Quotes by Wilkinson, Richard

“Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others’ eyes.””

“The truth is that modern inequality exists because democracy is excluded from the economic sphere. It needs therefore to be dealt with by an extension of democracy into the workplace. We need to experiment with every form of economic democracy – employee ownership, producer and consumer co-operatives, employee representatives on company boards and so on.””

“A common response to research findings in the social sciences is for people to say they are obvious, and then perhaps to add a little scornfully, that there was no need to do all that expensive work to tell us what we already knew. Very often, however, that sense of knowing only seeps in with the benefit of hindsight, after research results have been made known.””

“Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.””

“Once we have enough of the basic necessities for comfort, possessions matter less and less in themselves, and are used more and more for what they say about their owners. Ideally, our impressions of each other would depend on face‐to‐face interactions in the course of community life, rather than on outward appearances in the absence of real knowledge of each other.””

“Despite the modern impression of the permanence and universality of inequality, in the time‐scale of human history and prehistory, it is the current highly unequal societies which are exceptional. For over 90 per cent of our existence as human beings we lived, almost exclusively, in highly egalitarian societies. For perhaps as much as the last two million years, covering the vast majority of the time we have been ‘anatomically modern’ (that is to say, looking much as we do now), human beings lived in remarkably egalitarian hunting and gathering – or foraging – groups.332–5 Modern inequality arose and spread with the development of agriculture. The characteristics which would have been selected as successful in more egalitarian societies would have been very different from those selected in dominance hierarchies.””

“Studies in the USA often report even larger differences, such as a 28‐year difference in life expectancy at age 16 between blacks and whites living in some of the poorest and some of the richest areas””

“The reality is that inequality causes real suffering, regardless of how we choose to label such distress. Greater inequality heightens social threat and status anxiety, evoking feelings of shame which feed into our instincts for withdrawal, submission and subordination: when the social pyramid gets higher and steeper and status insecurity increases, there are widespread psychological costs. Status competition and anxiety increase, people become less friendly, less altruistic and more likely to put others down.””

“A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley””

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti””

“While Americans are more likely to attribute individual successes to their own abilities and their failures to external factors, the Japanese tend to do just the opposite.””

“The evidence of our sensitivity to ‘social evaluative threat’, coupled with Twenge’s evidence of long‐term rises in anxiety and narcissism, suggests that we may – by the standards of any previous society – have become highly self‐conscious, obsessed with how we appear to others, worried that we might come across as unattractive, boring, stupid or whatever, and constantly trying to manage the impressions we make.””