Why (and how) inequality is bad for us: The Spirit Level lecture series

“The reigning economic system is a vicious cycle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

– Guy Debord (1967), The Society of the Spectacle 

Last Wednesday I attended the second in a series of three lectures by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the authors of The Spirit Level, hosted at the University of Auckland as part of the annual Sir Robert Douglas lecture series.

For those that haven’t read The Spirit Level, its central thesis is very simple. As income disparity increases, so do a wide range of health and social problems: violence, suicide, child abuse, obesity, depression – the list of negative outcomes associated with the degree of economic inequality is staggering, and as the lecture on Wednesday established, far more than just conjecture.

A Law School Lament; or The Difficulty of Changing Direction

“If you do not change direction you may end up where you were heading.”  – Lao Tzu

Where am I headed? It’s a question all students ask, often to no reply. But for those of us down at the University of Auckland’s Davis library there were strong indications. The study of law was unashamedly directed towards a future career: we were being prepped for lives as lawyers and all that entailed. It didn’t matter how many of us pretended otherwise, the wheels were in motion and it would take more than flippant remarks and not doing the readings to stop their relentless roll.

Perhaps that was why one graduate felt the need to send a sensationalist group email, detailing his resignation in a poem and calling out his corporate employers in the process. He swanned down to staff drinks for one final beer, his controversial departure a response to the weight of the system and all its expectations. Why were people so surprised? Maybe it’s because no one had given any thought to what the study of law actually entails. Like me, they’d just dived in and gone for it – until it was too late to quit.