Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the James Kennedy podcast. Thanks for coming back. Today we're talking all about inequality, something that most of us sadly know a lot about already. But what if I told you that it's been actually scientifically proven that it is in fact inequality that is the root cause for pretty much all of our social ills? I'm talking about things like mental and physical ill health, drug abuse, life expectancy, educational performance, violence, crime, fear, imprisonment, anxiety, insecurity, stress, depression, depletion of our resources, teenage pregnancy, pollution, corruption, environmental breakdown. Fucking everything is caused by inequality. Now we all know that inequality sucks. It's unfair. It's not fair that some people should have more whilst others should be struggling. We kind of know instinctively that inequality is wrong. But Professor Richard Wilkinson and his wife Professor Kate Pickett have scoured hundreds and hundreds of studies from which they have found that inequality is wrong. All around the world and correlated it with data on each country's level of inequality. They put all of their findings into the excellent book, The Spirit Level, which has sold tons and tons of copies and has been universally praised for actually putting into indisputable proof what most of us know instinctively that inequality is bad. Not only bad, but it is ruining our society, our values and life as we know it. The book is filled with graphs and charts and references and studies and information, but it's a real easy read. It's a short book and they focus each chapter at the start of the book on each social cause that I mentioned earlier, such as, you know, mental and physical health, imprisonment, crime, violence. They go through all that stuff and they explain what the correlation between social inequality is and those outcomes. And then they show you the graph. And what's uncanny about this is that all of the graphs look exactly the same. All of the countries with inequality, are scattered upon the same point in the graph. So if you pick an issue, say violent crime, and then you lay the statistics that we have around the world for countries that have rates of violent crime, you lay that on top of a country's graph for their level of inequality relative to the others, and it shuffles about and it ends up looking exactly the fucking same as all the other issues. So the countries that have higher rates of inequality also have a correlatingly high rate of whatever issue you want to pick. It's really uncanny. And like I say, it's kind of, you know, intuitive to us that we would know that anyway, but it's so fucking normal for us now to live in such unequal, unjust, and fucked up societies that we're just trying to get through the week, right? You know what I mean? But to see it there proven scientifically is a real wake-up call because it's like, yeah, okay, we are really off track here. We've been led astray by an ecosystem that is just not serving most people's needs. So I've been really lucky to be able to get one of the authors of The Brilliant Spirit Level to come onto the podcast and blow your minds today. I've got the brilliant professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level, and he's going to explain the content of the book, the broader issues, why it matters, and what we can do about it. But before we get down to business, one more nag, have you subscribed to the goddamn podcast? I'm sick of asking you, man. If you're listening to this, please help the brother out. Click follow, click subscribe, click like, click share, spread the word. There's a lot of good info on this podcast developing now over the previous 40-something episodes with some really cool people and some really great minds. So please tell your friends about the podcast and spread the word and let's get this information out there and let's join forces and take control of our country and our society back again. Knowledge is power, man. It all starts with information and education. So I'm doing my bit for the cause by getting access to these great teachers and sharing this information with you guys free of charge. All you got to do is help me out by subscribing and, you know, helping me to promote this goddamn thing. Otherwise, you know what will happen. I'll go, you know what? I can't pay my gas bill by making a free podcast. I'm going to have to get a day job and it'll all be your fault. So subscribe to the podcast. Click share, click like, give me a star rating. Let's kick this up the algorithm and let's get this info out there. Right. So now you've been told, let's bring on the guest. Today, we are joined by Professor Richard Wilkinson. Richard is an epidemiologist, Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, co-founder of the Equality Trust and the co-author of the brilliant aforementioned book, The Spirit Level, as well as others. Richard, I've been really looking forward to speaking with you. So thanks so much for stopping by. How are you doing, sir?
Speaker 2Thanks for having me. It's nice to be doing this. I always think there's no point in doing research unless people get to know about it.
Speaker 1Yeah, I hear you there, man. Well, I'm grateful to you. Well, a lot of people, I do know about the book. It's done very, very well, and rightly so. I absolutely love the book. It's mind-blowing stuff. And it's so broad-ranging that I can't imagine the level of research that must have gone into creating the book. So kudos to you and Professor Kate Pickett as well for bringing us this amazing book. For those who haven't yet read the book or don't know anything about it, would it be possible to give us a bit of a summary as to what the book is about and what's the central theme of it?
