You're listening to an upstream sneak peak with Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, co-authors of the spirit level. But But in a way the main thing is building a sort of social movement that's able to start to shift policy related to income differences. Basically you asked me

about politics earlier and in the end of the spirit level book. We do talk about ways of reducing income differences.

Basically two ways you can redistribute people's incomes through taxes and benefits.

That's rather the pattern of the Scandinavian countries.

But you can also start off with smaller differences in earnings.

And of course, one of the major reasons

why inequality has increased so much in many developed countries

is that the rich have run away from the rest of us,

you know, the bonus culture and those huge salaries at the top,

and that disease has spread downwards a little bit.

So, more inequality, and I think that it does take a large social movement to make a major difference and if you look at income differences in most of the developed world in the 20th century

The very high inequalities in the 1920s,

but in the 1930s they start coming down

in the United States under Roosevelt. but inequality has gone reducing almost continuously

until the 1970s and it's from about 1980 on that you get the modern rise of inequality with neoliberalism, Reagan and Thatcher.

But if you look at a marker of the sort of strengths of the social democratic movement, the strength of the

labor movement or what I call the countervailing voice in society, trade union membership

as a proportion of the labor force.

You find it's exactly the opposite of that U-shaped distribution of inequality during the 20th century.

Inequality comes down when the labour movement is becoming stronger and inequality rises again when the labour movement gets weaker.

And that's a very strong relationship and you see it in lots of different countries.

And it tells us something about the scale of movement we need to really shift to a different kind of society that we have to do not just for the sake of inequality,

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