Isn’t it just the English speaking cultures which do badly – or the Nordic ones which do well?
No. If you look at the graph in which all the separate outcomes are combined into one Index of Health and Social Problems (Figure 2.2 in The Spirit Level), you will see that even if all the English speaking countries were excluded, there is still a powerful relationship between inequality and the index among the remaining countries. The same is true of the UNICEF Index of Child Wellbeing. A statistically significant relationship also remains between inequality and the Index of Health and Social Problems if you instead remove all the Nordic countries. Indeed, the relationship is still statistically significant if countries at each end of the distribution – Sweden, Norway, Sweden, Finland, USA and UK – are removed. The association between inequality and social dysfunction cannot be explained simply by cultural differences.
