(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head, no one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet over someone, please save me trying to save the planet over someone. Please say me.

(00:25):
Welcome to move my head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Richard Wilkinson. Richard is now professor emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham medical school honorary professor at university of college, London and visiting professor at the university of York. He wrote the spear level with Kate Pickett, a bestseller now available in 24 languages. It won the 2011 political studies association publication of the year award and the 2010 Bristol festival of ideas prize. Richard has received awards from the Iris cancer society, the Australian society for medical research and more. He co-founded the equality trust a registered cherry. Since 2007, his books have been turned into award-winning documentaries and his Ted talk has been watched over 4 million times. He has given many hundreds of addresses and interviews around the world, including at the w H O the EU O E C D and the world bank together with epidemiologists Cape Pickett. He published his newest book, the inner level in 2018. Welcome to in over my head, Richard.

(01:23):
Well, it's nice of you to have me. Thank you.

(01:25):
So in talking with my past guests about the decarbonization of the electricity grid, the idea of a just transition came up and I'm still left with questions about this, and I want to explore more. And one fascinating aspect is how inequality affects society. And as such our ability to address the climate crisis, you were a pioneer in this field and you made addressing inequality of your life's work. So I'm honoured to have you with me today to talk about this. So to start, I think it might be helpful to define what we mean by inequality in this context. How do you define it?

(01:53):
Well, you can, of course look at many different kinds of inequality, gender inequality, ethnic inequality, and so on. But what we look at is simply income differences, the scale of income differences in a society between rich and poor. But I think that drives many of the other dimensions of inequality. So where you have bigger income differences in a society, you find usually women have a greater disadvantage and there are bigger differences between ethnic groups and so on. So the good reasons for thinking that material or economic inequality is a driver of other inequalities.

(02:34):
Okay, great. So we're talking mostly about income inequality. And so how does that generally affect societies?

(02:42):
Well, we compared income differences in a bunch of rich developed market democracies, Western European countries, USA, Canada, Australia. So on about 2025 countries and looked at various outcomes in relation to those income differences. And you find the more unequal countries that the bigger gaps between rich and poor do worse in all sorts of ways. They have more violence as measured by homicide rates. They usually have lower life expectancy. They have lower educational standards for children in terms of these international maths and literacy tests, the whole range of outcomes, where those more unequal societies seem to do worse.

(03:32):
Yeah. And I think that's really interesting if I'm understanding this correctly, cuz it's not in absolute numbers of a rich or a poor country, it's the difference in income? So I think the United States is a good example of a country that is quite wealthy, but has a lot of inequality. And, and as such a lot of those social issues as well.

(03:48):
Yes, it's a very good example, as you say, big income gaps within it. And actually it has amongst the rich developed countries, it has the highest homicide rates, the highest obesity rates higher proportion in prison amongst the lowest life expectancy figures. So in all sorts of ways, it does badly. Whereas if you look at countries with small income differences, the Scandinavian countries, they all do well on those things. And there's quite a strong relationship between the scale of income differences and how common all these problems are. Richer. People do better in all these countries and poorer people do worse and inequality makes its main difference amongst the people lower down the social hierarchy. But all of us would do a bit better if we lived in a more equal society. I, if I take you with your job, your education, your income, if you lived in a more equal society, you would be less likely to become a victim of violence. Your kids might be less likely to get seriously involved in dangerous drugs. You might live a little bit longer in that sort of way, even middle-class people to better living in a more equal society.

(05:08):
And I think one interesting aspect in reading some of your work, or of course we're talking about the environment and climate change and the climate crisis was how inequality affects our spending habits in consumerism. So how is that affected by inequality?

(05:23):
Well, one of the things that happens is that status and class become more important in more unequal societies it's as if the bigger material differences sort of up the stakes. And we all become more worried by how we are seen and judged by other people. And we judge each other more by status, but with that worry about how we're seen and judged goes increased consumerism and, and buying status goods. So you are more concerned with how you appear to others. So you are more likely to spend money on designer clothes, or rather an extravagant car things that make you look more successful in other people's eyes. And it's really quite a powerful influence on consumerism so much so that you see debt going up with inequality, both at the societal level, you know, the countries with the biggest inequalities usually have the highest levels of household debt, but also individuals, if you look at a more unequal area, people in that area are more likely to get into debt and to go bankrupt. That kind of thing. Money becomes more important in those more unequal societies

(06:37):
Who is most affected by this pressure to consume?

