Some men steal out of need or avarice; others kill themselves out of despair, or murder for revenge or gain. These episodes in individual tales display such striking regularities in aggregate that some of the social scientists who first applied the rules of probability to human affairs questioned the very notion of free will. "Society prepares the crime," wrote Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician, in 1835, "and the guilty person is only the instrument."rnThe findings of those statisticians' successors-that poor children are more likely to fail at school, poor adults to commit crimes and die young, and so on-are nowadays uncontroversial. And policymakers mostly eschew metaphysics. Instead, they try to break such links by spending to "end child poverty" and by targeting health and education initiatives on the neediest. Yet such attempts are doomed to disappoint, say British social scientists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, because they conceive of each social ill in isolation, rather than treating their shared root cause. Moreover, they misidentify that cause: it is not poverty as such, but inequality.
展开▼
