Ideas@TheCentre
Buying spirit level bubbles
One of my favourite TV shows is The Inbetweeners, a crass comedy about an English teenager, Will, who due to his parents’ post-divorce finances, is enrolled in a local comprehensive school. The show is about him knocking about with his newly found non-private school mates.
In one episode, Will is sent by the spiteful Dean of Sixth to do his work experience day at the local mechanics. The mechanics promptly recognise Will’s unworldliness and send him to the local shop to pick up mythical supplies such as tartan paint and spirit level bubbles.
The episode reminds me of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, which engages in the same, never-ending search for similar spirit level bubbles.
The book claims to provide solid scientific evidence for what leftists have always argued: (income) equality is better for everyone – rich and poor alike.
Unlike Australia, the political left in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom have grasped onto this text as if it were holy writ. ‘See!’ they say, ‘we were right all along. Not only are our views morally superior but also scientifically correct.’ The ensuing implication is of course that those who argue otherwise are not only wrong but immoral.
Fortunately for Australia, the book was released when Kevin Rudd’s prime ministerial star was in the ascendant and the government popular, so the ALP seemed to pay little attention to it. In New Zealand and in Britain however, it was a godsend for dead and dying Labour regimes. It arrived just as they were casting around for a new intellectual basis to replace the failed, flaky third-way new Labourism. The Spirit Level provided them with a new basis for political action.
NZ Labour Leader Phil Goff regularly mentions the book in interviews, and a number of his caucus and up and coming thinkers and shadow ministers cite the book as proof that inequality is out of control. It is even used to justify certain sorts of industrial relations policies! The Greens (it goes without saying) are all over it like a rash. Even so-called conservative UK Prime Minister David Cameron sang its praises.
CIS Senior Fellow Peter Saunders published a rebuttal called Beware False Prophets, in which he forensically picks apart the claims made by Wilkinson and Pickett. This created a furore in Britain, and Saunders was widely attacked as doom merchant of the ‘extreme right.’ However, with the book’s continued influence, it is timely that Saunders is publishing an updated version for the CIS titled When Prophecy Fails, which includes a refutation of Wilkinson and Pickett’s counterclaims.
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Luke Malpass is a Policy Analyst with the New Zealand Policy Unit of The Centre for Independent Studies.
