Green-Free Market Fundamentalist debate: On Inequality

In my debate with Mark Littlewood a free marketeer, I claimed  that Wilkinson and Pickett in the Spirit Level are showing that unequal societies suffer from all manner of social ills.

Mark contests this, saying:

ML: The Spirit Level cannot possibly be described as consisting of “sound scientific facts”. It’s now been conclusively debunked. The data used is partial, some of the data sources are questionable – and data has been omitted which does not suit their conclusions. 

RL: You're over-claiming here, Mark. "Conclusively debunked" it is not. It has been challenged by free market fundamentalists, as is to be expected, but it stands.

ML: I don’t know a single, serious economist who now believes their conclusions stack up. 

RL: Two things. For me, a "serious" economist is one who predicted the 2009 crash. All the others are just common economists, and if you get two of such economists in a room, you will have three or more opinions on any economic matter. Common Economists are not scientists, they are obscurantist ideological wranglers.

The second point is that Wilkinson and Pickett are epidemiologists, not economists. Epidemiology, unlike economics, is a proper science, and for real discussion we need to look to the community of epidemiologists. There is debate there, the consensus is not as advanced as the consensus over AGW in the climatology community, but among epidemiologists, the inequality-disorder link stands up pretty well.

There are multiple lines of enquiry, including civil servant and other animal studies. Here's an introduction to the idea that social status affects gene expression. 

ML: One analysis of their work shows  that there might just be a minor correlation between infant mortality and equality.

RL: This is Peter Saunders' Policy Exchange critique. His admission that infant mortality correlates with inequality is in itself is an important and significant fact. 

ML:  – but the rest is pretty much garbage (and if you produce enough scattergrams you’d expect to find some sort of correlation somewhere by sheer chance – for example, the rise of Manchester City football club over the last decade correlates pretty closely to a widening gap in incomes, but it certainly isn’t the cause of it). 

RL: Again, you are overclaiming. Very significant is the aggregated correlation of several indices, which shows a very tight adherence to proportionality between social dysfunction and inequality:

ML: Christopher Snowdon’s “Spirit Level Delusion” blows Wilkinson and Pickett apart http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.co.uk/

RL: Again, you are using charged, extreme language.  I have criticised Snowdon's approach here, and his methodology here. Snowdon is very far from "blowing W&P apart".

Another deconstruction of the preposterous assertions made by Wilkinson and Pickett can be found here http://www.petersaunders.org.uk/cis_presentation_on_the_spirit_level_6_june_2011.html

I’ve yet to come across any serious attempt to rebut Saunders’ or Snowdon’s devastating critique. 

RL: W&P's response to Saunders is here, and their response to Snowdon is here.

As a matter of interest, I produce an hypothesis here to try to explain why inequality should produce social stress.

So, in this debate between green and free marketeer, we come across a second instance where free market ideology comes into conflict with science - the first, of course, being the clash over climate change.

This is not unexpected, since there is a third clash - over the nature of homo "Sapiens". 


FMFs are individualists, that is, their philosophy is founded on the experience of man as an individual.
H. "sapiens" is  a social animal, plain and simple, without any shadow of doubt.

So FMF ideology is an idealism, an idea divorced from reality at its very inception. Therefore it is to be expected that it keeps clashing with the findings of science.