Dans Le Devoir, [Michel David écrivait hier->26724]: «Le premier ministre Charest s'est présenté lui-même devant les membres de la Chambre de commerce de Québec pour expliquer comment il allait "changer la trajectoire du Québec".» Un des arguments de Charest pour défendre son budget est le suivant: ses économistes prétendent que c'est en favorisant les riches (!) que le Québec assurera sa croissance.
C'est vrai: la croissance rend les riches plus riches. Jamie Johnson, un petit-fils de la richissime famille Johnson & Johnson, a produit un documentaire sur la concentration des richesses, qu'il a intitulé The One Percent (voir YouTube) dans lequel il rappelle que le 1 % des plus riches possède 40 % des richesses de la terre et 90 % de la valeur nette disponible. Posant des questions sur cette iniquité au célèbre économiste libertaire Milton Friedman, il se fait répondre: «Mais les pauvres se sont enrichis eux aussi. Qu'est-ce que tu aimes mieux, garder l'écart identique et qu'il n'y ait aucune amélioration chez les pauvres, ou que l'écart s'accroisse comme aujourd'hui en permettant aux pauvres de l'être moins?»
La question est intéressante. C'est la défense de l'injustice par ce que l'on a appelé la «percolation»: comme pour le café, tout se passe en haut, mais il y a tout de même des gouttes qui se répandent autour. Or, le café est bien faible quand il parvient au bas de l'échelle sociale: la moyenne des citoyens doit mettre un an de travail pour gagner, disons 35 000 $, alors que le 1 % du haut le gagne en un jour.
La croissance à tout prix n'est pas la solution — et même si les pauvres en retirent certains avantages. Les professeurs Richard Wilkinson et Kate Pickett travaillent depuis 30 ans sur ce que révèlent les statistiques concernant les réalités sociales. Ils viennent de publier The Spirit Level qui fait beaucoup de bruit parce qu'il démontre de manière irréfutable que ce n'est pas la richesse qui produit une société vivable, mais la solidarité manifestée par un écart moindre des revenus entre les plus riches et les plus pauvres, ce qui est un aspect du «modèle québécois».
The Spirit Level démontre avec force chiffres et graphiques que l'on ne vit pas mieux en ayant un plus haut niveau de vie, mais bien en organisant une société plus égalitaire. Les statistiques démontrent à l'évidence que dans les sociétés riches qui sont égalitaires (disons, la Suède), l'obésité est moindre, les mères adolescentes sont moins nombreuses, le nombre de meurtres est plus bas, le nombre de prisonniers par habitant est moindre, l'alcoolisme est moins répandu que dans les sociétés inégalitaires, même si celles-ci sont riches (disons, comme les États-Unis ou la Grande-Bretagne, qu'il donne en exemples), ainsi de suite.
Plus égalitaire, plus vivable
Et c'est également vrai pour les pays plus pauvres: moins d'inégalité produit une société plus vivable, qui en tire des bénéfices statistiques similaires. On y constate moins de problèmes sociaux, on y est plus heureux et ces citoyens-là entretiennent même une plus grande espérance de vie.
Ponctionner les petits revenus par des taxes à la consommation et exonérer d'impôts les plus hauts revenus produit peut-être la croissance économique, plus de richesse, mais qui aboutit dans la poche des déjà riches. Cette politique creuse davantage l'écart et brise les solidarités. Et, on le sait maintenant, cela produit une société moins vivable.
***
Claude Cossette - Professeur de publicité sociale à l'Université Laval
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From The Sunday Times

March 8, 2009

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

The Sunday Times review by John Carey





This is a book with a big idea, big enough to change political thinking, and bigger than its authors at first intended. The problem they originally set out to solve was why health within a population gets progressively worse further down the social scale; they estimate that together they have clocked up more than 50 person-years gathering information from research teams across the globe. Their eureka moment came when they thought of putting the medical data alongside figures showing the extent of economic inequality within each country. They say modestly that since dependable statistics both on health and on income distribution are internationally available, it was only a matter of time before someone put the two together. All the same, they are the first to have done so.
Their book charts the level of health and social problems — as many as they could find reliable figures for — against the level of income inequality in 20 of the world’s richest nations, and in each of the 50 United States. They allocate a brief chapter to each problem, supplying graphs that display the evidence starkly and unarguably. What they find is that, in states and countries where there is a big gap between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children’s educational performance and literacy scores are worse. The Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently come at the positive end of this spectrum. They have the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes, and the best record of psycho-social health. The countries with the widest gulf between rich and poor, and the highest incidence of most health and social problems, are Britain, America and Portugal.
Richard Wilkinson, a professor of medical epidemiology at Nottingham University, and Kate Pickett, a lecturer in epidemiology at York University, emphasise that it is not only the poor who suffer from the effects of inequality, but the majority of the population. For example, rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole population in the most unequal than in the least unequal societies in their survey. One explanation, they suggest, is that inequality increases stress right across society, not just among the least advantaged. Much research has been done on the stress hormone cortisol, which can be measured in saliva or blood, and it emerges that chronic stress affects the neural system and in turn the immune system. When stressed, we are more prone to depression and anxiety, and more likely to develop a host of bodily ills including heart disease, obesity, drug addiction, liability to infection and rapid ageing.
Societies where incomes are relatively equal have low levels of stress and high levels of trust, so that people feel secure and see others as co-operative. In unequal societies, by contrast, the rich suffer from fear of the poor, while those lower down the social order experience status anxiety, looking upon those who are more successful with bitterness and upon themselves with shame. In the 1980s and 1990s, when inequality was rapidly rising in Britain and America, the rich bought homesecurity systems, and started to drive 4x4s with names such as Defender and Crossfire, reflecting a need to intimidate attackers. Meanwhile the poor grew obese on comfort foods and took more legal and illegal drugs. In 2005, doctors in England alone wrote 29m prescriptions for antidepressants, costing the NHS £400m.


Status anxiety and how we respond to it are basic, it seems, to our animal natures. In an experiment with macaque monkeys, the animals were housed in groups, and the social hierarchies that developed among them were observed. Then the monkeys were taught to administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever. The dominant monkeys in each group were relatively abstemious, but the subordinate monkeys took a lot of cocaine to medicate themselves against the pain of low social status. In a similar experiment, high-status monkeys from different groups were housed together, so that some of them became low status. The downwardly mobile monkeys accumulated abdominal fat and developed a rapid build-up of atherosclerosis in their arteries, just like humans.
The different social problems that stem from income inequality often, Wilkinson and Pickett show, form circuits or spirals. Babies born to teenage mothers are at greater risk, as they grow up, of educational failure, juvenile crime, and becoming teenage parents themselves. In societies with greater income inequality, more people are sent to prison, and less is spent on education and welfare. In Britain the prison population has doubled since 1990; in America it has quadrupled since the late 1970s. American states with a wide gap between rich and poor are likelier to retain the death penalty, and to hand out long sentences for minor crimes. In California in 2004, there were 360 people serving life sentences for shoplifting. California has built only one new college since 1984, but 21 new prisons. Whereas societies with high income differentials are exceptionally punitive, in Japan imprisonment rates are low and offenders who confess their crimes and express a desire to reform are generally trusted to do so by the judiciary and the public.
The authors’ method is objective and scientific, so that the human distress behind their statistics mostly remains hidden. But when they quote from interviews conducted by social researchers, passion and resentment flood into their book. A working-class man in Rotherham tells of the shame he felt having to sit next to a middle-class woman (“this stuck-up cow, you know, slim, attractive”); how he felt overweight and started sweating; how he imagined her thinking, “listen, low-life, don’t even come near me. We pay to get away from scum like you”. In half a page it tells you more about the pain of inequality than any play or novel could.
It might be said that The Spirit Level merely formulates what everyone has always felt. Western European utopias have almost all been egalitarian. Polls in Britain over the past 20 years show that the proportion of the population who think income differences too big is on average 80%. But what is new about their book, the authors insist, is that it turns personal intuitions into publicly demonstrable facts. With the evidence they have supplied, politicians now have a chance to “do genuine good”. By reducing income inequality, they can improve the health and wellbeing of the whole population. How this should be effected, Wilkinson and Pickett do not think it is their job to say, but increasing top tax rates or legislating to limit maximum pay are possibilities they suggest. They warn, though, that short-term remedies like this could be reversed by a change of government, and that we need to find ways of rooting greater equality more deeply in our society. This is their book’s mission, and they have set up a not-for-profit trust (equalitytrust.org) to make the evidence they set out better known. One illusion that, cheeringly, they hope to dispel is that the super-rich are some kind of asset we should all cherish, rather than, from the viewpoint of social health, the equivalent of the seven plagues of Egypt.
The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Allen Lane £20 pp416

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