The Spirit Level
07 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics Tags: data mining, income inequality, Spirit Level
Below are the inequality and life expectancy graphs with and without the strategic deletion of important countries:
Inequality and life expectancy graph, The Spirit Level
Inequality and life expectancy graph, UN (2006)
One of the interesting aspects of The Spirit Level is the claims that the authors make about their originality:
- In the first edition, their preface claimed that they had found something really new about the link between inequality and life expectancy and other quality-of-life variables.
- In the next edition of their book, their preface claimed that they were summarising the consensus of the scientific literature.
John Kay reviewed The Spirit Level in the Financial Times where he wrote:
The evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests.
If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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