To solve problems, we must know their causes.
An old joke I heard when in graduate school studying mental health goes as follows:
How do you know when you can discharge a patient from the mental illness ward?
You give the person the following test: Go to a kitchen and plug up the drain in the sink, and run the water until it is slowly overflowing, allowing the water to keep running from the tap. Place a mop and empty bucket nearby, on the floor next to the sink. Once the floor has some standing water, bring in the person to be tested and say, "This floor is wet. Please make the floor dry."
If the person first takes the mop and attempts to dry the floor with it, he or she fails. Success is defined by FIRST turning off the tap and unplugging the drain—THEN mopping the floor dry.
To pass this test the person must determine the causes of the water on the floor, not merely treat the symptom—the water itself on the floor.
Of course, this never happened. It's a joke. But the generalization it illustrates applies to many situations: to solve problems we must find their causes. By then altering the causes in particular ways, we can prevent the resulting undesired outcomes they have caused in the past, thereby making a new and better future.
The book The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkerson changed my views about what causes some of the more persistent, intractable, and consequential problems in modern societies, here in the United States and elsewhere.
Here are the problems the causes of which they seek to reveal:
- level of trust
- mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction)
- life expectancy and infant mortality
- obesity
- children's educational performance
- teenage births
- homicides
- imprisonment rates
- social mobility
They examined most wealthy 23 modern market democratic nations. And then they compared the same data with the 50 American states.
What they found is rather stunning: among these nations, and among American states, it is not average income or wealth that correlated with better outcomes on these problems. It was something else: income inequality.
They measured income inequality with data comparing the difference between after tax income of the bottom 20 percent of the population with the top 20 percent of the population.
The first slide in the slide show provides this data in graph form from Richard Wilkerson's TED talk slide.
Then they compared the data on problems with income equality with each nation and with the 50 states. They do that with a regression line, which shows the trend of correlation.
The second slide in the slide show provides the set of problems correlated with income inequality of the rich nations.
The third slide shows the problem set data for the 50 states.
The book, as you'd expect, breaks down the numbers for each type of problem.
The fourth slide shows trust (percentage of people who say others are trustworthy) among the rich nations when correlated with income inequality.
The fifth slide shows the trust data graph for the 50 states.
The book continues for the other problems in the set of problems listed above.
It then argues that income inequality causes these problems.
On pages 187 to 193 they lay out the case that income inequality causes the problems mentioned and not the reverse.
They make the case in a number of ways:
- "the decrease in life expectancy in Eastern European countries in the six years following the collapse of communism (1989-95) was shown to be greatest in the countries which saw the most rapid widening of income differences."
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They make the case that the changes over time in the US and Japan in life expectancy shows causation. Japan had low life expectancy in the 1950s and the US had the highest in the world. By the 1980s, with Japan becoming the most equal in income of all modern market democracies, Japan took its place at the top of all nations in life expectancy, while the US, which become the most unequal of all the nations in the study by 1980, dropped to number 30 on the life expectancy list.
- "Societies that do badly on any particular health or social problem tend to do badly on all of them."
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"Those in more unequal societies do worse than those on the same income in more equal societies."
- They conclude that not only does income inequality cause the range of social problems mentioned, but they proposed a mechanism of this cause: "inequality must be affecting health through psycho-social effects . . . by its links with the quality of social relations and numerous behavioral outcomes."
Thus they conclude their Chapter 13 by saying that ". . . inequality is, in an essential respect . . . a hugely damaging force."
As someone who actively works with lots of people as a coach, I can attest to the pain that income and the resulting social inequality causes. For both men and for women being on the self-conceived low end of a scale of "success" creates deep feeling of inferiority, of dread, or anxiety and of depression and hopelessness—each contrary to liberty and justice, happiness and peace of mind.
Sadly, the United States comes in last compared to the other 20 nations in the study on several of the problems, with the worst or near worst outcomes on homicides, spending on foreign aid, mental illness, infant mortality, obesity, child obesity, teenage births, people in prison, social mobility, and recycling. This is consistent with the US being nearly the last in income equality.