(06:41):
I think it's much the same as the rest of the picture. It's the poor affected most. There are now measures of what's called status anxiety or worries about how you're seen and judged. And it shows in a more unequal society, all income groups have more status anxiety than they do in a more equal society. But the status anxiety is highest at the lower income levels, but whether it's lower amongst the rich and high amongst the poor, everyone suffers more in a more unequal society. Then we go on with that because what we see is there are two results of that. If you are worried about what people think of you all the time, you can either do what we call going under that suffer from low self-esteem, lack of confidence. You find social meetings more stressful. So perhaps you avoid going to social gatherings and parties and so on.

(07:40):
You start to capture yourself off from other people and more likely to have depression. And we actually find those results more common in more equal societies. But the other response, again, to worrying about how you're seen and judged is to big yourself up you flaunt your abilities and achievements instead of being modest about them and not just in terms of consumerism, but there are nice studies of how people think they compare to the average in their society and people in a more unequal society going for sort of self ament self-advertisement. And so they'll talk as if they're cleverer than other people and psychologists call it self advancement. There's two opposite responses. You can either feel social contact is too stressful, hide yourself away. Or if you mix a lot with other people, you big yourself up,

(08:37):
Is there a point where economic growth is no longer helpful for societies in terms of our well-being?

(08:45):
Well, if you look at the curve of happiness or wellbeing, measures of wellbeing or life for expectancy, you find that it rises in the early stages of economic growth. You know, as poorer countries get richer rises fairly rapidly, people get happier, well-being increases, life expectancy increases. But when you get past the sort of middle-income countries into the rich countries, it levels out. And what it's really telling us is that it's really important for people in poorer countries to have more higher material standards. It does produce real human benefits, but in the rich world for us to have more and more of everything makes less and less difference. And although in most rich countries, life expectancy is continuing to increase, but completely unrelated anymore to economic growth. Even if you look at really long periods of economic growth, you can't see any relationship with what, how, how life expectancy of the population has changed.

(09:53):
Yeah, that's really interesting. And so if it's not economic growth, so what other aspects are contributing to our wellbeing?

(10:01):
The studies of well-being happiness suggest that one of the really most important factors is the quality of social relationships. Whether you are, you have good friendships, lots of friends good relationship with your partner, whether you are involved in community life. I think all these are showing the importance of being at ease with each other. And in more in equal countries, you see community life dies away. It falls away with increasing inequality and people are, are less likely to trust each other. And actually it looks rather in what I often talk about is how in more equal societies, you get a lot of reciprocity, a good community relations. People tend to know their neighbors. They're fairly public-spirited. And then with increasing inequality, you get the decline in trust of other people. You get a rise in violence. And then if you look at really much more unequal countries than the ones in our main dataset countries like Mexico and South Africa, amongst the most unequal in the world, you find that it's all gone a step further.

(11:20):
People in those societies seem to be afraid of each other. So they put bars on their windows and doors and they have razor wire around yards. And they have often guard dogs and, and so on. And there you feel that social relations in the public sphere have really broken down. I remember giving some lectures in Mexico and the academics who invited us thought of it as dangerous to go out in the evening and were worried about taking us to see various sites. The rise in, in violence is really enormous. And there are studies that show in the more unequal of the American, the 50 American states, those with the highest levels of inequality may have 10 times the homicide rates of states with the least inequality, the effects of often very large. Indeed.

(12:16):
Yeah. And, and when we're looking at addressing the climate crisis, obviously there, there might be weather changes and maybe some migration. And, and to me it seems like having people who are more cooperative and neighbourly, and that's just going to be a requirement to deal with this. Wouldn't you say?

(12:32):
Yes. I think that's really important. Actually, there is one study that I sometimes quote, it uses an international survey of the opinions of business leaders and in more unequal countries, they don't think environmental issues are so important in more equal countries. They do think they're important. I think there's an idea that in the most unequal countries that you know, those issues are for governments to deal with, we must just look after our own business. Where's more social sense of social responsibility in the more equal countries and going with that to see higher levels of recycling of our waste materials, people more likely to ride bicycles and actually lower CO2 levels per say, a hundred dollars of GMP. So it looks as if those more equal countries are doing better environmentally. And I think it's partly cause there's a greater sense of social responsibility if you like.