Speaker 2Well, in a way, it comes out of a very old intuition that inequality is socially damaging, socially corrosive, damages the social fabric in a society. But now you can get figures on the scale of income inequality in different countries and actually start to look and see whether there are differences in various outcomes. Right. Related to how unequal a society is. And in the rich, developed world, countries like the USA and Britain are much more unequal than some of the Scandinavian countries. And it looks as if as a result of that, they suffer more violence, more imprisonment, worse health, including mental health. A whole range of problems get worse. So, for instance, as I said, the U.S. is one of the most unequal of the rich, developed countries. It has the highest obesity rates. It has more homicide. It has more people in prison. It has worse drug problems. Its life expectancy is actually going down at the moment. And that contrasts. For instance, with countries like Norway or Denmark, where you find exactly the opposite. They're doing well on all of those things, and they have much smaller income differences between rich and poor. And basically, we just did that sort of analysis.
Speaker 1It's uncanny when you look at it, because one of the things that stood out to me, I mean, the book is very fresh for me at the moment, because I've only just finished reading it. So I'll just reiterate some of the issues that you just mentioned there and in the book as well. So I'll just reiterate some of the issues that stood out to me, I mean, the book is very fresh for me at the moment, because I've only just finished reading it.
Speaker 2and then they've cities the areas that have the worst health or the most violence or where kids do worst at school so it's telling us that that pattern gets worse in in more unequal societies which which makes a lot of sense well
Speaker 1it is an intuition i think for many of us it would be common sense but to have it there visually proven it's indisputable you can see it with your own two eyes you know it's indisputable that this is a pattern that happens all around the world everywhere that it's tested whether it be in various states within a country or countries around the world it's just it's an indisputable fact i think um how do we get here then because what's quite distressing to read as a as a british citizen is that we are pretty much always at the top four of of the worst cases uh whether it's mental health or drug abuse or violence or imprisonment or social mobility we are always pretty much at the top of the league there along with the united states um how is it that some countries like us are so unequal and then other countries like japan or the scandinavian countries are literally always right at the extreme other end of that
Speaker 2graph well we used to be one of the more equal countries um in the 1960s and 70s um we were as equal as the scandinavian countries are now um and we did better on all these things right if you pair us over time with other countries you can see standards slipping as our income differences widen right um and looking at things like infant mortality uh seeing that pattern there that uh you know we used to be one of the best countries in those in terms of infant mortality and you see year by year uh our position in the sort of international league table of infant mortality uh slipping all the time until now we do pretty poorly um it's it is and still you asked why um there's a clear pattern in most rich countries that income differences were very large in the 1920s and started to decline in the 1930s and went on declining so we were becoming more and more and more and more and more equal until the late 1970s and then from about 1980 onwards we get a huge rise in inequality again and so we're now back to levels of inequality last seen in the 1920s all the social progress has been reversed uh effectively um class and status are now much more important than they were um and with that goes declines in in social mobility and and so on um the whole social structure has become more more ossified status as i say matters much more i i think that long-term pattern of changes in inequality is the result of uh really political changes or ideological changes that uh if you like in the um uh early part in the 1930s onwards there's a growing importance of the labor movement social democratic parties a belief that people have that there is a better way our societies can work better for all of us that life can be qualitatively better um and so you get voices on on radio and television representing that sort of other view um what i call the sort of countervailing voice if you like whether trade union leaders or labor party figures or whatever but um from about 1980 that all starts to crumble disappear um and you get a rise of neoliberal free market fundamentalist ideology under thatcher and reagan and it's not just in one country it's an international change in thinking um that that ideology that right-wing ideology wins out um and the left loses any confidence in what it's about where it's going and so on so i think that's what happens uh and of course uh the thatcher government and other governments around the world they privatized the utilities uh you know electricity gas water phones post offices and so on uh they lowered top tax rates you know in the 60s and 70s top tax rates from the richest people were up to um 80 or even 90 percent now they're back to 40 or 45 percent um so the richer um are getting much much more than they used to but it's not just that that tax burden has declined it's that the income differences before