On this week’s Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s best-selling study in the book The Spirit Level (2009), showing how economic inequality correlates with most of the major social problems of our time.
We will juxtapose their latest paper “The Spirit Level at 15: The Enduring Impact of Inequality,” which details how economic inequality has only gotten worse in the past fifteen years, despite government laws and programs aimed to “reduce” inequality.
Wilkinson and Pickett show that it is capitalism that generates the inequality that generates the hostilities and social tensions — including social ills, divisions, and disintegration — that intrude upon and damage our lives.