(13:35):
So is sustainability compatible with a high quality of life?

(13:39):
I think it depends what you mean by high quality of life. There's always been a tendency, which I think economists are to blame for taking quality of life as meaning high levels of income and consumption. But actually the real quality of life is much more about, and once you've got an adequate level of food and shelter and warmth and clothing and so on is about social relationships, friendships, whether you feel valued. That seems to be one of the real drivers of the effects of inequality, because if you live in a society where some people appear so much more important than others, you know, you think of the, the, the richer sort of superhuman and people at the bottom, the, well, the prejudices are the, the bottom because they're stupid and lazy. I mean, those, those are prejudices that make being lower down the hierarchy.

(14:35):
Hurtful. I think that you can see in, and even health data, the importance of good social relationships, if you are worrying all the time about whether you are valued or not, whether people like you, whether they think you are clever and amusing and fun to be with, if you ha overcome with the self doubts that these big inequalities raise and the idea that some people are worth so much more than others. So, you know, where do I come? What do people think? And be those actually are the most important sources of chronic stress in the population as a whole. And of course there are worse sources of chronic stress in terms of, you know, if you're sent to prison or you suddenly discover you have an advanced cancer tumor or something, but those fortunately are rarer in the population. But these worries about how we're seen and judged are so widespread.

(15:34):
And we now know that chronic stress has very powerful influences on health, even when measured by objective factors like death rates, you find that actually having good social relationships is highly protective of health. It's more important than whether or not you smoke to your survival over a follow-up period. The work on this sort of thing is really interesting. You find that people with good relationships in with their partner wounds, heal faster. Other experiments show that people with lots of friends have higher resistance to infection. These are sophisticated experiments. So they control for your preexisting antibodies. The idea that you, you might have got lots of friends who have come across these colds before and so be resistant. So they control that outta the picture. And they say, still find that these people presumably more stressed by social relationships and avoiding them. So fewer friends, less good relationships, and they have weakened immunity. So just like the effects on, on wound for healing. And, and we know about how chronic stress affects the immune system, digestion, growth, tissue, maintenance, and repair, a whole lot of things important to health, a sort of downregulated when you are stressed. Cause if you are stressed and you know, you've got to deal with some sudden emergency, then mobilizing energy for muscular activity, being very alert are crucially important. The damage comes when you are stressed for weeks and months and years, not just a brief emergency.

(17:24):
So would you say that a more equal society is better able to deal with the effects of climate change?

(17:30):
Yes. I think relationships are much more powerful than we realize the importance of equality is much more powerful than we realized. And obviously the super-rich have a much bigger carbon footprint than the rest of us, but the poor have a much smaller one. And so when president macro in France proposed to raise the price of gasoline and fuel and so on, there were huge demonstrations. The protests all over France that went on for months and months basically saying that this was unfair. It hit the poor harder than the rich. And that actually reminded me that in Britain, during the war, the second world war, apparently the government made very conscious decisions to reduce inequality, reduce income differences in order to make people feel that the burden of war was equally chaired. And if you want people to pull their weight in the war effort, you must make people feel that this is something that we all do together. And of course, that's exactly what we need with climate change. The time we have left to make changes, well, we don't have time left the results. The damaging results are already coming thick and fast. And I think we now need governments that are prepared to take that approach like war where we need rapid changes in industrial policy and so on to try and reduce carbon emissions from all sources.

(19:07):
Yeah. And that's really interesting to me. So during the war, England banded together for that effort, where are things at now are things less that way?

(19:17):
Exactly the opposite. Yes. In the war. It's not only that they reduced income differences, but of course, rationing and subsidies on necessities and taxes on luxuries. And that the Royal family even took part in this. So war utilitarian, clothing made of utilitarian materials and quite a, a show made of how even they were Abey the rules. And of course in Britain recently, we've had a show of almost the opposite with the prime minister and cabinet, not even obeying that own rules about not having parties and things like that. But inequalities have grown enormously income differences, widened very dramatically under Thatcher in the 1980s and early nineties. So we've become a more anti-social society since then. And no government has really managed to reverse that huge step rise in inequality that took place under the Thacher government.

