Quotes from Richard G. Wilkinson

The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.

You can predict a country's performance on one outcome from a knowledge of others. If – for instance – a country does badly on health, you can predict with some confidence that it will also imprison a larger proportion of its population, have more teenage pregnancies, lower literacy scores, more obesity, worse mental health, and so on. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes.

Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others' eyes.

New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed.

In conventional employment people are specifically hired to work for purposes which are not their own. They

Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement 'I am an important person', but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.

The truth is that modern inequality exists because democracy is excluded from the economic sphere. It needs therefore to be dealt with by an extension of democracy into the workplace. We need to experiment with every form of economic democracy – employee ownership, producer and consumer co-operatives, employee representatives on company boards and so on.

The recognition that what we have seen is the rise of an insecure narcissism – particularly among young people – rather than a rise in genuine self?esteem now seems widely accepted.

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. John Donne, Meditation XVII

further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth: the issue is now community and how we relate to each other.

A common response to research findings in the social sciences is for people to say they are obvious, and then perhaps to add a little scornfully, that there was no need to do all that expensive work to tell us what we already knew. Very often, however, that sense of knowing only seeps in with the benefit of hindsight, after research results have been made known.

Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.'350

Studies in the USA often report even larger differences, such as a 28?year difference in life expectancy at age 16 between blacks and whites living in some of the poorest and some of the richest areas

The evidence of our sensitivity to 'social evaluative threat', coupled with Twenge's evidence of long?term rises in anxiety and narcissism, suggests that we may – by the standards of any previous society – have become highly self?conscious, obsessed with how we appear to others, worried that we might come across as unattractive, boring, stupid or whatever, and constantly trying to manage the impressions we make.

A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.

... class differences in health represent a double injustice: life is short where its quality is poor.