Liberals still think inequality will kill us all (it won't)

There’s no argument so bad that people won’t try to resurrect it again and again, especially when it’s one that is convenient to a certain worldview and a certain strain of political thought. One such claim is that inequality itself makes us all miserable, creates most of the problems in society, even starts to kill us all off.

It isn’t true. But here is that claim being made again, that inequality is what ails us all. It’s not, in fact, how much we’ve got that matters, it’s what we have in relation to what we might covet that others have. Having little isn’t the problem, others having more is. This time around, the book telling us all this is The Broken Ladder. It includes such hoary favorites as we’d all be better off if we were poorer and more equal, better off psychologically, and even physically healthier as a nation.

The problem with all of this is that we just had the same claims made a decade ago in a book called The Spirit Level. It just so happens that book is the source of much of the information in The Broken Ladder. That's something of a real problem, because these claims were comprehensively debunked a decade ago. The best disproof of the claims came from a colleague of mine in London’s think-tank world, Chris Snowdon.

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