The Spirit Level

The Gini Coefficient is a method used to measure a society’s inequality. If a society was extremely unequal, its label would be 1, while a perfectly equal society would be a 0, so the lower the score, the more financially equal the society. The authors use the Gini Coefficient to analyze the inequality rates in different US states because the US Census Bureau and most economists rely on this method.

Income inequality refers to the gap between people’s incomes. In The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett analyze incomes after taxation to investigate how much income variation there is between different nations.

The authors borrow economist Robert Frank’s term “luxury fever” to describe how earners across the social hierarchy engage in materialistic buying behavior to try to emulate the lifestyles of the rich. According to Wilkinson and Pickett, this is more common in unequal societies, and when people embrace luxury fever they do so at the expense of their finances, mental health, and the environment.

Obesogenic factors help to cause obesity. In their chapter “The Obesogenic Environment,” the authors argue that the stress of poverty and low status is an obesogen, as it impacts people’s emotional and physical health, making them more likely to form addictive behaviors around unhealthy foods.

Social evaluative threats are stressors that could lead to someone’s humiliation or loss of status. For instance, someone could feel that their reputation or status is threatened if they are being assessed critically while performing a task or experiencing rejection from their peer group. The authors use psychological studies to argue that social evaluative threats are among the most impactful stressors and that inequality increases this feeling of social insecurity.

The authors use the term social failure to refer to the crime and poor health which plagues even wealthy, developed countries. They contrast this failure with these countries’ comparatively strong economic performances to argue that economic growth does not always translate into better health in a population, and that rich countries can experience social failure if they allow too much inequality to take hold in their population.

The authors use Alain de Botton’s term “status anxiety” to describe the shame many people feel about their place in the social hierarchy. The authors argue that if inequality was reduced, people would feel less status anxiety and less competitive with others.