tax have increased dramatically right and there are now research papers looking at income differences within big companies and you find ceos were earning well i sometimes think i shouldn't say earning they were getting uh 20 or 30 times as much as the average production worker in the 60s and 70s up to around 1980 but by the first decade of this century they were getting not uh 20 or 30 times as much they were getting two or three hundred times as much yeah suddenly a huge escalation in the differences within large multinational companies and that's why i think that's why i think that's why they're growing and that's why they're growing and that's why they're growing and that's why they're growing and there are also research papers which look and see whether the performance differs uh according to how well paid the ceo is and if you take the top four or five hundred companies in the us for instance you find the company is doing best are the ones with the less well-paid ceos right um you know so they're not actually earning it um uh and uh it's it's not justified at all by um performance uh which is of course how they justify the outlandish salaries that's really interesting
Speaker 1so i was going to mention you you said that it all started to go south on the in the late 70s and i thought oh what happened in the late 70s oh yeah thatcherism reaganism so you could see a direct correlation there between um you know the the undoing of socially orientated politics more towards completely you know unregulated free trade capitalism and the you can see that how the this the corrosive social effect that that has had is is demonstrated clearly in your in your
Speaker 2graphs yes although it's hard to sort of graph changes in ideology what people have graphed is changes in the proportion of the labor force in trade unions and you see as uh the proportion in trade unions goes up uh inequality comes down and then when the proportion in trade unions starts to uh starts to fall inequality goes up again and i i think that's not because trade unions transform your wages i'm sure they help uh it's that uh trade union membership is a sign of the health if you like of the whole labor movement the social democratic parties and so on that's alternative ideology in society well
Speaker 1there has definitely been a global ideology shift hasn't it you know since the the 80s and certainly here in the uk you know we've followed the american model of just unregulated everything free trade capitalism doggy dog mentality and we've got the uh demonstrable social scars to show for that which which seems to be very similar to the sort of um social issues that that they have and much of that is kind of much like america our politics has now become completely dominated by the interests of you know the rich you know elite one percent business class who i'm assuming are the main barriers to progress on the issue of inequality because they of course are the main beneficiaries
Speaker 2of it well i think the influence of the rich on politics has increased enormously with rises of income differences you know they buy their way their influence um uh the money spent by large corporations and uh the super rich on on lobbying um in in most countries has increased enormously and they managed to get the legislation they want um a lot of people have remarked how inequality is is fundamentally destructive of democracy um uh and i do think our democracies have become more and more meaningless in a way right um and i think there's a solution to that i think one of the ways of reducing pay differences is forms of economic democracy, employee representation on company boards, employee ownership, things like that. So gaining more equality by extending democracy into the economic sphere. And the evaluation suggests that more democratic companies work better than the usual forms of management.
Speaker 1I guess it's difficult though, isn't it? Because the people that truly hold the reins of power these days, the people you just mentioned, you know, the super rich, I suppose they're not really affected by this though, are they? I mean, they live in, you know, gated communities and yachts and private planes and their kids go to private universities. And so I suppose they are essentially insulated from the damage that this inequality, that they are the core of the economy. What are the causes of reeks on the rest of society?
Speaker 2Well, I think they're not completely insulated. We don't have data on the super rich. So we can't see the levels of mental illness or violence or whatever. But we can, talking about the super rich as the top fraction of 1%, but we can talk about the top 5 or 10%. And we see even they would do a bit better and more. And the differences are smaller at the top. Differences in what inequality does to people, compared to the impact on the bottom of society. But it looks as though we all know that children get mental health problems and become drug addicts and, you know, commit suicide and so on. I mean, we all know that, that children get mental health problems and become drug addicts and, you know, commit suicide and so on. And we all know that, you know, we all know that, that children get mental health problems and, you know, commit suicide and so on. They're not really insulated from what goes on in the rest of society.
Speaker 1Right. Yeah. And regardless, anyway, I mean, you know, 95 to 5% ratio is not a good split for the people that have got everything and then the rest of us that are scrambling amongst ourselves. So regardless of whether the top 1, 5, 10, 20%, whatever, like it or not, it's still not cool.
