The Spirit Level

Why Equality is Better for Everyone

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Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality.

This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show:

- How almost everything - from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy - is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is
- That societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - including the well-off
- How we can find positive solutions and move towards a happier, fairer future

Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world.

About Richard Wilkinson

Richard Wilkinson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School and visiting professor at University College London and at the University of York. Trained in history, the philosophy of science and epidemiology, he has played a formative role in international research and is the author of several books on health and inequality. He is also the co-author, with Kate Pickett, of the international bestseller The Spirit Level, which was named one of Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, won the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Award and the 2011 Political Science Association’s Publication of the Year Award, was adapted into the 2015 documentary film The Divide, and has been translated into 24 languages. Its follow up, The Inner Level, was published in 2018.

Wilkinson is the founder of The Equality Trust and recipient of Solidar’s Silver Rose Award, the Irish Cancer Society’s Charles Cully Memorial Medal, and the Australian Society for Medical Research Medal. He was awarded a honorary doctorate by the University of Northumberland in 2025 and is a Fellow by Distinction of the UK Faculty of Public Health.

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About Kate Pickett

Kate Pickett is Professor for the Public Understanding of Social Science and Director of the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at
University of York.

Her landmark book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, co-written with Richard Wilkinson, was an international bestseller, chosen by the Guardian as one of the 100 most influential books of the century and by the New Statesman as a top ten book of the decade. Their follow-up, The Inner Level, shows how societal inequality has similarly profound effects on individual health and wellbeing.

Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Nature and New York Times, and she has delivered more than 500 keynote speeches, including at the United Nations, the European Parliament and within UK government departments.

Kate is the co-founder of the Equality Trust, academic director of Health Equity North, and a fellow of the RSA, the UK Faculty of Public Health and the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2023, she received an OBE for services to societal equality.

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