The spirit level

The message in the book is very valid, but it could be conveyed in far fewer pages. I didn‘t finish the book, this is the key message, if you don't want to know, stop now.

Almost every negative metric in society (drug use, obesity, crime, etc.) correlates with income inequality (not average income or GDP). And the US is the clear leader on economic and societal inequality.

Every chapter highlights a specific negative metric, demonstrates a correlation with inequality and talks about how it could be causative.

Evey chapter is the same, read one chapter and you've read it all.

The only caveat is people/countries below the poverty line. People that really can't afford to eat, people struggling to survive; they do benefit from increases in average income, but the benefit stops once they are out poverty.

5 stars for content, but 4 for presentation. The results are thorough, but the writing is dry—more engaging than a research paper, but I wouldn't consider it enjoyable past a mental exercise. Also, graphs are often labelled extremely vaguely (“high” vs “low”, “more” vs “less”, etc). I understand this was done in the name of simplicity, to show the correlation between graphs and between concepts, but really? I think most of us can read and interpret a numbered graph. As it stands, the reader has no idea whether a graph represents 5% of the scale of something or 100%.

Nonetheless, the research is intriguing, and The Spirit Level is a solid factual resource to back up assumptions that most of us have always shared: we are most happy and healthy when we live as equals with our peers.