested? I went to see a married couple who had taught me about this science and found an intriguing way of investigating it. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level—has made them two of the most influential social scientists in the world. When they looked at Robert’s work, they knew that with baboons, the hierarchies are fairly fixed:15 they are always going to live that way, with only minor variations. But Kate and Richard knew that for humans, it doesn’t quite work like that.

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., “Economic grand rounds: Income inequality and depression across the United States: an ecological study,” Psychiatric Services 62, no. 7 (2011): 710–2. See also http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/?p=642, as accessed December 10, 2016. This is true if you compare different countries Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2009), 31–41, 63–72, 173–196. “We’re extraordinarily sensitive to these things,” Paul Moloney, The Therapy Industry (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 109. If you work for a company, in living memory http://www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/ftse-100-bosses-earn-average-5-5m-year-report-says/100790, as accessed January 10, 2017; Sebastian Junger, Tribe: One Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, 2016), 31.

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See Internet and social media social neuroscience, here social prescribing definition of, here and holistic approach to diagnosis and treatment, here limited research on, here opposition of drug companies to, here and prescribing of activities rather than drugs, here See also Bromley-by-Bow Center society, Western rejection of concept, here The Spirit Level (Pickett and Wilkinson), here Sptizer, Eliot, here SSRIs. See Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors Star-D Trials, of SSRIs, here starvation, effects on body, here status and respect current large differences in, here disconnection from, as cause of depression, here and depression as type of submission response, here and status hierarchy in baboon troops, here and low/threatened status as source of stress, here, here, here reconnection to cooperatives and, here universal basic income and, here Stein, Richard, here, here, here stigmatization of depressed persons research on, here undermining of, as motive for chemical imbalance theory of depression, here stress long-term, as cause of depression, here impact of research on, here, here research on, here low/threatened status as source of, here, here, here Sudblock (Berlin gay club) and bonding of Kotti residents, here and Kotti neighborhood protest, here and Tuncai (homeless man), adoption of, here, here, here suicide rates, among Native American/First Nations groups, here Sullivan, Andrew, here Summerfield, Derek, here symptoms, painful of depression, as message about needed changes in society, here as key to discovering underlying problem, here, here, here, here Tamir, Maya, here taxi drivers in London, and neuroplasticity, here teenagers, ineffectiveness of antidepressants for, drug companies’ hiding of, here television, and advertising power to create materialistic desires, here sense of inadequacy generated in viewers, here Thatcher, Margaret, here Ticu, Alex, here, here tribe, human need for connection to cooperatives and, here, here and disconnection from other people as cause of depression, here, here, here, here Internet gaming and, here Tuncai (homeless man) freeing of, by Kotti protesters, here and involvement with others as treatment for depression, here and Kotti neighborhood protest, here return to psychiatric institution, here Tuncer, Neriman, here Twenge, Jean, here twins studies, and genetic factors in depression, here unhappiness, and depression, continuum between, here unions, difficulty of establishing, here United Nations, on social causes of mental illness, here universal basic income cost of implementing, here experiments with, here experiment with, in Dauphin, Canada, here effects on residents, here ending of, here Forget’s analysis of data from, here and improvements in working conditions, here, here mental health effects of, here as realizable dream, here as remedy for economic insecurity created by globalization, here, here Utopia for Realists (Bregman), here values, meaningful, disconnection from as cause of depression, here advertising’s encouragement of materialistic values and, here, here and chemical imbalance model of depression, here link between materialism and depression, here and materialism, destructive effects of, here, here values, meaningful, reconnecting to, here alternative lifestyle designed for, here banning of advertising and, here and consumer values, experiment in changing, here difficulty of, here meditation and, here psychedelic drugs and, here Vietnam, author’s food poisoning in, here, here Virno, Paul, here Virtually Normal (Sullivan), here wand, healing.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

As Professor Sam Friedman of the London School of Economics (LSE) notes in his own research and analysis of this phenomenon, ‘people find stories of the past – of working-class struggle, of upward social mobility, of meritocratic striving – that provide powerful frames for understanding their own experiences and identity’. A person’s class can change throughout their life and they may also feel that they belong to a different class to the one that their socio-economic status puts them in. Class is an identity. Income and wealth are a reality. In their 2009 book The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson make a similar point, arguing that social class is subjective as it is classified differently in various studies and pieces of research, but income differences are more objective. Any discussion of wealth and class in Britain necessarily intersects with race and ethnicity.

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Author’s Note 60 per cent of people in Britain: Patrick Butler, ‘Most Britons regard themselves as working class, survey finds’, Guardian, 29 June 2016, www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/29/most-brits-regard-themselves-as-working-class-survey-finds a quarter of people in such jobs: NatCen Social Research, ‘Social Class’, in British Social Attitudes 33 (2016), p. 9, www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-33/social-class.aspx ‘people find stories of the past’: ‘Why do so many middle class professionals insist they are working class?’, LSE, 19 January 2021, www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2021/a-Jan-21/Why-do-so-many-middle-class-professionals-insist-they-are-working-class social class is subjective: Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009; London: Penguin, 2010). Prologue the average rent for a one-bedroom home was £1,265: The house price statistics at the start of each chapter are taken from the online property website rightmove.co.uk. Please note these will therefore be asking prices and not sale prices.

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(London: Penguin, 2017) Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013) Nathalie Olah, Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity (London: Repeater, 2019) George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001) Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009; London: Penguin, 2010) Martin Pugh, We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (London: Bodley Head, 2008) Chris Renwick, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State (London: Allen Lane, 2017) Josh Ryan-Collins, Why Can’t You Afford a Home?

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

” — Nicholas Stuart, Sydney Morning Herald “An important and interesting book that shows how trapped we have become by the idea of Gross Domestic Product—and reveals how important it is to develop alternatives that will help us reduce inequality and respond to climate change.” — Kate E. Pickett, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York and co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone “The writing is effortless and intriguing. Like a novel, it weaves personal stories and the significance of individuals into a narrative about tectonic shifts in world politics.” — Maria Ivanova, Associate Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and author of The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty In memory of Mahbub ul Haq (1934–1998) Contents Title Page Dedication Preface to the Second Edition Preface Prologue: Lost History Introduction: The Great Invention One: GDP and Its Discontents Two: The Fight for the Formula Three: Made in Cambridge Four: The Karachi Economic Miracle Five: Red Star Over Central Square Six: The Talented Mr.

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Many thanks also go to Dasho Karma Ura who described the making of Gross National Happiness; to Gustav Papanek for his memories as an economic development consultant in 1950s Karachi; and to Lord Nicholas Stern for re-living both the Commission for Africa and the Stern review on the economics of climate change. A huge thanks also to Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level, for the generous cover quote. You would think that our digital age would mean less work for librarians and archivists, but I can assure readers that their services remain much sought after. I am especially grateful to Kate Mollan of the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC for dogged pursuit of an original copy of Simon Kuznets’s 261-page report National Income 1929–32; and to the staff at the library of the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex for material on Dudley Seers.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Galbraith and Travis Hale, “Income Distribution and the Information Technology Bubble,” Working Paper No. 27, University of Texas Inequality Project, January 2004. 56. Robert Frank, The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 54. 57. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 58. Rana Foroohar, “Thomas Piketty: Marx 2.0,” Time, May 19, 2014. 59. Federal Reserve Flow of Funds; Congressional Research Service, “Rebuilding Household Wealth: Implications for Economic Recovety,” by Craig K. Elwell, September 13, 2013. 60.