Speaker 2The democratic society ought to be able to deal with this. Yes. Whatever the top 1%. But actually, it's they who control what happens. And it's not only the lobbying, it's also the control they have over the media. You know, the major newspapers, television and so on. Yeah. And actually, it was clear in the States, you could see the right setting up, right wing radio stations and so on um which became more influential and helped this change in popular ideology well i suppose
Speaker 1it comes down to our values doesn't it i mean we as you mentioned we do have an instinctive set of values and most of us know kind of instinctively that inequality is wrong we don't need to explain to us why that is so you know we do have those values but we we've been locked into a system now whereby we are living out of alignment with our quite primal and natural human and communal values so essentially i feel that we need to shift back now we need to reclaim the the ground that we've lost and get back to a sense of living in alignment with the values that are better for everybody
Speaker 2well i think the more immediate effect so in one of the things when i give talks i show that um community life weakens people feel they can't trust each other there are various questions in in national surveys like uh do you feel people would take advantage of you if they got the chance or do you feel most people can be trusted and that plummets with greater inequality and of course that goes with um people not feeling safe walking home late at night in our towns and you know it's a major issue particularly for women um an infringement of their freedoms a very important fundamental infringement um but uh you also get this rise in homicide rates um which has been shown all over the world so those more unequal societies are not only less friendly less community orientated but they are also less friendly in terms of society and in terms of less trusting of each other but they're more dangerous and if you look at really the most unequal societies uh places like mexico and south africa uh you see it's gone a stage further there are people actually afraid of each other they've got bars on their windows and doors and razor wire around the top of the room around their gardens and so on um and uh you know other people are to be feared kept out dangerous um and uh that is really so tragic because um studies of happiness and well-being show that the quality of social relations is absolutely crucial you know having lots of friends being involved in community life are fundamental to happiness and it's there that inequality is doing its greatest damage and that's not just the poor it's what all of us suffer
Speaker 1100 yeah and that ties in with something else i wanted to ask you about i haven't yet read the inner level which is the other book that you co-authored with kate pickett um the tagline to that is how more equal societies reduce stress restore sanity and improve everyone's well-being now i'll be fascinated to read that because we have seen and it's quite well known now that there's a global increase in certainly in the west of anxiety and stress and depression and all of these things and i think it's a direct result of this ideology shift that we've been talking about this kind of dog eat dog you're on your own there's no community it's just the individual that living out of alignment with our natural sense of community and tribalism is it's going to be detrimental to people's mental health and certainly now at a time of the cost of living crisis and war and all the bad news and our national assets are getting sold out from under us and stuff like that more and more increasingly are we becoming stress and tense and pressured and anxious and despairing because of the ever tightening grip of this right-wing conservative capitalistic worldview so am i right in thinking that that's where you're going in the other book the
Speaker 2inner level yes um i think after writing the spirit level we felt that people still didn't see that they were personally affected by income inequality it was something that was out there in society but you know most of us we only think about our friends and family and so on uh we have an idea of the personal life that really matters to us and the big outside things in society are somewhere else and so we wanted to show that actually the mechanisms come right into our most personal experience and actually what inequality does i said it makes class and status more important um it that means it raises issues of your feelings about self-worth uh and it's clear that we feel that we're more worried by other people's judgments of us um uh how they they see us um you know do they think we're we're stupid incompetent failures or do they think we're very successful and clever and all the rest of it and um there is a response to that if you're worried about how you're seen and judged by other people and we all are to some extent you know you're worried about the impression you give to people and what you look like and you know whether you got the right sort of a decent car or um whether you've got the latest phone or all those in your clothes whether you've got the designer labels and what you find is people uh buying more status goods they're spending more money on on on things that look good from clothes to cars um but uh the the psychological response is is twofold you can either uh feel uh lack of confidence um insecurity that you're no good you find social life too stressful you withdraw from you know you don't go to parties and evening things like that because you're worried about uh all this stuff um social contact becomes more stressful and anxiety provoking withdraw from social life you get depressed and so on or you can the other response to feeling worried about how people uh see and judge you is to up um so uh you go in for what psychologists call uh self-aggrandizement um right uh self-enhancement um and part of it as i said through consumerism um but you can see it there's a nice research paper which looked at what they called status anxiety and they show that in more unequal countries the whole population all income groups from the rich to the poor have more status anxiety than people in right uh unequal more sorry more equal societies so we all get more twitchy about how people see and judge us and that those issues of confidence um are very personal and i think we all feel that you know we have this little psychological weakness well a bit worried about what other people think of us and that lack of confidence is seen i think we we mostly see it as a sort of personal psychological weakness that we hide away um in fact we should share it with others and say look i know i feel like this and so do you yeah yeah and we must put our guard down and share these things a bit um but i think part of the decline in community life um is that um we are more worried about these social um connections um we're more worried about you know you're more hesitant to start chatting to people you don't know because of it just for us feel more inhibited socially inhibited i suppose yeah
