Is Equality Set to Return as a Political Good? RICHARD WILKINSON/ KATE PICKETT: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better London 2009 Allen Lane, 352 pp. (Translated from the English by Edgar Peinelt and Klaus Binder as»Gleichheit ist Glück – Warum gerechte Gesellschaften für alle besser sind,« Berlin 2009) W inston Churchill(1874–1965) once summed up his experience with pro­cessed data as follows:»The only statistics you can trust are those you falsi­fied yourself.« This can be interpreted in a number of ways: anyone listening to the party secretaries discussing the results on television after national and impor­tant regional elections in Germany would generally get the impression that every party had won. Numbers are patient, it is said. Bad statistics can often be hidden or disguised and results can be»sexed up,« as illustrated recently by Eurozone member states, with dire consequences. Other sets of figures can be startling, however: in June 2010 the German Institute for Economic Research published a new study on income distribution in Germany. Income differentials between poorer and richer households are increasing and the middle class is shrinking. Society is drifting apart into a small and prosperous stratum and a broad and poor one. But the trend of income polarization is by no means merely a German phenomenon. In their book»The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better,« British social scientists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson examine the consequences for society as a whole of this development, also taking into consid­eration the international dimension. How is it that the societies of rich industrialized countries are more prosper­ous than ever before but suffer from such profound social problems? The usa , for example, has the highest per capita income but, at the same time, the high­est homicide rate of the western industrialized countries. The authors think they have the answer: income and prosperity are not distributed equally. Once a cer­tain level of social product has been reached, the more fairly income and prosper­ity are distributed, the healthier, happier, and more successful a society is. Bu the consequences of unequal distribution are not borne solely by the poorer strata of the population. The well-to-do also feel the effects of a socially unequal society to a greater extent than previously thought. To take one example: in the usa the top 20 percent of the population have seven and a half to eight times as much money at their disposal as the bottom 20 percent – in Norway, by contrast, it is only around four times as much, despite broadly similar living standards. By comparison, Norway comes off much better in every area than the usa . A child born in Norway is healthier, generally does better at school, has ipg 4/2010 Rezensionen/Book Reviews 239