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Mian and Sufi, House of Debt. 10. Turner, Between Debt and the Devil. 11. Robert J. Shiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 12. Mian and Sufi, House of Debt. 13. For an interesting discussion of alternative models, see chapter 16 of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 14. Asker, Farre-Mensa, and Ljungqvist, “Comparing the Investment Behavior of Public and Private Firms.” 15. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2012). 16. Rana Foroohar, “What Hasn’t Been Fixed Since the Last Market Crash?”

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New York: Picador, 2015. Weill, Sandy, and Judah S. Kraushaar. The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy. New York: Warner Business Books, 2006. Whitney, Meredith. Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity. New York: Penguin Press, 2013. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Wolf, Martin. The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. Zingales, Luigi. A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Bush administrations.”15 The similarities between mismanaged nations and America in 2013 are unsettling: weak productivity growth, stagnant wages, Red Queens, deteriorating economic mobility, and widening income disparity. Johnson’s analogy is extended by statistics suggesting the United States also has come to resemble a mismanaged nation on social indices, as described by Australian journalist Leon Gettler, drawing on research by epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level: “The US has the worst health and social problems in such areas as numeracy and literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage pregnancies, lack of trust, obesity, mental illness including drug and alcohol addiction, and social mobility.”16 Voters can end gridlock by reasserting their economic self-interest at the polls, weighing carefully the consequences of policies expected from the leaders they elect.

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., pp. 157, 427. 12 Rich Morin, “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor,” Pew Research Center, Pew Social and Demographic Trends, Jan. 11, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/01/11/rising-share-of-americans-see-conflict-between-rich-and-poor/Top of Form. 13 Francesco Guerrera, “A Need to Reconnect,” Financial Times, March 12, 2009. 14 John P. Hussman, “Misallocating Resources,” Weekly Market Comment, July 12, 2010, http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc100712.htm. 15 Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” The Atlantic, May 2009. 16 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Leon Gettler, “The Wealth Time Bomb,” Sydney Morning Herald, Oct. 28, 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-wealth-time-bomb-20101027-173xm.html#ixzz1ndiT7ObQ. 17 Nancy Folbre, “Defining Economic Interest,” Economix, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2011. 18 Michael I.

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(Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce), 41, 180, 181, 186, 203–04, 214, 216, 225, 367, 369, 376, 389 Petri, Alexandra, 427 Pew Research Center, 20, 45, 263, 292, 300, 345, 431–32, 452 Pfeffer, Jeffrey (professor), 311 Phelps, Edmund (Nobel Laureate), 146, 149, 151, 163, 440, 442 Philippon, Thomas (economist), 137 Phillips, Kevin (economic historian), 80, 282, 391 Phillips-Fein, Kim, 35–36 Phillipson, Nicholas, Phipps, Maureen, 303 Pickett, Kate (epidemiologist), 433, The Spirit Level, 434 Pierce, Justin R., 345 Pierson, Paul (political scientist), 41 Piff, Paul K., 127 Piketty, Thomas (economist), 5, 23–24, 263, 265, 274–75 Pisano, Gary P., 161, 365, 395 Plender, John (Financial Times columnist), 30, 199, 201 Polglaze, Mark (GM-Holden, Australia), 114 Pomorski, Lukasz, 119 Porter, Eduardo, 390 (chart) Porter, Michael E.

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

In any event, higher real estate values and an economy dependent on servicing the rich are probably the only two certain consequences of living in a country with a lot of wealthy people. These benefits, themselves dubious, should be weighed against the well-documented negatives. In their highly acclaimed book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw on a vast body of social science evidence, as well as their own research, in revealing the long list of problems that large income inequalities exacerbate, including poor physical health, mental illness, drug use, violence, obesity, shorter life spans, diminished social relations and reduced prospects for upward social mobility.

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We show that countries with higher taxes tend to have significantly better social outcomes and that their economies have been unaffected, and indeed arguably have benefited, from the increased government spending that higher taxes have financed. Some readers will note that our findings are similar to those of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level. Wilkinson and Pickett revealed that more equal countries tend to have better social outcomes. We measure tax levels (instead of equality) and find that there is also a strong correlation between high tax levels and better social outcomes. The overlap is perhaps not surprising since countries with higher tax levels tend to have greater equality.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

But among those who assert their own self-worth, psychologists found two distinct personality types. One group are those who report high self-esteem and also high levels of happiness, fulfilling friendships, and social relations. The other group report high self-esteem but also display a host of antisocial tendencies, including violence, racism, and lack of empathy. In their book The Spirit Level, authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett describe this latter kind of self-esteem as “primarily defensive, a kind of internal attempt to talk oneself up”: People with insecure high self-esteem tend to be insensitive to others and to show an excessive preoccupation with themselves, with success, and with their image and appearance in the eyes of others.

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Esquire, January 18, 2011. 41 “And I—I mean—you know, my dad”: See “Republican Presidential Candidates Participate in a CNN-Sponsored Debate,” Political Transcript Wire, January 20, 2012. 42 “It was always a business where you had to have an edge”: Steve Fishman, “The Madoff Tapes,” New York, February 27, 2011. 43 “I am an important person”: Jean M. Twenge et al., “Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” Journal of Personality 76, no. 4 (2008): 878. 44 “People with insecure high self-esteem”: Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury), p. 37. 45 “not that smart and kind of a bully”: See Jeffrey Rosen, “The Case Against Sotomayor,” New Republic, May 4, 2009. 46 “meritocratic feedback loop”: Ho, Liquidated, p. 57. 47 “There’s 100 percent no question”: Author interview. 48 “the outstretched arms of J.P.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Rewards at the top of finance and business, their authors argue, have become increasingly disproportionate and undeserving, the product of an increase in the concentration of political and market power rather than a greater economic contribution.2 One of the most influential of these critiques, The Spirit Level, has shown that highly unequal societies are much more likely to impose widespread social damage.3 These are important arguments but they deal mainly with the moral and social consequences of the surge in polarisation. An equally important issue, but one that has been largely ignored, is the impact of soaring inequality on the way economies function.

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A failure to act risks a new phase of permanent or near-permanent recession, one that will condemn much of the population—in the UK, the US and elsewhere—to a prolonged period of depressed wages, stagnant living standards and blighted opportunities. Notes 2 See, for example, W Hutton, Them and Us, Little Brown, 2010; D Dorling, Injustice, Policy Press, 2010; G Irvin, Super Rich, Polity Press, 2008; P Toynbee & D Walker, Unjust Rewards, Granta, 2008; S Lansley, Rich Britain, Politico’s, 2006. 3 R Wilkinson and K Pickett, The Spirit Level, Penguin, 2009. 1 AN ECONOMIC MEGASHIFT Thirty years ago, the United Kingdom was one of the most equal countries in the developed world. Today it is one of the most unequal. 4 This shift started at the beginning of the 1980s and put into reverse a half century of political and social change that had reduced the gap between the top and the bottom to its lowest level in history.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

., ‘Transitions in pathways of human development and carbon emissions,’ Environmental Research Letters 9(1), 2014; Angus Deaton, ‘Income, health, and well-being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll,’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2), 2008, pp. 53–72; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton University Press, 1997). 13 Tim Jackson, ‘The post-growth challenge: secular stagnation, inequality and the limits to growth,’ CUSP Working Paper No. 12 (Guildford: University of Surrey, 2018). 14 Mark Easton, ‘Britain’s happiness in decline,’ BBC News, 2006. 15 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (Penguin 2010). 16 Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown, ‘Income inequality and status seeking: Searching for positional goods in unequal US states,’ Psychological Science, 2015. 17 Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, I. V. Holmes and Derek R. Avery, ‘The subjective well-being political paradox: Happy welfare states and unhappy liberals,’ Journal of Applied Psychology 99(6), 2014; Benjamin Radcliff, The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 18 According to the UN’s World Happiness Report. 19 Dacher Keltner, Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (WW Norton & Company, 2009); Emily Smith and Emily Esfahani, The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfilment in a World Obsessed with Happiness (Broadway Books, 2017). 20 Sixty-year-old Nicoyan men have a median lifetime of 84.3 years (a three-year advantage over Japanese men), while women have a median lifetime of 85.1.