Speaker 1yeah i think you're right that's something that we all carry even even people in the top five percent i'm sure are going to have that kind of um i suppose you could describe it as a kind of uh relative status you know it's like we're all constantly um made to feel inadequate compared to what's happening what we think is happening in the rest of society and because of this value shift that's now happened you know since the the late 70s is you know we now tend to measure things based on our personal level of success or personal riches or personal possessions or personal power or strength in whatever form that might be and we tend to identify very much now in that way and of course we get it rammed down our throats as well you know the examples of people who are richer and better looking and more successful than we are um and we we do have this feeling that it's on us you know it's a lot to make it on our own and to to fight our way to the top of the pile rather than being part of a functional healthy equal society which would be a lot more attainable and a lot better for everybody
Speaker 2yes it's a very fundamental damage to the social fabric um and i think people you know they feel it now but they don't see the pattern of change right perhaps it's it's harder people to see see it but you know i'm i'm getting on now and in terms of age um and i remember when society was different right and the changes uh since free market fundamentalism neoliberalism thatcher and reagan came in around 1980 uh i can in my own experience i can feel that they have made a difference in the way that they have made a difference in the way that they have made our society more anti-social right um it used to be a warmer more friendly cooperative place than it is now well i'm
Speaker 1an 80s baby so i don't have any other point of reference you know i know it's crazy um but i don't have a personal point of reference of what life could be like that would be different to this bad luck yeah yeah you're
Speaker 2right we we and we have to be um campaigning to make a better society that has those characteristics that we know are important to our well-being and happiness well
Speaker 1speaking of solutions then and moving us into a better direction um just to kick off i asked the chat gpt you know the artificial intelligence computer how we can solve inequality before i came on the podcast today and i want to share with you what it said number one tax the rich higher two increase wages two increase the number three strengthen the unions number four provide free education and free health care for all number five tightly regulate the financial and real estate industries now i was quite impressed with that i thought that sounded quite lefty for a robot um would you agree
Speaker 2um yes i would uh i i've tried it out on a number of things not that particular question and i've been rather impressed by its answers and i suppose it's going through vast quantities of research and discussion and literature and so on and just pulling out the stuff that comes up repeatedly yeah but i mean there's no doubt we've got to tax the rich more i mean given that our our services public services are falling to bits um you know whether it's school buildings with the ceilings falling down or um lack of teachers in all sorts of subjects or whether it's the nhs um uh the idea that you should allow the super rich to be pulling in millions each year and giving rise to um in families um i can't remember the word i want but um uh who will not have to work for generations because their great great grandfather uh was paid millions and they stashed away and so on we don't want a society like that and nobody can really believe that allowing people to have those huge incomes is more important than funding the health service properly yeah um but it's not just a matter of taxes and benefits it's it's as i was saying earlier a matter of um extending democracy into the workplace um i mean if there was some um measure of democracy in the workplace you might think your boss should get a bit more than you you might think maybe you'd vote for him to have twice as much but you probably wouldn't have to 300 times i'm saying him all the time but of course there are and now a few women ceos but we say him
Speaker 1because that is generally the way it is unfortunately the way it is yes
Speaker 2um people actually are not going to vote for him because they're not going to vote for him because often ask me how other forms of inequality fit into this ethnic inequality, gender inequality. And actually, they're all related because in societies where you've got bigger overall income differences, there is more discrimination by ethnicity and gender. So women's pay disadvantage is bigger in those societies. And the differences between black and white are bigger. So, you know, it's part of where I said that class and status becomes more important. With that goes a process of thinking that the people at the top are brilliant and the ones at the bottom are hopeless and the prejudiced view that the poor are poor because they're, I don't know, lazy and stupid. All those prejudices. But actually, as soon as anything becomes a marker of low social status, whether it's skin color or in some countries, your linguistic group, you know, in the States, Spanish speakers. Right. Or in Belgium, there are different linguistic groups that go and have some status relevance. Or in Northern Ireland, what religion? When any of those things become markers of status, they are stigmatized. And actually, you can see in some of these things, like obesity, it changes. It used to be the rich who were fat and the poor who were thin. Yeah. And in the 20th century, that reversed. And so suddenly, obesity starts to be stigmatized. Stigmatized. Yeah, right, right. Actually, you see the same with suntan. When the poor worked in the fields and were very suntanned, the upper classes tried to keep as white as they could. Right. They carried parasols to shade themselves from that.
