Free The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

and blankets left out for people to use if they feel chilly while having a coffee. Nobody worries about customers or passers-by stealing the blankets. Many people feel nostalgic for time past, when they could leave their doors unlocked, and trusted that a lost wallet would be handed in. Of all large US cities, New Orleans is one of the most unequal. This was the background to the tensions and mistrust in the scenes of chaos after Hurricane Katrina that we described above.
    CHICKEN OR EGG?

    In the USA, trust has fallen from a high of 60 per cent in 1960, to a low of less than 40 per cent by 2004. 24 But does inequality create low levels of trust, or does mistrust create inequality? Which comes first? Political scientist Robert Putnam of Harvard University, in his book Bowling Alone , shows how inequality is related to ‘social capital’, by which he means the sum total of people’s involvement in community life. 25 He says:
    Community and equality are mutually reinforcing . . . Social capital and economic equality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950s and 1960s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century . . . those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and social capital coincided . . . Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital . . . The timing of the two trends is striking: Sometime around 1965–70 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically. (p. 359)
    In another article, Putnam says:
    the causal arrows are likely to run in both directions, with citizens in high social capital states likely to do more to reduce inequalities, and inequalities themselves likely to be socially divisive. 26
    Taking a more definite stance in his book, The Moral Foundations of Trust , Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, believes that it is inequality that affects trust, not the other way round. 27 If we live in societies with more social capital, then we know more people as friends and neighbours and that might increase our trust of people we know, people we feel are like us. But Uslaner points out that the kind of trust that is being measured in surveys such as the European and World Values Survey is trust of strangers, of people we don’t know, people who are often not like us. Using a wealth of data from different sources, he shows that people who trust others are optimists, with a strong sense of control over their lives. The kind of parenting that people receive also affects their trust of other people.
    In a study with his colleague Bo Rothstein, Uslaner shows, using a statistical test for causality, that inequality affects trust, but that there is ‘no direct effect of trust on inequality; rather, the causal direction starts with inequality’. 28 , p. 45 Uslaner says that ‘trust cannot thrive in an unequal world’ and that income inequality is the ‘prime mover’ of trust, with a stronger impact on trust than rates of unemployment, inflation or economic growth. 27 It is not average levels of economic wellbeing that create trust, but economic equality. Uslaner’s graph showing that trust has declined in the USA during a

    Figure 4.3 As inequality increased, so trust declined. 27 , p. 187
    period in which inequality rapidly increased, is shown in Figure 4.3. The numbers on the graph show for each year (1960–98) the relation between the level of trust and inequality in that year.
    Changes in inequality and trust go together over the years. With greater inequality, people are less caring of one another, there is less mutuality in relationships, people have to fend for themselves and get what they can – so, inevitably, there is less trust. Mistrust and inequality reinforce each