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., ‘The Nicoya region of Costa Rica: a high longevity island for elderly males,’ Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, 11, 2013; Jo Marchant, ‘Poorest Costa Ricans live longest,’ Nature News, 2013; Luis Rosero-Bixby and William H. Dow, ‘Predicting mortality with biomarkers: a population-based prospective cohort study for elderly Costa Ricans,’ Population Health Metrics 10(1), 2012. 21 Danny Dorling, ‘Is inequality bad for the environment?’ Guardian, 2017. 22 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level. 23 Extreme Carbon Inequality, Oxfam, 2015. 24 Yannick Oswald, Anne Owen, and Julia K. Steinberger, ‘Large inequality in international and intranational energy footprints between income groups and across consumption categories,’ Nature Energy 5(3), 2020, pp. 231–239. 25 Thomas Piketty, ‘The illusion of centrist ecology,’ Le Monde, 2019. 26 World Happiness Report. 27 CFO Journal, ‘Cost of health insurance provided by US employers keeps rising,’ Wall Street Journal, 2017. 28 David Ruccio, ‘The cost of higher education in the USA,’ Real-World Economics Review blog, 2017. 29 Average real wages peaked in 1973 at $23 per hour, declined to a nadir of $19 per hour in 1995, and stood at $22 per hour in 2018 (US Bureau of Labour Statistics).

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Inequality It is not just the size of the economic pie that is causing concern; it is how it is divided. Since the turn of the century, and especially since the financial crisis, there has been a growing concern about the gap between the richest and the rest. Wilkinson and Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level argues that inequality leads to crime, poor health, and unhappiness not just among the poor but also across society.6 In 2011, the Occupy movement popularised the meme of “The 99%,” highlighting the dichotomy between a rich elite and the population as a whole. And Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought decades of empirical work on wealth inequality to bear on the public debate.7 FIGURE 1.3: Growth by Income Group in the World, 1980–2016.

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“The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 11 (1): 1–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/765068. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1911. An Introduction to Mathematics. London: Williams and Norgate. Wilkinson, Frank, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Williamson, Elizabeth J., Alex J. Walker, Krishnan Bhaskaran, Seb Bacon, Chris Bates, Caroline E. Morton, Helen J. Curtis, et al. 2020. “Factors Associated with COVID-19-Related Death Using OpenSAFELY.” Nature 584 (7821): 430–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2521-4.

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Yet, despite people’s hesitancies about identifying themselves economically, we will insist on the centrality of such inequalities in shaping people’s lives. The power of income inequalities Income inequalities in Britain are very high, and have been rapidly increasing. In their highly influential book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett use the standard metric to measure inequality between countries – the Gini coefficient – in the fifteen states who were members of the European Union prior to its major enlargement in 2004 and also the major industrial English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada and the USA.2 Figure 2.1 gives an indication of the inequalities within nations as they reflect the relative differences between countries in terms of earnings.

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Garthwaite, Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay No-pay, Britain (Bristol: 2012). CONCLUSION: THE OLD NEW POLITICS OF CLASS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 1. Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: 1956), p. 237. 2. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: 2014), Chapter 14. 3. See, notably, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: 2009). 4. See Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: 2005). 5. See Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects (London: 2013); T. Shildrick, R. MacDonald, C. Webster and K. Garthwaite, Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay, No-pay Britain (Bristol: 2012); Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: 2004); and John Hills, Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us (Bristol: 2015).

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

Only in its early stages does economic growth boost life expectancy. Source: United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). FIGURE 7. Health and social problems are closely related to inequality among rich countries. Source: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin, 2009), 20. FIGURE 8. Ecological footprint versus human development index, 2008. Source: Global Footprint Network and WWF, Living Planet Report 2012 (Gland, Switzerland: WWF, 2012), 60. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues in The Price of Inequality that even after the 2007–08 financial crisis, “the wealthiest 1 percent of households had 220 times the wealth of the typical American, almost double the ratio in 1962 or 1983.”4 Stiglitz emphasizes that inequality results from political failure and argues that inequality contributes not only to the social pathologies pointed out above, but also to economic instability in the form of a “vicious downward spiral.”

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Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005). Chapter 2. Structure 1. Lau, “What the World Needs Is Financial Stability.” 2. See the description of archetypes in Senge et al., Presence; and Senge et al., The Fifth Discipline. 3. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin, 2009), 7. 4. Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 8. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of vols. I–VI by D. C. Somervell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1946] 1987). 7.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Notwithstanding the studied references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, the book's success is puzzling. The problems of rising inequality have been identified before, by economic historian Angus Maddison, World Bank economist Branko Milanović, James Galbraith and the University of Texas Inequality Project, and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. The French reaction to Capital was subdued. Its rapturous treatment in Anglo-Saxon territories has been less about the book than deep-seated anxiety about inequality. The book challenges the mythology central to liberal societies of an egalitarian meritocracy based on skill, hard work, entrepreneurship, and competition.

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Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Touchstone Books, 1991. ——, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, Penguin, 2011. Inequality and Trust Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2011. Satyajit Das is a globally respected former banker and consultant with over thirty-five years’ experience in financial markets. He presciently anticipated, as early as 2006, the Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt problems, as well as the unsustainable nature of China's economic success.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

‘The Political Economy of Property Tax Reform’. OECD Working Papers on Fiscal Federalism no. 18, 9 April. Sloman, J., and A. Wride. 2009. Economics. 7th ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall. Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Snowdon, Christopher. 2010. The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-Checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything. Ripon: Little Dice. Solow, Robert M. 1956. ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth’. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1): 65–94. Stephens, Mark. 1993. ‘Housing Finance Deregulation: Britain’s Experience’. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 8 (2): 159–75.

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‘The Scope and Method of Political Economy in the Light of the “Marginal” Theory of Value and of Distribution’. The Economic Journal 24 (93): 1–23. Wilcox, S. 2006. The Geography of Affordable and Unaffordable Housing: And the Ability of Younger Working Households to Become Home Owners. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin. Wilson, W., and L. Blow, L. 2013. Extending Home Ownership – Government Initiatives. London: House of Commons Library. Wise, Sarah. 2013. The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. London: Random House. Woetzel, Jonathan, Sangeeth Ram, Jan Mischke, Nicklas Garemo, and Shirish Sankhe. 2014.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

For sailing, Ellen MacArthur’s Taking on the World. 21 For example, Steven Hawking responding to an audience question after one of his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures: ‘We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least 100 years, so we have to be very careful in the meantime’. https://tinyurl.com/ReithHawking 22 Kinetic energy = ½ mv 2. m = 50 70 kg = 3500 kg. Speed of light (c) = 300,000,000 m/s. v = c/10. KE = 1.5 1018 J = 440 TWh or 18.3 TW for a day. 5 Growth, Money and Metrics 1 For example, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickerty’s The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better lays out a bullet proof case for reduction in inequality and chilling out about GDP in rich countries. The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows laid out perhaps the first proper challenge to the ‘more is better’ mantra, and Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth and, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics build on these themes, as does the New Economics Foundation (https://neweconomics.org). 2 For a more detailed analysis of the link between GDP and carbon emissions, see The Burning Question, Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark, Profile Books 2013 (Chapter 9, The Growth Debate). 3 Bobby Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 1968, speaking to Vietnam War protesters. https://tinyurl.com/ BobbyKennedy-onGDP 264 NOTES TO PAGES 124–134 4 Tom Peters might not have been the first to coin the phrase, which is also widely associated with Peter Drucker.

