We discussed his ideas before.
Regarding
his book:Quote:
Richard Reeves in The Guardian called the book "a thorough-going attempt to demonstrate scientifically the benefits of a smaller gap between rich and poor", but said there were problems with the book's approach. "Drawing a line through a series of data points signals nothing concrete about statistical significance [...] since they do not provide any statistical analyses, this can't be verified."
Quote:
In 2010, Tino Sanandaji and others wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they said, "when we attempted to duplicate their findings with data from the U.N. and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we found no such correlation".[21] The same group of researchers published a report for the Taxpayer's Alliance providing details of their data analysis and coming to the conclusion that "the most straightforward measure of health simply has no robust correlation to income inequality when comparing industrialized countries using standard OECD and UN statistics".
There's further questions as to why he excludes certain countries such as South Korea and the Czech Republic from his data, and in any case, he is one expert in the field and there is far from consensus.
The "wealth inequality" argument inevitably falls afoul of the simple fact that absolute wealth is far more important than relative wealth. Even the very poor in this country are far better off than the vast majority of truly poor on a world scale.