To start out, I want to share with you this story that CNN carried over the weekend, and this is just a clip from it. This is the set up to it on CNN.

ROBERTS: If your child is obese, morbidly obese in medical terms, are you responsible? Even more, are you criminally responsible?

Well, in the case of Jerri Gray, the state of South Carolina says yes. And take a look why.

Gray gave us this school photo of her 14-year-old son Alexander. He weighs 555 pounds.
As you can imagine, he’s rather large.

He is now in foster care and she has been charged with criminal neglect. She told "The Early Show" on CBS how he got this way.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JERRI GRAY, MOTHER OF 555-POUND BOY: A lot of times I had to work full-time second shift or full-time third shift. And I wasn't home a lot. There were times that I would have to purchase, you know, maybe some fast food when I came in if I was working third shift because I would have to lay down for second shift.

(END VIDEO CLIP) It's a tough question to untangle to be sure. Joining us now...
Excuse me, I'm sorry, I meant to break earlier than that. So, basically what she’s saying is that this is the crisis that she is facing. And you know, here, of course, President George W Bush talking back when he was President, when he was running for re-election in 2004, and he was talking with a woman who is the single mother of a couple of kids, working three jobs, and he had to say...

Bush: "Yes, but nevertheless, there's a certain comfort to know that the promises made will be kept by the government. ... You don't have to worry."

Ms. Mornin: "That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute."

Bush: "You work three jobs?"

Ms. Mornin: "Three jobs, yes."

Bush: "Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. Get any sleep?
Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. Yeah, that's just fantastic. So who is the real criminal here? Is it the mother of this obese teen, or is it possible that all our thinking on poverty, and the consequences of poverty, and in fact an entire spectrum of social ills has been wrong, and the real criminal is a guy called Andrew J Hall, the head of CitiGroup’s Energy Trading Phibro, who’s taking home one hundred million dollars. That’s his paycheck.

Our question for the hour: Why is Andrew J Hall, head of CitiGroup Inc’s trading firm, the real criminal in the case of the obese teen? And it seems like, ok, come on, what’s the connection between a guy making a hundred million bucks, and a mother working three jobs, so that she can raise her kids? Well, let me lay it out for you in a fairly straightforward fashion. This is new to most Americans. What I’m going to share with you right now, is news, and perhaps even shocking news, to most Americans.

It was first published in a book by Richard Wilkinson back about three years ago, about how unequal societies become unhealthy, and he has a new book out. It’s in the United Kingdom. It’s available in the UK, you can’t get it here in the United States yet. It’s called "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better". It will be published in the United States in December. But, the information is available on the web at equalitytrust.org.uk And we’ll get a link to that on our blog today.

And what they found, he and his writing partner on this book Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have between the two of them, done fifty years of research on this. They compiled thousands of statistics, measuring the quality of life in a whole bunch of different indices over every country in the world. These statistics compiled by the United Nations, and in every state in the United States. Statistics compiled by the US Census Bureau. This is not liberal think-tank stuff. Or conservative think-tank stuff, for that matter. This is just pure raw census data.

And what they found is that what we thought all along, back for example when Lyndon Johnson declared the war on poverty, what we thought that poverty was the problem, is not the problem. Poverty is the symptom of the problem. The problem is inequality. Just wrap your brain around that for a minute.

The problem is not that people are so poor they can’t afford, fill in the blank, for example, this mother, she has to work three jobs, and her kid is 555 pounds. She’s not around to supervise his eating, and she’s basically feeding him fast food because it’s cheap, it’s convenient, she doesn’t have time to cook, she may live in a neighborhood where there’s not a grocery store, things like that.

That is a symptom of the problem. And in fact, what they were able to demonstrate was that while rich people do live longer than poor people, while they have longer life style, lower infant mortality, typically better health, than poor people, and a slightly higher happiness index, that the real big variable is not income. In fact, when you look at countries, let’s just compare income per person, national average income, and life expectancy.

The US has the highest income in the world, the US and Norway are up there, a little over forty thousand dollars per person per year, average. And, you know, we have a good life expectancy, it's in the neighborhood of seventy-seven / seventy-eight years.