(20:22):
I guess one thing that I'm still wondering about is I know it's probably a very big question, but how do we help solve this inequality in, in these various countries to, to make life better and to better address the climate crisis?

(20:36):
Well, I think there are lots of different ways and I used to sort of shelter behind the excuse that I'm an epidemiologist. I'm not an economist, it's their job to think how to reduce inequalities, but I've been pushed into reading and thinking more about policies for cutting the inequality. Quite clearly, we have to deal with tax avoidance and the tax havens, income taxes and taxes as a whole are no longer progressive Warren buffet. I think said that he pays a smaller percentage of his income in tax than his cleaner or secretary. And I think that sort of thing is quite common now in the rich developed world, these changes in inequality and the ideology that goes with it are common across different countries, the international trends basically. But the other way I think we should reduce inequality is by reducing income differences before taxes, not depending on just taxes, reducing large differences in our pay, but having smaller differences in pay before tax.

(21:44):
And I think one of the important ways of doing that is to extend democracy into the economy, into our workplaces. I think that it's really important to move towards employee representation on company boards, not just token representation, but strong representation. Some countries already have that tone. Germany has quite strong employee representation on boards and remuneration committees. And so on. I think basically we should have a, and if we could get it a system for increasing employee representation over time until employees have majority control, it is at work that the differences in status and wealth and so on are, are first created and are most obvious. It's often said how, you know, the bosses use a different car park and use a different restaurant in the works and so on. And people used to talk when Japan was more equal than it is now about how their, everyone in a big company would wear the same uniform and eat together and, and so on.

(22:58):
But I, I think most of that has gone. We should be, I think, trying to embed greater equality, more fundamentally into the economic sphere and the systems of line management. And so on that we have probably not the most efficient, there are good evaluations of companies with more democratic structures that suggest actually that productivity is higher in those companies. I remember working in small firms where people on the shop floor who often felt exploited, were glad when things went wrong. When, you know, there was an order for something and it was unavailable and you know, don't have to do it. and I think when there is systems of employee involvement, so they feel that it's their company they're controlling it and that if they take sickies and don't come in, even when they're perfectly well, that they're letting down their friends and people they depend on. And so I, I think you can change the ethos as you change the inequality in incomes and so on by increasing forms of economic democracy.

(24:18):
This show is about empowering citizens to take action on the climate crisis and with inequality. How would you suggest that individuals are part of that change?

(24:28):
Well, I have spent my life in research mainly around health inequalities, but I think just the same thing goes on in relation to issues of climate change for decades, people have been pointing out these problems to politicians and so on and extraordinary little being done about it. And I used to say that the health inequalities, the tendency for life expectancy to be so much shorter and in lower social classes and upper social classes. I used to talk about that as the greatest abuse of human rights in our societies, but we know how terribly we're threatened by climate change setting in motion changes that may be irreversible and hugely damaging. And our politicians just aren't doing enough about it. I think demonstrations are absolutely crucial. Now demonstrations are effective. I mean the black lives matter thing, the me too movement the occupy movement before that on inequality, they all do shift public opinion. And to get these changes, we have to have movements that are powerful enough to stand up to the privileged few who exercise power. I'm afraid they've got to feel really worried about not accepting greater equality.

(25:52):
Yeah, I think that's great. The show is about empowering citizens, so to get involved and to know that when you're going out and, and maybe for a peaceful protest that that does matter, and that does make a difference. That's really helpful. Well, Richard, this has been very educational. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

(26:08):
Well thank you for having me. It's important to get the understanding of these issues more widespread.

(26:16):
Well, that was my talk with professor Wilkinson. I think the biggest takeaway for me was that our happiness and our well-being, isn't tied up in the things that we have in our cars and our status symbols. It's more dependent on our social relationships, our friendships and those things you don't have to buy. And so the more that we can focus on that and, and less on the status symbols, we're obviously better able to address the climate crisis and lower our environmental footprint. So for me, that was really, really interesting. And if you're getting something outta these conversations, I encourage you to tell a friend about it because the more people that we can have take action, the better off will be. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz, here's the feeling a little less in over our head when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see, again, soon you over my head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

(27:13):
I'm trying to save the planet with someone. Please save me.