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See also Wikipedia’s posts on supply side economics and trickle-down economics. 9 Credit Suisse 2017 Global Wealth Report https://tinyurl.com/globalhwealth By wealth, we mean the sum of all assets; house, money, pension fund, clothes, toothbrush – the lot. 10 See endnote 9 above. 11 Using data compiled by on Giving What We Can from https://tinyurl.com/meanmedianwealth as well as Credit Suisse. The factor of 4 is a rough but probably conservative estimate, based on guestimating the income distribution within the poorest half of Africa’s population. 12 See Wilkinson and& Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Also relevant is Andrew Notes to Pages 136–140 265 Sayer’s book Why We Can’t Afford The Rich. The Equality Trust website gives us a broad overview of the issues: https://www .equalitytrust.org.uk/ 13 The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution as defined for molecules moving in a gas between speeds c1 and c2: 3=2 2 mc m f ðcÞ ¼ 4πc2 e 2kB T 2πkB T • m is the mass of the molecule • kB is the Boltzmann constant • T is absolute temperature. 14 Here is where the money spent on the UK National Lottery ends up. • 53% is paid out in prizes • 25% goes to ‘good causes’ (some of which, some people argue, are causes that are rarely used by the people who buy most of the lottery tickets) • 12% goes to the government as tax • 5% goes to the gambling company, Camelot, that runs it. • 4% goes to the shop that sold the ticket So when you buy a ticket, you give away nearly half the money.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Might it be harder for Americans, as gated communities spread across the land while middle-class enclaves disappear, to sustain in such discussions the necessary sense of moral superiority? That income inequality weighs heavily on the noneconomic life of a nation is the thesis of the 2009 book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two medical researchers based in Yorkshire, England. The book has been criticized for overreaching. Wilkinson and Pickett relate income inequality trends not only to mental and physical health, violence, and teenage pregnancy, but also to global warming.

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Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Andy Stern, A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track (New York: Free Press, 2008; originally published in 2006). Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 1. Trends in the Distribution of Household Income, Congressional Budget Office, 19. 2. Warren Buffett, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2011, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html; “Options to Tax Individuals with Incomes over $1 Million,” Table T11-0302, Tax Policy Center (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2011), at http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/Content/PDF/T11-0302.pdf; “Monthly Budget Review,” Congressional Budget Office, Nov, 7, 2011, at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/125xx/doc12541/2011_Nov_MBR.pdf. 3.

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski

Charles Babbage, classic study, Ford Model T, invention of movable type, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman

A Roman builder, or mensor aedificorum, was familiar with the try square, the plumb line, and the chalk line—all tools that were developed by the ancient Egyptians.3 The level, or libella, also an Egyptian invention, consisted of a wood frame resembling the letter A, with a plumb bob suspended from the apex. To level, the string was lined up with a mark in the center of the crossbar. Not as compact as my spirit level, perhaps, but obviously just as serviceable since A-levels continued to be used until the mid-1800s. The spirit level, with its sealed tube containing an air bubble floating in alcohol, was invented in the mid-1600s. It was first exclusively a surveying instrument—it took another two hundred years to find its way into the carpenter’s toolbox. For measuring length, the Roman mensor used a regula, or a wooden stick divided into feet, palms, twelfths or unciae (whence our inches), and digiti or finger widths.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16 ‘We would need to create …’ Kevin Anderson, ‘Talks in the city of light generate more heat’, Nature 528, 21 December 2015. 17 ‘Deforestation is a major cause …’ US Environmental Protection Agency, ‘Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data’, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data, accessed 4 February 2017. 18 ‘As the soils deplete …’ ‘Deforestation and its extreme effect on global warming,’ Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deforestation-and-global-warming/. 19 ‘Livestock farming alone contributes more …’ Carbon Countdown, Carbon Budget 2016 Update, Carbon Brief, www.carbonbrief.org. 20 ‘Now, let’s accept that poor …’ Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 21 ‘In this scenario, poor countries …’ Then they will have to reduce emissions aggressively from 2025, cutting by about 7 per cent each year until net zero in 2050, with assistance from rich countries. 22 ‘And poor countries are going …’ The rate necessary for them to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, assuming maximum reductions from clean energy technologies and efficiency improvements. 23 ‘We already have plenty of …’ Daniel W.

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Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 21 ‘In this scenario, poor countries …’ Then they will have to reduce emissions aggressively from 2025, cutting by about 7 per cent each year until net zero in 2050, with assistance from rich countries. 22 ‘And poor countries are going …’ The rate necessary for them to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, assuming maximum reductions from clean energy technologies and efficiency improvements. 23 ‘We already have plenty of …’ Daniel W. O’Neill, ‘The proximity of nations to a socially sustainable steady-state economy’, Journal of Cleaner Production 108, 2015, pp. 1213–31. 24 ‘After that, what makes us …’ Benjamin Radcliffe, ‘A happy state’, Aeon, 17 September 2015. See also Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level. 25 ‘We should look at societies …’ P. Edward, ‘The Ethical Poverty Line: a moral quantification of absolute poverty’, Third World Quarterly 27(2), 2006, pp. 377–93. 26 ‘A similar majority also believe …’ Reported in Jennifer Elks, ‘Havas: “Smarter” consumers will significantly alter economic models and the role of brands’, Sustainable Brands, 15 May 2014. 27 ‘It made headlines in 2012 …’ Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, The Chicago Plan Revisited, IMF Working Paper WP/12/202 (New York: International Monetary Fund, 2012). 28 ‘According to a recent report …’ US advertising expenditure data available at: http://purplemotes.net/2008/09/14/us-advertising-expenditure-data/. 29 ‘This frenzy of advertising has …’ Betsy Taylor and Dave Tilford, ‘Why consumption matters’, in Juliet B.

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

bank run, dark matter, The Spirit Level

A survey of the sewers of London was undertaken in the summer and autumn of 1848 when their condition was described as “frightful”; the system was dilapidated and decayed, even dangerous. The sewer for the Westminster workhouse was “in so wretched a condition that the leveller could scarcely work for the thick scum that covered the glasses of the spirit-level a few minutes after being wiped.… A chamber is reached about thirty feet in length from the roof of which hangings of putrid matter like stalactites descend three feet in length.” One of the investigating party was “dragged out on his back (through two feet of black foetid deposits) in a state of insensibility.”