But, higher than us in life expectancy, is Japan, which has an average income of only thirty thousand dollars a year. Higher than us in life expectancy is Malta, which has an average income of twenty thousand dollars per year. They’re half as rich as we are. Higher than us in life expectancy is Costa Rica, which has an average per capita income of ninety-five hundred dollars per year. They’re a quarter as rich as we are. So it’s got nothing to do with richness, it’s got nothing to do with riches. And the same with health, within rich societies.

So, we look at the spread, and to define the spread what they do is they compare the richest twenty percent, and the poorest twenty percent of the society, and they said how big is the difference. Well, the difference is almost ten to one in the United States, and Britain. The difference in Japan is about three to one. In Finland, it’s three to one. In Norway, three to one. Sweden, three to one. In Denmark it’s around four to one. Belgium, four to one. Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, it’s getting up to around five to one. But we’re about ten to one. We’re the most unequal society on earth.

Now, what is the consequence of that?

What they find is that life expectancy, math and literacy, infant mortality, homicide, number of people in prison, teenage births, level of trust in others, happiness, obesity, mental illness, including alcohol and drug addiction, and social mobility. All of these things, all of these things, are worse in highly unequal societies like the United States and the United Kingdom. We are the most unequal. Portugal, the United Kingdom and New Zealand are up there with us, and all these countries have all these problems.

And the most equal societies, where you don’t have extreme riches and you don’t have extreme poverty, we have very high taxes on the rich, and you have a social safety net. Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. They are the most equal countries, and they are the best. They’re doing the best in life expectancy, math and literacy, infant mortality, homicide rates, imprisonment rates, teenage birth, trust, obesity, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, and social mobility.

The one single variable is equality in a society. So, how do we get there?

...

So, all of these things, every single one of these things is a very interesting graph, over at the website equalitytrust.org.uk that compares health and social problems. In other words, it maps all of these things. Life expectancy, math and literacy, the school dropout rates, infant mortality, homicide rate, gun deaths, imprisonment (number of people in prison), teenage birth rates (and also sexually transmitted diseases), trust in a society (people answering the question “yes, I can trust strangers”), obesity, mental illness, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, use of psychiatric drugs (psychiatric pharmaceuticals), and social mobility ( the ability to move higher than the income class into which you were born).

Then, all of these things have absolutely nothing to do with how rich the country is. The US is worst of all the countries in the world on all of these things, and yet we are one of the richest nations in the world. Portugal is second worst on all of these things, and yet they are one of the poorer countries in Europe, at an average income of around eighteen thousand dollars a year. We've got forty four thousand dollars a year.

Why is the US, the richest, and Portugal, one of the poorest, both on the worst end of the scale in this list of things that I have just laid out? Because the US and Portugal are two of the most unequal societies. In other words, we’re the two societies, along with the United Kingdom, which is also in the middle, they have an average income of around twenty eight thousand, and they’re among the three worst in terms of all of those things that I just listed.

The difference between the poorest twenty percent and the richest twenty percent, in these three countries, is the greatest of anywhere else on Earth. And therefore we have the worst outcomes in these areas. It’s got nothing to do with being rich, we’re rich, Portugal’s poor, we’re both having a terrible time.

Japan, for example, has an average income of twenty eight thousand, that’s kind of moderately rich. They’re the best of all the major developed countries, in terms of all of these things that I listed: life expectancy, math and literacy, college graduation, high school graduation, infant mortality, homicide rates, imprisonment, teenage births, trust, obesity, mental illness, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, social mobility. Japan is the best. They’re also the most equal society among all the fully developed worlds. The most.

Now, how did they get there? This was an issue that Karl Marx struggled with. Because I think that we’ve always known as humans, intuitively, that we are wired to be co-operators and not competitors. We are wired to be collaborators. We are wired to work together. In fact it turns out, chimps are incredibly hierarchical and very violent towards each other, male chimps in particular. Bonobos ... another kind of monkey that’s closely related to us, or ape, that is closely related to us, are not at all violent. Chimps resolve conflicts by violence and dominance. Bonobos resolve conflicts literally by sex, by making love, or by touching, or by working things out socially.