Speaker 1Because it showed they weren't working in the fields. Right, I get it. Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 2And then as soon as the poor were. Living in cities, in basements, working in factories without citizenship. the sun at all um they became white and it became fashionable to be to have a nice suntan right and it's awful how these the importance of class and status work out yeah i know
Speaker 1it really is man it's such a shameful needless destruction to so many people's lives in so many different ways when it could so easily be the other way and when you look at the world now from your experience of of the transition that society has made do you see a hope are we moving you know there's signs that we're moving in the right direction that things are turning a corner or are we just freewheeling our way to the end of the cliff well
Speaker 2i think there's a big big fight going on but um actually even fueling the far right is i think that's sense of loss of status um and uh you know make america great again there's people wanting you know even if they've been diminished and looked down on they want to be part of something that is seen as as great partly as a response to it uh and i but i mean i think the prejudices increase with um the more you have your own uh status self-worth taken away from you uh the more you try and regain it by saying at least i'm better than those bastards right yeah um and so um it generates prejudice downward prejudice division society but i'm in a way i'm hopeful because i think that uh the amount of inequality is intimately linked to whether or not we can move towards sustainability and the the environmental footprint of the rich is so much bigger than of the poor and um if you start to try if you're having environmental taxes carbon taxes and so on um the poor will feel they're unfair um unless they're much raised much much higher rates on rich they're not going to be able to afford the benefits they're not going to be able to afford the benefits they're not going to be able to afford the benefits of the rich and they're not going to be able to afford the benefits of the rich and they're not going to be able to afford the benefits of the rich and they're not going to be able to afford the benefits of the rich and they're not going to be able to afford the benefits of the rich and they're not going to be able to afford uh to be taxing the fuel that the uh to be taxing the fuel that the uh to be taxing the fuel that the pawn uh used yeah and uh so pawn uh used yeah and uh so pawn uh used yeah and uh so macron had to drop it um and macron had to drop it um and macron had to drop it um and you know there are lots of reasons for you know there are lots of reasons for you know there are lots of reasons for thinking that thinking that thinking that to make any environmental um policies to make any environmental um policies to make any environmental um policies acceptable acceptable acceptable they have to be accompanied by they have to be accompanied by they have to be accompanied by measures to increase equality measures to increase equality measures to increase equality but as i say but as i say but as i say particularly because particularly because particularly because uh you know the private planes and the uh you know the private planes and the uh you know the private planes and the endless amounts of flying done by the endless amounts of flying done by the endless amounts of flying done by the rich rich rich and and and lifestyles and huge houses and so on lifestyles and huge houses and so on lifestyles and huge houses and so on the environmental footprint is really so the environmental footprint is really so the environmental footprint is really so much worse much worse much worse and actually uh and actually uh and actually uh to to move towards sustainability to to move towards sustainability to to move towards sustainability environmental sustainability environmental sustainability environmental sustainability uh we just have to lower consumption uh we just have to lower consumption and it's the consumption of the rich which is the main offender
Speaker 1no problem yeah 100 well as we come towards the end then because i'm conscious not take up more of your time that i promised you i would what can people listen to this do what can we do what can what can the 95 of us actually do to regain control and steer us back to sanity well
Speaker 2we started the equality trust which you'll find on the web if you look up uh equality trust um dot org dot uk and that's a small registered charity that campaigns for greater equality um but i think what people do in the um workplaces um and membership of trade unions and so on is is important and students in some universities have taken up the issue of the pay differences within the universities between the vice chancellor at the top and the cleaners at the bottom right and that has led to some changes uh many of the labor controlled local uh governments in britain um i think 15 or 20 of the big cities in britain controlled by labor authorities have set up what they call the fairness commissions to recommend how to make um uh how to reduce income inequalities locally and they have led to almost all those uh cities uh paying at least the living wage rather than the minimum wage right um and some of them uh insisting that the the suppliers the people they buy from the companies also pay the living wage and there's now a big living wage movement and so campaigning on these issues is really important in all sorts of uh uh situations not only at work and students and so on but also through the sort of things that the equality trust is doing um talking about it but joining trade unions is important too 100
