Welcome | The Equality Trust. Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies. THE SPIRIT LEVEL (short film) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Yes, we are all in this together. Our book The Spirit Level was first published in March 2009, about six months after the start of the worst financial crisis since the Second World War. Much of the blame for the crisis was rightly attributed to extraordinary risks taken by people in the financial sector whose excesses were matched only by their grotesquely high salaries.
Although our research pre-dates the crisis by many years, the book's generally positive reception clearly owes something to its timing. Many people who, before the crash, had assumed that huge salaries and bonuses reflected the unique contributions and brilliance of their recipients changed their minds as they learned about the lack of relationship between performance and reward. But the reception of the book cannot be attributed wholly to the moment at which it appeared. A recent report confirms empirically the impression we have formed - that the general public is averse to the high levels of inequality in very unequal countries.
The ties that bind. Eric Holt Gimenez: We Already Grow Enough Food For 10 Billion People -- and Still Can't End Hunger. A new a study from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. Researchers found that on average, conventional systems out-yielded organic farms by 25 percent — mostly for grains, and depending on conditions. Embracing the current conventional wisdom, the authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts.” Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger. Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth.
The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet.