A good society with Kate Pickett
“Vested interests. And lack of political will.”
That’s what Kate Pickett believes is holding us back from taking needed action to tackle inequality and build a good society.
Paul Skinner recently interviewed Kate Pickett, OBE, bestselling author of The Spirit Level and Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York, to explore the ideas in her latest book The Good Society: And How We Make It.
The Good Society builds on Kate’s previous work in The Spirit Level and Inner Level to set out how we can achieve a society that prioritises equality and wellbeing. One that’s economic policies drive higher standards in education, health and social care and criminal justice for all.
Kate shared how inequality is linked to many of the things we think of as a good society. It is linked to health and wellbeing, education, social cohesion, and how we approach the environment. And many political scientists are currently studying the impacts of inequality on democracy.
One of things that has most surprised people from Kate’s research has been that even people at the higher end of the income scale or education scale are negatively impacted by living in a country that has high inequality. Though, of course, those at the bottom of these scales are the most impacted.
Kate was optimistic about the potential for the new proposed International Panel on Inequality (IPI) as a new global expert body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Kate proposed a new government body, like SAGE, with a panel of social scientists to advise on policies that can help tackle inequality. They would be able to weigh up the evidence and costs of proposed policies to help overcome the gap between what the evidence tells us and how to take action on it.
She said we need to build consensus around what we want the future to look like and citizen assemblies are one way to do that. This can be done at a local, regional or national level.
Many of the ideas in the book would require a bigger state, at least in the short term, to achieve and Kate concedes that trust in politics would need to improve before that was likely to happen. She also said that a bigger state could be more cost effective. Underinvestment has created expensive problems to solve, so we’re constantly trying to patch up the many problems we’ve created.
Watch the full xChange below or listen to the podcast version here.