That part of, and this was a real revelation to me, this very recent research, that part of our DNA which has to do with how we interact with other people socially, that part of our DNA that drives our social interactions, is identical to the bonobo DNA, and different from the chimp DNA. We’re wired like bonobos, which is why, for in that realm, in that realm of conflict, which is why, when societies pass through the thresholds of crisis, ( which is the essence of my new book "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture", when societies pass through these thresholds, where their environment crashes, their population gets so high that they start experiencing famine and starvation, their economic and political systems collapse, those being the three thresholds that we’re really facing right now, in a big way, in a terrible way. When societies pass through these thresholds, and come out the other side still alive, they become egalitarian societies. You see that right across the board, in Aboriginal and indigenous societies, all over Earth. And that’s what’s happened with these societies that came through World War Two and said, 'how do we re-do society? Let’s make our society more equal.' Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Canada, France. They are the most equal of the fully developed countries. And they have the longest life expectancy, the best high school graduation, college graduation, the lowest infant mortality, the lowest homicide rate, the lowest imprisonment rate, the lowest teenage birth rates, the best trust, the lowest obesity rates, the best mental health, and the highest social mobility.

Marx said we to do it by forcibly having the government take money from the rich and give it to the poor. I submit to you that there’s a middle ground, which is building a strong social safety net at the bottom, and high taxation at the top. This is called social democracy, and it’s how it’s practiced in Europe, and we can do it too.

...

So the question. How would you, if you could wave a wand, if you could do something about this, how would you solve the problem?

You know, back when Der Spiegel, the German Newsweek, as it were, a week or so ago, and I shared it with you on this programme, did a story about how Germans, former East Germans, people who lived under Communist East Germany, a significant majority of them now, more than fifty percent, are saying that life was actually better under the Communist rule, in all regards expect politically. Now, people were poor, people couldn’t speak out politically, or they'd go to jail, neighbors were spying on neighbors, but, people were equal. The society was largely equal. There were not rich and poor in the former East Germany. Everybody was poor.

So, how do you establish equality? Karl Marx’s solution was basically the state owns everything, and all private property is outlawed. You don’t own your house, the state owns it, and gives it to you for free. You don’t own your car, well, you may be able to own your car, you can own some private things, your clothes and things. Your healthcare is provided, your job is provided by the state. The companies are all owned by the state. That didn’t seem to work out so well.

So, how about a middle… and what we have in the United States, here we have this guy, Andrew J Hall, the head of CitiCorp’s trading unit, Phibro LLC. He wants to take home a paycheck this year of a hundred million dollars. A hundred million bucks, this guy thinks he deserves. And I would submit to you, the reason this fourteen-year-old kids weigh 555 pounds is because of people like Andrew J Hall.

Now, not him specifically like he’s some, you know, God-awful terrible person, but because the rules of the game in this society since the 1980’s, and that’s when this society began to becoming unequal, by the way. When you go back and you look at all of these problems: life expectancy, to school graduation, infant mortality, to homicide, to imprisonment, teenage births, to trust, to obesity, to mental illness, to social mobility. Look at all of these problems, they all began to get worse, dramatically worse, misbehavior in schools, criminality, children ending up in juvenile detention facilities, jail, it all began to get worse in the 1980’s in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Why? Because of Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher doing away with the social safety net and cutting taxes on the very rich. And the consequence of that was that our society became more and more unequal. And in this book on equality, “The Spirit Level”, what Wilkinson is pointing out is that as societies become more and more unequal, these problems emerge. And there is a biological basis to this. We are wired to notice inequality around us, and be made crazy by it. And we are wired to notice equality and be made happy by it.

So, what’s the best way to make a society more equal? I’ll tell you. In our culture, I think that the best way is to roll back the Reagan tax cuts, go back to a seventy-four percent tax on millionaires, and to build a strong social safety net. Long-term unemployment insurance, long-term health care, things like that. How do we that though in a society where everybody's bought into meme that (a) the victims, the poor, are actually the cause of the problem, or that poverty is the cause of the problem, when it’s not poverty. The poor in the United States are actually richer than the middle-class in Costa Rica. Yet the middle-class in Costa Rica doesn’t have the problems of the poor in the United States. Why? because it’s a less unequal society. Because they have high taxes on the wealthy, and they have a social safety net. They have a national health care programme, for example.

Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.