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

Johnston, “2005 Incomes on Average Still Below 2000 Peak,” New York Times, August 21, 2007. 49. Vision of Humanity, Global Peace Index, http://www.visionofhumanity. org/gpi/results/rankings/2008. 50. O. James, The Selfish Capitalist (London: Vermilion, 2007). 51. D. Callahan, “The Moral Market,” Democracy Journal (Summer 2009): 49–59. 52. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). chapter 4 1. From Alan Krueger’s introduction to the Bantam edition of The Wealth of Nations (New York, 2003). 2. ReasonOnline, “Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business: A Reason Debate Featuring Milton Friedman, John Mackey and T.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

The data for figure 2.1 (the most recent available) were taken from Edward N. Wolff, “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18559 (November 2012), table 2, 58. 2. See especially Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 49 ff. 3. US Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/, table H-6, and http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/, table P-8. 4. James Madison, National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_madison.html. 5.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Marmot’s 2004 book, The Status Syndrome: How social standing affects our health and longevity, is a book that may change the way you understand ­human nature and our social world. He played a leading role in the World Health Organ­ ization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health whose 2008 report sets out how a better world is possible. Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better (2009) provides a wealth of information on the pervasive effects of inequality on societies. 218 10  |  Trade and globalization without the rosetinted glasses ‘There is no branch of economics in which there is a wider gap between orthodox doctrine and actual problems than in the theory of international trade.’

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UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) (2008) World Investment Report 2008: Transnational corporations and the infrastructure challenge, New York and Geneva: United Nations. UNDP (United Nations Development ­Programme) (2007) Human Development Report 2007/2008, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, available at hdr. undp.org/en/. UNICEF (2007) ‘WHO and UNICEF call for renewed commitment to breastfeed- 288 Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009) The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane. Winkelmann, L. and R. Winkelmann (1998) ‘Why are the unemployed so unhappy? Evidence from panel data’, Economica, 65(1): 1–15. Wolf, M. (2004) Why Globalization Works, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wolff, E. and A.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “the disease consequences of feeling poor are often rooted in the psychosocial consequences of being made to feel poor by one’s surroundings.” If you’ve got food and a roof over your head, the worst part of poverty may in fact be the feeling of being poorer than other people. Big gaps in socioeconomic status can mean trouble for society in general. In their book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate how gross inequality can lead to higher rates of violent crime, drug use, children born to teenagers, and heart disease. “If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” they warn governments.

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“psychosocial consequences”: Adler, Nancy, Elissa Epel, Grace Castellazzo, and Jeannette Ickovics, “Relationship of Subjective and Objective Social Status with Psychological and Physiological Functioning: Preliminary Data in Healthy White Women,” Health Psychology, 2000: 586–92. Status comparisons: Layard, Richard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005), 43–48. higher rates of mental illness: Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Society Stronger (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). This may be part of the reason: Harris, Gregory, “Liberal or Tory, Minority Gov’t Would Hit ‘Sweet Spot,’ Profs Say,” University of Calgary press release, January 18, 2006, www.ucalgary.ca/mp2003/news/jan06/third-way.html (accessed January 12, 2011); Helliwell, John F., Globalization and Well-Being (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002).

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

‘Again, I was hit, and vaguely sickened, by Greenland’s inhuman scale,’ she writes in her fine essay ‘Greenland is Melting’, New Yorker, 24 October 2016 <https://www.new yorker.com/ magazine/2016/10/24 /greenland-is-melting>. 363 ‘deaden[ed] . . . gangplank of a cattle truck’: Seamus Heaney, ‘Mycenae Lookout’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 29. 364 ‘thick speech’: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 252. 364 ‘interpret or respond’: Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 250. 364 ‘back-flowing’: Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 249. Chapter 11: Meltwater Pages 380 ‘matter out of place’: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 44. 380 ‘animate (endowed with life) . . . landscapes they inhabit’: Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?

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.: Duke University Press, 2016) Hardy, Thomas, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872; London: Penguin, 2012) Harman, Graham, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) *Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Hawks, John, et al., ‘New Fossil Remains of Homo Naledi from the Lesedi Chamber, South Africa’, eLife 6 (2017) Heaney, Seamus, The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) Herzog, Werner (dir.), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Hesjedal, Anders, ‘The Hunters’ Rock Art in Northern Norway: Problems of Chronology and Interpretation’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 27:1 (1994) Hoffmann, D. L. et al., ‘U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art’, Science 359:6378 (February 2018) Hogenboom, Melissa, ‘In Siberia There is a Huge Crater and It is Getting Bigger’, BBC, 24 February 2017 <http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170223-in-siberia-there-is-a-huge-crater-and-it-is-getting-bigger> Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Éloi Laurent, “Inequality as Pollution, Pollution as Inequality: The Social-Ecological Nexus” (working paper, Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2013), https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_media/working_papers/laurent_inequality-pollution.pdf. See also Éloi Laurent, Social-écologie (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). 14. Michael Marmot and Richard G. Wilkinson, eds., Social Determinants of Health, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2010). See also Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (London: Penguin, 2018). 16. A visitor from Mars falls into this trap when, observing that rain falls on Earth every time umbrellas can be seen, it deduces that umbrellas are the cause of the rain.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

They’ll find it hard to develop a fundamental faith in self-efficacy—a belief that they can shape the course of their life. They’ll be less likely to have confidence in the proposition that cause leads to effect, that if they sacrifice now, something good will result. Then there are the psychic effects of inequality itself. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that the mere fact of being low on the status totem pole brings its own deep stress and imposes its own psychic costs. Inequality and a feeling of exclusion causes social pain, which leads to more obesity, worse health outcomes, fewer social connections, more depression and anxiety.

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18 Public-education spending Eric Hanushek, “Milton Friedman’s Unfinished Business,” Hoover Digest, Winter 2007, http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/friedmanhoover_digest.pdf. 19 A mother with two kids Haskins and Sawhill, 46. 20 If you read part Margaret Bridges, Bruce Fuller, Russell Rumberger, and Loan Tran, “Preschool for California’s Children: Unequal Access, Promising Benefits,” PACE Child Development Projects, University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute (September 2004): 9, http://gse.berkeley.edu/research/pace/reports/PB.04-3.pdf. 21 About half the students Haskins and Sawhill, 223. 22 Isabel Sawhill has calculated Haskins and Sawhill, 42. 23 If you get married before Haskins and Sawhill, 70. 24 Wilkinson and Pickett point Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 75 25 “Low-income families” Haskins and Sawhill, 101. 26 As James Heckman argues James Heckman and Dimitriy V. Masterov, “The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children,” Invest in Kids Working Group, Committee for Economic Development, Working Paper 5 (October 4, 2004): 3, http://jenni.uchicago.edu/Invest/FILES/dugger_2004-12-02_dvm.pdf. 27 But social and emotional skills Heckman and Masterov, 28–35. 28 Small classes may be better Malcolm Gladwell, “Most Likely to Succeed,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell. 29 The City University of New York Marc Santora, “CUNY Plans New Approach to Community College,” New York Times, January 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/education/26college.html?

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

"Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations." UNI-SPAL. http://domino.un.Org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/abl4d4aafc4elbb985256204004f55 fa?OpenDocument. "Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine." UNISPAL. http:// domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/O/cc33602f61b0935c8025648800368307? Document. Remnick, David. "Profiles: The Spirit Level: Amos Oz Writes the Story of Israel." The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/P04ll08fa_fact. Shlaim, Avi. "Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948." Cambridge University Press. http://www.fathom.com/course/72810001. "The Law of Return 5710 (1950)." Knesset, http://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/ "The Law of Return 5710 (1950)."

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Oz and his colleagues produced The Seventh Day: Soldiers' Talk About the Six-Day War, a book aimed at "recording in permanent form the effect of the Six-Day War on their generation." The soldiers' stories and quotes are taken from it. Oz's early stance against the occupation is documented by David Remnick in his New Yorker article "The Spirit Level," November 8, 2004. The remainder of the chapter—Dalia and Richard's arrival in Ramallah, their reception by the Khairi family, and the encounter between Dalia and Bashir—is recounted according to their memories, as described at the beginning of the notes for this chapter. Chapter 10 This chapter is based on a combination of eyewitness interviews, memoirs, secondary sources describing the historical and political context of the day, and interviews with various actors among the Palestinian political factions from 1969 to the mid-1980s.