Speaker 1yeah i mean essentially coming together as a community again regaining that community attachment and that communal identity and that community identity and that community identity and that community identity rather than the individualistic identity that we've all been so bought into now and and coming up together stronger together and regaining control of our shared resources and shared identity and shared power um so richard thank you so much for doing everything that you've done along with uh professor kate pickett as well to highlight and amplify this issue and to lay out the case so plainly and so clearly demonstrated with the the data as to why this issue now is case closed and indisputable so thank you so much for doing everything that you've done we know what the problems are we know why we have these problems and we know what we've got to do about it so it's a it's an it's an invaluable gift that you've given us so thank you so much for all of the hard work as you said there check out the equality trust.org.uk if you want to get involved and also i would 100 everybody listen to this rush out right now and buy the book the spirit level the book that we've been talking about today but all of this stuff is laid out with all of the information and all of the background and also check out the equality the inner level which i have yet to read but you can mark my words i will soon be doing so richard thanks so much for giving us your time today it's been a fascinating chat and we thank you again for everything you're
Speaker 2doing well thank you for spreading the word essential work thanks
Speaker 1oh it's the least i can do anytime thanks again richard it's been great to meet you and we'll speak to you again soon bye professor richard wilkinson ladies and gentlemen put it together for him we must of course give a shout out as well to professor kate pickett who is the co-author of the spirit level who has been i'm sure equally involved in the project such great work those guys have done in those books fascinating stuff and just to have that issue case closed is really really useful and important and there it is in black and white they've proven it man they've been through all the data they've collated it all together in a scientifically sound method and they've put it all there in black and white for you all of the social ills that we struggle with and that cost us a lot of money and that we all have to suffer the results of are all without question the results of financial and social inequality in our society and those societies that don't have that financial and social inequality do not have any of those problems i mean of course they do in tiny amounts of course you know people are people right but it's proportional directly proportional to the level of equality or inequality in a society so if you want a better fairer safer better educated less violent happier well adjusted more creative and productive society you're gonna have to get rid of that inequality baby and the only way we're gonna be able to do that it seems is by coming together we've got to let go of this thatcherite reaganistic idea that we are all dog eat dog against each other is you know we've got to fucking be winners and you know be richer and stronger and work harder than the next guy and get to the top and be a fucking survivor and a fighter we got to get rid of that mindset it's bullshit if it wasn't bullshit how come it only works out for like less than one percent of the population and most of those motherfuckers are rich when they were born anyway so it's a fucking lie man it's a lie it's never gonna happen to you you're better off coming together stronger together and fucking overthrowing the system and creating a new one and that's not a radical idea this is not a romantic yearning for some kind of unrealistic utopia we've been there before we've had a society that was fairer but you can't take your eye off the ball you know the bad guys are always looking to come and fucking pull the rug out so they can run away from you with all the cash again you know we've like tony ben said every generation must fight the same battles you know there's no final victory and there is no final defeat you know and i love that it's one of my favorite quotes but what it means is is that yeah we can't get too comfortable it's like it's the same battle battle over and over and over again and man the bad guys have been kicking our ass quite severely for quite a long time now i think i think the pressure is boiling now it's so bad out there that we really need to come together as brothers and sisters and fucking let them know where the power is we are the power and enough is enough so i hope you enjoyed the episode i hope you found that insightful and interesting and great food for thoughts do check out the equalitytrust.org.uk and also the spirit level and the inner level books as well by professor richard wilkinson and professor kate pickett and if you do nothing else with your day-to-day give me a subscribe hit the james kennedy podcast subscribe button the follow button if there's a star rating if you're on apple or spotify give me a star dude it's one click of a button doesn't cost you nothing and you'll be helping me out you'll be making a little welsh podcaster happy okay you look at all the free goodies i'm giving you here man this is good stuff as always i'll be back next week with another awesome guest so i'll see you there in the meantime take care of yourselves take care of each other i love you loads and i'll see you next time
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