In her new book, the co-author of The Spirit Level gathers jaw-dropping facts about the inequality crisis in the UK – and explores creative ways to address it
T
here was a moment when reading Kate Pickett’s new book that I realised I was underlining something on nearly every page. Occasionally it was an exclamation mark, or a star. Other times, she herself was doing something similar. “I’m sorry to say that is not a typo,” she writes, at one point. And then, in a later chapter, “I’m going to have to put this in bold …”
It wasn’t stylistic commentary, although The Good Society is well written. Nearly every scribble was next to a fact. Pickett is a social epidemiologist, and deals in facts: “In the decade from 2011 to just before the pandemic, total spending on preventive services for families declined by 25%”, for instance. Or that half of children born in Liverpool in 2009 and 2010 had been referred to children’s services by the time they were five. Or that in 2023-4, England’s local authorities had only 6% of the childcare places they needed for children with disabilities (that was the bit Pickett wished to point out wasn’t a typo).
Pickett came to international prominence with a book she wrote with Richard Wilkinson in 2009, The Spirit Level. That book used a battery of facts to argue that countries with the greatest overall inequality – even those that seemed to be richest – had the worst levels of health, social cohesion and human capital development. The Spirit Level sold more than 300,000 copies, was translated into 26 languages and was named by the Guardian as one of the 100 most influential books of the 21st century. Pickett and Wilkinson followed it, in 2018, with The Inner Level, which set out to illustrate the many ways in which the chronic stress caused by high inequality negatively affects our psychological wellbeing.
