Building a Good Society with Kate Pickett

“Vested interests. And lack of political will.”

That’s what Kate Pickett believes is holding us back from taking needed action to tackle inequality and build a good society.

In our recent xChange Paul Skinner interviews Kate Pickett, OBE, bestselling author of The Spirit Level and Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York, to explore the ideas in her latest book The Good Society: And How We Make It.

The Good Society builds on Kate’s previous work in The Spirit Level and Inner Level to set out how we can achieve a society that prioritises equality and wellbeing. One that’s economic policies drive higher standards in education, health and social care and criminal justice for all.

In this xChange

Kate shares how inequality is linked to many of the things we think of as a good society. It is linked to health and wellbeing, education, social cohesion, and how we approach the environment. And many political scientists are currently studying the impacts of inequality on democracy.

One of things that has most surprised people from Kate’s research has been that even people at the higher end of the income scale or education scale are negatively impacted by living in a country that has high inequality. Though, of course, those at the bottom of these scales are the most impacted.

Kate is optimistic about the potential for the new proposed International Panel on Inequality (IPI) as a new global expert body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

Kate proposes a new government body, like SAGE, with a panel of social scientists to advise on policies that can help tackle inequality. They would be able to weigh up the evidence and costs of proposed policies to help overcome the gap between what the evidence tells us and how to take action on it.

She also believes we should be having big public conversations now about how to survive the shifting labour market and all of the other societal changes that are happening rapidly due to AI.

She says we need to build consensus around what we want the future to look like and citizen assemblies are one way to do that. This can be done at a local, regional or national level.

Many of the ideas in the book would require a bigger state, at least in the short term, to achieve and Kate concedes that trust in politics would need to improve before that was likely to happen.

She also says that a bigger state could be more cost effective. Underinvestment has created expensive problems to solve, so we’re constantly trying to patch up the many problems we’ve created. 

A lot of the stats that she and Richard were interested in in The Spirit Level actually started to go down during the austerity years, such as life expectancy and infant mortality (an important marker of the quality of health provision). 

“I don’t think we need a nanny state or a bigger state for everything, but if we look around the world at the things we would like to have, better education, better health, better social care, those are bigger states.”

Taking action

As individuals, Kate says that anything we do as active citizens is helpful. It can be as simple as voting or it could be our activities through our work, our volunteering or our conversations with family and friends. She advised us to get outside our bubbles and spend more time with people who’ve had different life experiences to our own.

If you have not yet read it, pick up your copy of The Good Society here.

Listen now

You can watch the full xChange below or listen to it on our podcast here.