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

There is indeed a relationship between income inequality and the mean health status of a population. But it could be due exclusively to the fact that on the one hand there is a correlation between individual health and income, and, on the other hand, it tends to disappear for high incomes. Thus, in one society 14 A similar hypothesis is proposed in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Globalization and Costly Inequality141 where rich people are richer and poor people poorer than in another society, rich people have the same health status but poor people are less healthy. On average, health is worse in the more unequal society.

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

WHO (2013b) Fact sheet 311, Obesity and overweight, World Health Organisation, Geneva. WHO, (2014a) Air quality deteriorating in many of the world’s cities. News Release, 7th May 2014, World Health Organisation, Geneva. WHO (2014b) Obesity and Overweight. Fact sheet Number 311, May 2014, World Health Organisation, Geneva. Wilkinson, R and Pickett, K (2009) The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Woodcock, J and 17 others (2009) Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: urban land transport, Lancet 374:1930-43. World Bank (2014) Transport for health. The global burden of disease from motorised road transport, Report 86304.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

‘The Empirical Status of Empirically Supported Psychotherapies: assumptions, findings, and reporting in controlled clinical trials’. Psychological Bulletin, 2004, 130 (4), pp. 631–63. Wilkinson, R. The Impact of Inequality: how to make sick societies healthier. London: Routledge, 2005. Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone (revised edition). London: Penguin, 2010. World Health Organisation. Mental Health, Resilience, and Inequalities. Copenhagen: World Health Organisation, 2009. Young, M. ‘Down with Meritocracy’. The Guardian, 29 June 2001. ——. The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: an essay on education and equality.

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Kollewe, ‘London Retains Crown as Favourite City of World’s Ultra-Rich’, Guardian, 5 March 2014. 8. R. Fuentes, ‘Anatomy of a Killer Fact: The World’s 85 Richest People Own as Much as the Poorest 3.5 Billion’, Oxfam Blog, 31 January 2014, at oxfamblogs.org. 9. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, ‘The Spirit Level Authors: Why Society Is More Unequal than Ever’, Observer, 9 March 2014. 10. L. Elliott, ‘Britain’s Five Richest Families Worth More than Poorest 20 Per Cent: Oxfam Report Reveals Scale of Inequality in UK as Charity Appeals to Chancellor over Tax’, Guardian, 17 March 2014. 11. K. Moreno, ‘The 67 People As Wealthy As The World’s Poorest 3.5 Billion’, Forbes Magazine, 25 March 2014, at forbes.com. 12.

The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy

banking crisis, banks create money, carbon tax, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, full employment, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, green new deal, high net worth, Jeremy Corbyn, land value tax, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, offshore financial centre, price elasticity of demand, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, savings glut, seigniorage, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing

The work of professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett has been fundamental in establishing a common understanding of this seemingly obvious truth and although there are some economists who have challenged the way in which they have evidentially supported their claims the fact is that the vast majority of observers think these objections nitpicking, at best. The claims made by Wilkinson and Pickett in their book The Spirit Level represent truths that are self-evident to most of us. But in that case the very real practical challenges in delivering equality, some of them already mentioned at the start of this section, have to be addressed if principles are to be turned into reality. Truth Truth should, if truth be told, be the foundation of all successful tax systems.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Your job is to deduce how the balloon does move and to explain it to the interviewer. One good response is to draw an analogy to a spirit level. For the not so handy, a spirit level is the little gizmo carpenters use to make sure a surface is horizontal. It contains a narrow glass tube of colored liquid with a bubble in it. Whenever the spirit level rests on a perfectly horizontal surface, the bubble hovers in the middle of the tube. When the surface isn’t so level, the bubble migrates to the higher end of the tube. The takeaway here is that the bubble is simply a “hole” in the liquid. When the surface isn’t level, gravity pulls the liquid toward the lower end.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009). Tomasello, Michael. Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009). Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Index The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader. accelerated spending access, ownership vs.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Robertson (1998) Beyond the Dependency Culture: People, Power and Responsibility, London: Praeger. 5 D. Byrne (2001) ‘Class, tax and spending: Problems for the Left in postindustrial and postdemocratic politics – or why aren’t we taxing the fat cats till the pips squeak?’, Capital and Class, 75: 157–66. 6 Quotation and interpretation from R. G. Wilkinson and K. E. Pickett (2009, forthcoming) The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Harmondsworth, Penguin) 7 J. Robertson (2004) ‘Using common resources to solve common problems’, Feasta Review 2: Growth: The Celtic Cancer, Dublin: Feasta. 8 Wilkinson and Pickett Spirit Level. 9 M. S. Cato (2004) ‘The freedom to be frugal’, Feasta Review 2: Growth: The Celtic Cancer, Dublin: Feasta. 10 J.

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

And with the development of larger societies and sophisticated economies, the need to cooperate, to trust each other and build relationships has become more important, not less. The notion that human beings have thrived through selfishness has been demolished by an endless line of anthropologists, sociologists and economists. In their recent book The Inner Level, a sequel to the hugely successful The Spirit Level, the renowned academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw extensively on evidence from these fields and from evolutionary neuroscience to come to the following conclusion: ‘Clearly, the human brain is, in a very real sense, a social organ. Its growth and development have been driven by the requirements of social life.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Donlan, “The Benefits of Failure,” Barrons, April 12, 2010. 160 inequality . . . means lower economic growth: Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). 160 lower levels of trust: Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 160 risen by 22%: Taylor Telford, “Income Inequality in America Is the Highest It’s Been Since Census Bureau Started Tracking It, Data Shows,” Washington Post, September 26, 2019. 160 nowhere has it spiked more: Alvaredo et al., “World Inequality Report 2018,” 6, 8. 160 captured less than 10%: “The Unequal States of America: Income Inequality in the United States,” Economic Policy Institute infographic, adapted from Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, “The New Gilded Age: Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County,” an Economic Policy Institute report published July 2018, https://www.epi.org/multimedia/unequal-states-of-america/#/United%20States. 160 from 22% in 1970 to 15% today: Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike I.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, friendshoring, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Take the London Underground train eastwards from Green Park on the Jubilee Line, and the average life expectancy for someone born in London drops by one year for every two stops. If you travel northbound from Hyde Park Corner to Holloway Road, a fifteen-minute ride on the Piccadilly Line, life expectancy decreases by eleven years.26 Books like The Spirit Level and The Killing Fields of Inequality argue that it is not just poverty that is the problem. Inequality in itself creates status stress and health issues. Therefore it is not enough to fight poverty; we must also fight great wealth. Angus Deaton, the Nobel laureate who has done so much to focus the world on deaths of despair in the United States, is very critical of such research: ‘[I]t is not true that income inequality itself is a major determinant of population health… it is low incomes that are important, not inequality, and there is no evidence that making the rich richer, however undesirable that may be on other grounds, is hazardous to the health of the poor or their children, provided that their own incomes are maintained.’27 In his book Deaths of Despair, written with Anne Case Deaton, he also points out that inequality is a ‘false trail’ in the debate: ‘those in despair are in despair because of what is happening to their own lives and to the communities in which they live, not because the top 1 per cent got richer’.28 Almost all examples that are popular in the debate can be explained by the fact that unequal countries have on average more poverty, and it is poverty – not income difference – that undermines health.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Johnson, 1798) Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Milanovic, Branko, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) Mokyr, Joel, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) _____, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Moretti, Enrico, The New Geography of Jobs (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) Murray, Charles, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group, 2012) Pickett, Kate, and Wilkinson, Richard, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Allen Lane, 2009) Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2001) Rifkin, Jeremy, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Rodrik, Dani, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Saadia, Manu, Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek (San Francisco, CA: Pipertext, 2016) Shirky, Clay, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (London: Allen Lane, 2010) Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

G. and Kivimäki, M. (2010), ‘Overtime Work and Incident Coronary Heart Disease: The Whitehall II Prospective Cohort Study’, European Heart Journal, 31: 1737–44. Wacquant, L. (2008), ‘Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the Punitive Upsurge’, Radical Philosophy Review, 11(1): 9–27. Weber, M. ([1922] 1968), Economy and Society, Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. E. (2009), The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane. Willetts, D. (2010), The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give It Back, London: Atlantic. Willsher, K. (2010), ‘Leaked Memo Shows France’s Expulsion of Roma Illegal, Say Critics’, Guardian, 14 September, p. 20.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

., A Vietnam War Reader: American and Vietnamese Perspectives PAUL COLLIER, The Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity With Nature NORMAN STONE, The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War SIMON PRICE AND PETER THONEMANN, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine HAMPTON SIDES, Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Chagall: Love and Exile RICHARD MILES, Carthage Must be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization TONY JUDT, Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents MICHAEL LEWIS, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine OLIVER BULLOUGH, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus PAUL DAVIES, The Eerie Silence: Searching for Ourselves in the Universe RICHARD WILKINSON, KATE PICKETT, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone TOM BINGHAM, The Rule of Law JOSEPH STIGLITZ, Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy JOHN LANCHESTER, Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay CHINUA ACHEBE, The Education of a British-Protected Child JARON LANIER, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto JOHN CASSIDY, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities ROBERT FERGUSON: The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

London: Earthscan, 2009. Korten, D. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2006. Leonard, Annie, www.storyofstuff.org, accessed June 3, 2013. New Economics Foundation, www.neweconomics.org, accessed June 3, 2013. Pickett, K. and Wilkinson, R., The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2011. PostCarbon Institute, www.postcarbon.org, accessed June 3, 2013. Robin, Vicki, et al. Your Money or Your Life. New York: Penguin, 2008. Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs, 1973. www.smallisbeautiful.org, accessed June 3, 2013.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Tsangarides, Redistribution, Inequality and Growth, IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN 14/02, 2014, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016). For a wider discussion on the relationship between economic performance, well-being and inequality, see R. G. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London, Allen Lane, 2009. 58 R. Riley and C. Rosazza Bondibene, Raising the Standard: Minimum Wages and Firm Productivity, NIESR Discussion Paper 449, National Institute for Economic and Social Research, 2015, http://www.niesr.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Minimum%20wages%20and%20firm%20productivity%20NIESR%20DP%20449.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016). 59 N.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

International comparisons of inequality are found in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries (OECD Publishing, October 2008), pp. 77-92. Data on the impact of income inequality on health and segregation are drawn from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); and Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” NBER Working Paper, July 2006. 125-127 The Vanishing Middle: The discussion of the impact of education on income growth draws from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); David Autor and David Dorn, “Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States,” NBER working paper, November 2008; Congressional Budget Office, “Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007,” October 2009; Francine Blau, Marianne Ferber, and Anne Winkler, The Economics of Women, Men and Work, 5th edition (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t05.htm, accessed 08/08/2010); Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 2008 (www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf, accessed 08/09/2010); Bureau of Labor Statistics, “100 Years of U.S.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

crime is caused by 5 percent of the population: Örjan Falk, Märta Wallinius and Sebastian Lundström, “The 1% of the Population Accountable for 63% of All Violent Crime Convictions,” Social Psychiatry Psychiatric Epidemiology 49, no. 4 (2014): 559–71. diminish the well-being of an entire society: Richard Wilkinson and Katie Pickett, The Inner Level (London: Allen Lane, 2018), xxi. Wilkinson and Pickett also explored these issues in their previous book, The Spirit Level. 64 percent less likely to attempt suicide: Chloe Reichel, “Suicide Prevention: Research on Successful Interventions,” Journalist’s Resource, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019. 4 percent of pediatricians screen for ACEs: Vanessa Sacks and David Murphey, “The Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences, Nationally, by State, and by Race or Ethnicity,” Child Trends, February 20, 2018.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

“Denver’s International Airport: A Case Study in Large Scale Infrastructure Development, Part 2.” Municipal Finance Journal 13, no. 3 (1992): 62–79. Weisman, Steven R., ed. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Wood, Robert Coldwell. 1400 Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metropolitan Region. Harvard University Press, 1961. Zeng, S. X., X. M. Xie, and C. M. Tam. “Relationship between Cooperation Networks and Innovation Performance of SMEs.”

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

Add in the unregistered millions, and a large fraction of British people are forever ‘don’t know’ – and probably also ‘don’t much care’. Yet political passivity and even poll reports of general contentment do not mean everything is well; they certainly do not mean people are fulfilled. Published towards the end of Labour’s reign, The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett amassed international evidence to show the close association between people’s sense of well-being and the objective facts of income distribution; here might even have been a governing proposition. In spite of the evidence, Labour were not sure what they believed or, more debilitating still, whether what they believed was politically doable if it meant challenging power, ownership and the deep complacency of middle England.

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

Conclusion: Entwined: Our Cellular Legacy 1. Pickett, K. E., and R. G. Wilkinson, “Inequality: An Underacknowledged Source of Mental Illness and Distress,” British Journal of Psychiatry: The Journal of Mental Science 197, no. 6 (December 2010): 426–28, doi:10.1192/bjp.bp.109.072066. 2. Ibid; and Wilkerson, R. G., and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 3. Stone, C., D. Trisi, A. Sherman, and B. Debot, “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, updated October 26, 2015, http://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. 4.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

The same is almost certainly true of the developing country surveys used by the World Bank, so the truth of the comparison remains unresolved. The ethnographic work by Edin and Shaefer, Desmond, and, on a smaller scale, Alston, documents the grotesque poverty that exists in the US. 4. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009, The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Bloomsbury. See also the wide range of claims at the Equality Trust’s website, https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/. 5. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015, “Table A-4: Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment,” Data Retrieval: Labor Force Statistics (CPS), https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab4.htm. 6.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Pinker also places too much emphasis on the admittedly weak links between inequality and happiness and well-being (with all the caveats that were described in Chapter Four), while discounting the very strong links found within a plethora of quantifiable social ills such as mental illness, diseases of despair, crime, incarceration rates, teen pregnancies, and so on. He implies that these phenomena, as analyzed in works such as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, constitute “the left’s new theory of everything” yet makes no effort to factually debunk the plethora of statistical claims that this book makes.44 If anything, responsible policymakers should welcome these linkages. For fiscally-strapped, post-austerity governments, it is far more efficient to concentrate on addressing one socio-economic indicator (inequality) than a dozen others in isolation.