The Quest for Solutions
That said, the book goes on to suggest ways of improving income equality, from creating mechanisms in organizations such as employee ownership that make incomes more equal, like Japan does, to progressive taxation to even out incomes after taxes, like Sweden does.
They also link the pursuit of greater income equality in societies to preventing global warming by reducing emissions while retaining a high quality of life. For rich countries, they argue, needn't raise all incomes into the future, but rather to make those incomes more equal.
They then call for a transformation of our societies " . . . a transformation which will not be furthered by a departure from peaceful methods but one which is unlikely to be achieved by tinkering with minor policy options. A social movement for greater equality needs a sustained sense of direction and a view of how we can achieve the necessary economic and social changes. The key is to map out ways in which the new society can begin to grow within and alongside the institutions it may gradually marginalize and replace. That is what making change is all about. Rather than simply waiting for government to do it for us, we have to start making it in our lives and in the institutions of our society straight away."
Would such a transformation in societies towards more equality cause lower levels of intellectual, artistic and sporting achievement? The authors cite a study that showed that in twenty-nine baseball teams over a nine-year period found that major league baseball teams with small income differences among players do significantly better than the more unequal ones.
This wonderful book ends with a clarion call for a bright and necessary transformation. They say, ". . . it falls to our generation to make one of the biggest transformations in human history. We have seen that the rich countries have got to the end of the really important contributions which economic growth can make to the quality of life and also that our future lies in improving the quality of the social environment in our societies. The role of this book is to point out that greater equality is the material foundation on which better social relations are built."
The data The Spirit Level reveals, and the conclusions that follow constitute a call for activism for this transformation on the part of mental health practitioners in the United States and in other severely unequal nations. As much as we coaches, psychologists, counselors, marriage and family counselors, social workers, consultants and facilitators can benefit our individual clients, families, and organizations with our work, we are paddling upstream, fully against the current of inequality. To enhance mental health and justice, along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the more we can create policy changes the more we can give the mental health professions a society where success is much more likely.
My Views for Actually Going Forward
When it comes to solutions, the book did not focus much on political mechanisms for improving equality other than mention the cases of Japan and Sweden, where Japan has organizations that pay more equally, whereas Sweden uses taxation to equalize income that is quite unequal before taxes.
My own view is that one such mechanism is what is called "economic co-determination" in Germany and other EU nations. Economic co-determination arises from legislation that requires corporations to comprise their boards of directors with half of their members with elected employees. That gives this controlling entity a different set of priorities than boards of directors made up of other CEOs from other corporations, and key stockholders, which is the tendency in American corporations.
Another such mechanism is a multi-party system through proportional representation (PR) with public financing of elections. This creates legislatures, like Germany's, New Zealand's, Sweden's, Denmark's, Norway's and more which reflects the diversity of their people rather then reflecting the investors and lobbyists which donated money to a given campaign.
I wrote about how proportional representation affects mental health here.
It is important to realize that the problems we face cannot be solved by the thinking that caused them—new types of thinking are required. And the same is true of institutions. The problems that institutions cause cannot be solved by the same institutions, in the same form that created them—new, innovative institutional changes and new institutions are required.
I wrote about the sort of thinking that would lead to the political changes in thinking to actually create a transformation here. And I've written about how to make changes in thinking at work, in organizations, here, here, and here.
Go and make a difference! If not you, who? If not now, when?
Let me know your thoughts and actions and I'll include some of them in a future article.
Book Information:
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger is a book by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. Published in 2009, just after the financial crisis of 2008, it is published by Bloomsbury Press, New York. Its ISBN number is 978-1-60819-036-2
Websites associated with this book:
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/
Kelly Gerling's websites:
Examiner.com Website:
http://www.examiner.com/mental-health-in-seattle/kelly-gerling
Kelly's Professional Work in Mental Health, Coaching and Organizational Change:
http://kellygerling.com
Organizational Change:
http://kellygerling.org
Mental Health
http://kellygerling.net
Progressive Social and Political Change:
http://progressiverevolution.org
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