Singapore income gap, prison population high: Book

Singapore has the biggest income gap among 23 rich nations surveyed in the book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. This chart from the book shows the income gap between the richest 20 per cent and poorest 20 per cent of the population.

The authors write:

Within countries such as Japan and some of the Scandinavian countries at the top of the chart, the richest 20 per cent are less than four times as rich as the poorest 20 per cent. At the bottom of the chart are countries in which these differences are at least twice as big, including two in which the richest 20 per cent get about nine times as much as the poorest. Among the most unequal are Singapore, USA, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Singapore also has the second highest number of prison inmates per 100,000 people, according to the authors.

Wilkinson and Pickett are British epidemiologists. This book came about out of their interest in public health, they explain in the preface:

The focal problem was initially to understand why health gets worse at every step down the social ladder, so that the poor are less healthy than those in the middle, who in turn are less healthy than those further up.

There is one chapter with the title, Obesity: wider income gaps, wider waists. Levels of obesity tend to be lower in countries where income differences are smaller, say the authors. Their statistical chart shows obesity is lowest in Japan and highest in the USA. Singapore is not included in the chart because they could not get relevant data.

Greater inequality also leads to more crime and punishment, according to the authors.

Singapore has the second highest number of prison inmates per 100,000 people, as this chart shows. The USA has the highest among the 23 nations surveyed.

The authors say:

We used statistics on the proportion of the population imprisoned in different countries from the United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operation of Criminal Justice Systems…
In the USA there are 576 people in prison per 1000,000, which is more than four and a half times higher than the UK, at 124 per 100,000, and more than fourteen times higher than Japan, which has the lowest rate of 40 per 100,000.

Singapore's homicide rate is also higher than that of Japan, Norway, Austria, Spain, Ireland, Switzerland and New Zealand, according to this chart from the book based on the same UN surveys.

The authors note the murder rate in the USA is 64 per million, more than four times higher than in the UK (15 per million) and more than 12 higher than in Japan –5.2 per million.

The authors say the 23 countries were selected from a list of 50 richest countries in a World Bank report. They add:

The report we used was published in 2004 and is based on data from 2002.
Then we excluded countries with populations below 3 million, because we didn't want to include tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Monaco. And we excluded countries without good information on income inequality, such as Iceland.

The book, published in 2009, has been praised by the Economist, Financial Times, Independent, Observer, Sunday Times and the New Statesman. Here is a Boston Globe interview with the authors.

Robert B. Reich, who was US Labour Secretary under President Bill Clinton, says in the foreword:

The authors find, not surprisingly, that where there are great disparities in wealth, there are heightened levels of social distrust. They argue convincingly that wide inequality is bad for a society, and that more equal societies tend to do better on many measures of social health and wealth.