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Whillans, Ashley V., Nathan J. Wispinski, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. 2016. “Seeing Wealth as a Responsibility Improves Attitudes towards Taxation.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 127: 146–154. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press. Willis, Paul. 1979. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Wright, Erik Olin (ed.). 2005. Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

“It is social and human capital, as well as the overall policy regime that matter.”32 These, of course, need tax dollars. Second, tax isn’t only about revenue, the first of four “Rs” of taxation. The second “R” is redistribution, notably tackling inequality. This is what democratic societies always demand, and as the painstakingly researched book The Spirit Level attests, it is inequality, rather than absolute levels of poverty and wealth, that determines how societies fare on almost every single indicator of well-being, from life expectancy to obesity to delinquency to depression or teenage pregnancy. The third “R” is representation—rulers must bargain with citizens in order to extract taxes from them—and this leads to accountability and representation.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

Foroohar, Makers and Takers (New York: Crown, 2016), p. 7. 4. H. P. Minsky, ‘Finance and stability: The limits of capitalism', Levy Economics Institute Working Paper no. 93 (1993). 5. F. Grigoli and A. Robles, ‘Inequality overhang', IMF Working Paper 17/76, 28 March 2017; R. Wilkinson and H. Pickett, The Spirit Level (London: Penguin, 2009). 6. W. Churchill, ‘WSC to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 22 February 1925', Churchill College, Cambridge, CHAR 18/12A-B. 7. Bank of England database, ‘Three centuries of macroeconomic data': http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/onebank/threecenturie 8. Data in this sentence from House of Commons Library reports -Standard Note SN/EP/06193 (Gloria Tyler, 25.2.15) and Briefing Paper 01942 (Chris Rhodes, 6.8.15).

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, 2000, “Genes, culture, democracy and happiness,” in Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, eds., Culture and subjective well-being, MIT Press, 165–83; Richard Layard, 2005, Happiness: Lessons from a new science, Penguin; and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009, The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, Bloomsbury. CHAPTER ONE: THE WELLBEING OF THE WORLD 1. For a related calculation, see James Vaupel and John M. Owen, 1986, “Anna’s life expectancy,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 5(2): 383–89. 2. Robert C. Allen, Tommy E. Murphy, and Eric B.

Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

., Dougherty, T.W. and Dreher, G.F. (1991) ‘Relationship of career mentoring and socioeconomic origin to managers’ and professionals’ early career progress’, Academy of Management Journal, 34(2), 331-50 (https://doi. org/10.5465/256445). 356 References Notes Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2018) The inner level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s wellbeing, London: Penguin UK. Williams, C.L. (1992) ‘The glass escalator: Hidden advantages for men in the “female” professions’, Social Problems, 39(3), 253-67 (https://doi.org/10.2307/3096961).

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Oxford University Press, 2001. Philippon, Thomas, and Ariell Reshef. “Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Finance Industry: 1909–2006.” Working paper. March 2011. Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway, 2002. Pickett, Kate, and Richard Wilkinson. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2009. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 96:2 (May 2006). pp. 200–205. ———. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.”

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

In a sea of cynicism, this book is the sturdy, unsinkable lifeboat the world needs’ Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive ‘This is a wonderful and uplifting book. I not only want all my friends and relations to read it, but everyone else as well. It is an essential part of the campaign for a better world’ Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level ‘A fantastic read … Good fun, fresh and a page turner’ James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life ‘This stunning book will change how you see the world and your fellow humans. It is mind-expanding and, more importantly, heart-expanding. We have never needed this message more than now’ Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections ‘Rutger Bregman’s extraordinary new book is a revelation’ Susan Cain, author of Quiet ‘Rutger Bregman is one of my favourite thinkers.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

It was, he stated, ‘plain wrong to think that we can build a stronger society when we are relaxed about bankers being paid 200 times that of their cleaners’1 and he denounced ‘brutish US-style capitalism’. In all this, Ed Miliband had been inspired by a profoundly influential book by the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, which produced evidence to show that societies with less inequality have fewer social problems, from crime to physical and mental health to child wellbeing. In his campaign, Miliband attracted the decisive support of major trade unions – notably the most politically powerful, Unite – on the left of the party, a factor which would fuel bitterness on the Blairite Labour right.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18:1947–58. Wheatley, T., and J. Haidt. 2005. “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe.” Psychological Science 16:780–84. Wilkinson, G. S. 1984. “Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat.” Nature 308:181–84. Wilkinson, R., and K. Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury. Williams, B. 1967. “Rationalism.” In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards, 7–8:69–75. New York: Macmillan. Williams, G. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

exaggerate the risk John Mueller (2006), Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, Free Press. tolerance for risk Meir Statman (2010), “The Cultures of Risk Tolerance,” Social Sciences Research Network Behavioral & Experimental Finance eJournal, 1–23. income inequality Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2011), The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press. false confessions Saul M. Kassin, “False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17: 249–53. Jennifer T. Perillo and Saul M. Kassin (2011), “Inside Interrogation: The Lie, The Bluff, and False Confessions,” Law & Human Behavior, 35:327–37.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

City: Rediscovering the Center. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. ———. The Exploding Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage, 2011. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011. Zukin, Sharon. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989 ———. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Confessions of an Eco-sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff. (Beacon Press, Boston, 2008). William Perry. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2015). Laurence Smith. The World in 2050: Four Forces Facing Civilization’s Northern Future. (Dutton Penguin Group, New York, 2010). Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. (Allen Lane, London, 2009). EPILOGUE: LESSONS, QUESTIONS, AND OUTLOOK Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Hero in History. (James Fraser, London, 1841). Jared Diamond and James Robinson, eds. Natural Experiments of History.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

“Some Comments on Multiple Discovery in Mathematics.” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics 7, no. 1: 172–188. Wigner, Eugene. 1960. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. London: Bloomsbury. Wilson, David Sloan. 1975. “A Theory of Group Selection.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 72, no. 1: 143–146. Wolfram, Stephen. 2001. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media. Wright, Robert. 2001.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Of course, selling the TV (or one of these other appliances) would not go far to provide food, medical care, housing, or access to good schools. There is another important area, exploring the relationship between consumption and happiness, going back at least to Veblen’s (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class, which introduced the concept of “conspicuous consumption.” More recently, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), argue that more equality can improve happiness through reducing “social evaluation anxieties” and associated stresses. 105. See U.S. Census, “The Research Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2010,” November 2011. 106.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

New York: Basic Books, 1989. Warren, Elizabeth, and Amelia Warren Tyagi. The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke. New York: Basic Books 2003. Wicker, Tom. One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1991. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009. Woodward, Bob. Obama’s Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Young, Andrew. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———, and Kabir Sehdal.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Across the whole period, the two world wars are associated with massive spikes, but our analysis considers those spikes only insofar as they outlast the war. 19 Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1951). 20 William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn & Co, 1911), 12–13. 21 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 267–72. 22 See, for example, Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (New York: Allen Lane, 2009); Eric M. Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,” American Politics Research 33, no. 6 (2005): 868–894, doi:10.1177/1532673X04271903; and Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (New York: Viking, 2017). 23 David Morris Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 24 See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and John L.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Basic Income: An Anthology of ConÂ�temporary Research. New York: Wiley-Â�Blackwell. Widerstrom, Klaus. 2010. “Erich Fromm and His Proposal for a Basic Income.” Indybay, July 6. http://Â�w ww╉.Â�indybay╉.Â�org╉/Â�newsitems╉/Â�2010╉/Â�07╉/Â�06╉/Â�18652754╉.Â�php. Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal SocieÂ�ties Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Willmore, Larry. 2007. Universal Pensions for Developing Countries. World Development 35(1): 24–51. Withorn, Ann. 1993/2013. “Is One Man’s Ceiling Another Â�Woman’s Floor?” In Karl Widerquist et al., eds., Basic Income: An Anthology of ConÂ�temporary Research, 145–148.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra