rebuttal for The Spirit Level

theKik - Yes, that's my current best bet but I'm slightly put off by the reviews, which are basically the reviewers arguing with each other about politics, with no discussion of the book's evidence base, logical rigour, etc. Which makes me worry that the book might be more of a political tract than a reliable evaluation of available evidence. Chocolate Pickle - easiest and emptiest. Unsupported statements like that are plastered all over the 'net, and are not particularly useful. Expanding that answer into something that's actually useful (what has been tried, in what context, why did it fail, by what metrics were failure declared, why these conclusions are different from those in Spirit Level, where these data are drawn from, etc) would fill out a lengthy essay or book. Which is what I'm looking for.

The Economist has talked about this several times since it was published. Their criticism is that the statistics are driven by a few outliers. http://www.economist.com/node/16844516 http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2010/09/economics_equality_and_finance_sector

Looking into the amazon link you sent for the Spirit Level, there is a link to this book, which seems to be a rebuttal: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Delusion-Fact-checking-Everything/dp/0956226515/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

The easiest rebuttal is, "Every time it's been tried, it has failed."

I think some of the theses of the book are true, but it was sloppily argued. Here's criticism in the http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/08/spirit-level-book-critique, linking to a comprehensive debunking; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/david-runciman/how-messy-it-all-is. There's a lot more out there, but note that both of these responses appear to come from the political Left (the LRB still retains Marxist sympathies) -- heartening representatives of the rare notion that even arguments for one's own side must meet standards of rigor and honor. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/search?q=%22spirit+level%22 material, although I haven't read it and can't speak either to its quality or where it's coming from. Here's http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127862421912914915.html on the subject by the author of the blog.

Try reading a classic, like The Wealth of Nations. Failing that, read a funny analysis, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871139499/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/

http://www.hulver.com/scoop/story/2010/10/31/175419/25:However, while correlations are all very well, they don't prove causation, and that's where the book starts to fall down. They quickly mention the possibility that there's a missing factor that causes both inequality and the various problems, but blandly state it's unlikely that one will be found. To their credit they do go through a variety of other factors like ethnicity. However, to anyone who's read any sociology, there seems to be an enormous hole in the shape of culture. Suppose there's something about culture, maybe even mistrust which they class as a symptom, which causes both inequality and poor social outcomes? This matters because their proposed solution is to deliberately create a more equal society, which runs straight into the jagged teeth of the dreaded efficiency/equality tradeoff. Basically if you make an economy more equal, it tends to become less efficient. Suppose you have no welfare at all: the people who haven't starved or frozen to death will tend to work very hard, producing goods and services very efficiently. At the other end of the scale, if you enforced absolute equality so that everyone had the same income, there'd be no financial incentive to work hard or train for skilled jobs, and things would be very efficient.