The Glade 4.0

The experience of many other developed countries suggests that paying for a government that could help the poor and the middle class cope in our brave new globalized world will require more money from the middle class itself.

Many Americans may find this hard to believe, but the United States already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the developed world, according to several studies, raising proportionately more revenue from the wealthy than other advanced countries do. Taxes on American households do more to redistribute resources and reduce inequality than the tax codes of most other rich nations.

But taxation provides only half the picture of public finance. Despite the progressivity of our taxes, according to a study of public finances across the industrial countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we also have one of the least effective governments at combating income inequality. There is one main reason: our tax code does not raise enough money.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

There's a term for that.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

*liberal hippie check memegenerator*

I swear that the hippie meme chick is someone that my brother used to go out with.

I swear that the hippie meme chick is someone that my brother used to go out with.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

I like the way income inequality has replaced poverty as the issue. Remember, it's not how well you're actually doing, it's how much more someone else has that's the problem!

In the European Sociological Review, sociologist John Goldthorpe argued that the book relied too heavily on income inequality over other forms of inequality (including broader economic inequality), and demonstrated a one-dimensional understanding of social stratification, with social class being in effect treated as merely a marker for income. He concluded that much more research was needed to support either the Wilkinson and Pickett "account of the psychosocial generation of the contextual effects of inequality on health or the rival neo-materialist account".[12]

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." He later noted that, "The Spirit Level is strongest on Wilkinson's home turf: health. The links between average health outcomes and income inequality do appear strong, and disturbing".[13]

John Kay in The Financial Times said that "the evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams, with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests".[14] Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, described it as "an intellectual flagship of post-crisis compassion, this reader-friendly fusion of number-crunching and moral uplift has helped steer a debate about the route to a kinder, fairer nation.[15] Will Hutton in The Observer described it as "A remarkable new book ...the implications are profound."[16] Roy Hattersley in the New Statesman called it "a crucial contribution to the ideological argument",[17] and the New Statesman listed it as one of their top ten books of the decade.[18] Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph declared it to be "more a socialist tract than an objective analysis of poverty".[19] Gerry Hassan in The Scotsman said that Wilkinson and Pickett's claim that "more equal societies almost always do better" was "a universal, sweeping statement - which cannot be substantiated by most of their data."[20]

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". Pickett and Wilkinson addressed the Wall Street Journal article in a letter to the Journal[22] and published a response to the Taxpayers Alliance report on their own site.[23] In their response to the Wall Street Journal they said ,"...we use income inequality data from the United Nations, rather than the OECD, because the OECD data were not intended primarily for cross-national comparisons. However, even if we test our results using the OECD measures we find 28 of 29 relationships are still significant".'[22]

Peter Robert Saunders, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Sussex University, published a report for the think tank Policy Exchange questioning the statistics in The Spirit Level. He claimed that only one of the correlations in the book—that between infant mortality and income inequality—stood up to scrutiny, and that the rest were either false or ambiguous.[24] Wilkinson and Pickett published a response defending each of the claims in the book and accusing Saunders in turn of flawed methodology.[7] Saunders statistical analysed was also assessed by Hugh Noble, who published an article explaining statistical inference in "The Spirit Level" and assessing the critique offered by Peter Saunders. Noble concluded that the critical analysis of The Spirit Level offered by Peter Saunders 'cannot be taken seriously because it contains so many serious technical flaws'.[25]

Christopher Snowdon, an independent researcher and adjunct scholar at the Democracy Institute,[26][27] published a book largely devoted to a critique of The Spirit Level, entitled, The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything.[28] One of its central claims is that Wilkinson excludes certain countries from his data without justification, such as South Korea and the Czech Republic. It also argues that Wilkinson and Pickett falsely claim the existence of a scientific consensus when much of the literature disagrees with their findings. Wilkinson and Pickett released a response to questions from Snowdon[29] and responded to similar criticisms in the Wall Street Journal.[22] Snowdon has in turn responded to their criticisms on his blog.[30]

Here's a clue: It's not a problem. There's nothing the least bit "educational" about that video.

It's no exaggeration to say that Capitalism vs. Socialism is a choice of giving people a spread of incomes between 4 and 10, or ensuring absolutely everyone only gets 3. Contrary to leftist economic thought, it's impossible to ensure everyone gets 7. Every bit of wealth redistribution eventually takes standard of living away from the poor as much as it does the rich.

Income inequality is not an issue government should concern itself with.

That's because I've heard of him before and while I haven't watched that particular video, I certainly am familiar with his work and its associated problems. See my edit above. I don't need to watch his "educational" video to know what ideas he espouses.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

One's ability to quote Wikipedia doesn't necessarily indicate that you know more than the contents of that wiki.

I really recommend that you watch the video, it's quite interesting.

A man telling you things you (specifically) already presume to be true is educational or informative, how, Aizle?

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

The problem with this idea is that those countries that supposedly have little income inequality, such as the Nordic/Scandanavian areas also don't have many other social problems to solve in the first place. They have highly homogenous populations which are not overly large in comparison to their land areas, their land areas are small, and strategically speaking, they have little to worry about.

Conversely, those countries that do the worst, such as many African countries, have massive income inequality because of major problems in how the society is structured in the first place. Those same problems also create the major other problems this guy seems to think are created by income inequality.