Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You're listening to an upstream interview with Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, co-authors

of the Spirit Level and co-founders and board members of the equality trust.

Welcome, Kate and Richard, thank you for joining me.

Thank you. It's nice to be able to do this. Kate and

Richard, thank you for joining me.

Thank you. It's nice to be able to do this with you. And let's start with what is the spirit level?

Can you introduce us to what the book is about?

Well, first I should explain its title.

In Britain, a spirit level is what you might call a bubble level,

or the level that a builder or carpenter uses

to check that things are horizontal or vertical.

So it's to do with leveling and of course we have lots of graphs with lines at different angles.

So it's nothing to do with spirituality. And in the book we simply looked at the scale of income

differences in rich developed societies and related that to a whole range of health and

social problems. Basically showing that more unequal countries like Britain and the United States, have higher levels of homicide,

more people in prison, lower levels of child well-being, weaker community life, people trust each other less, there are more drug

problems, there is more mental illness, there's worse physical health, a whole range of outcomes

like those are worse in more unequal societies and then when you look

at the more equal ones like Japan or the Scandinavian countries you find they do much better on all those things.

A range of apparently unrelated problems all are bad in some countries and better in others.

So the thing that unites them is that they're all related to

relative deprivation in each society and they all get worse when you increase

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