book review ANS

Here's an example of Brad Hicks reviewing the books he has read this year.  If you like reading this kind of review, go to his site and read the rest of them.
Find it here: http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/446718.html
--Kim

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Somebody responded to one of my entries on this blog, just the other day, by saying, "It's better to be on top of a short hill than halfway up a tall mountain." But it turns out that there has been a ton of recent research arguing that no, in fact, it's not: in a society with wide income disparities, it isn't just the poor who suffer, but the rich live worse lives than if they would if they were less rich and living in a more egalitarian society. And, yes, they do cite a ton of studies that have been done to rule out co-causal factors and to rule out coincidence; it's not just correlation, it is, in fact, demonstrably causality. This book probably ties with Searching for Whitopia for best non-fiction book I read all year, and if I had to pick, I'd say probably edges out Whitopia slightly just for the repeated hammer blows of impossible to argue with, impossible to honestly refute research that everything that the US and Britain have done since Reagan and Thatcher has been wrong -- not just unpleasant, not just different from what liberals would prefer, but absolutely provably wrong.