Poverty & Progress
Poverty & Progress was Richard’s first book, published in 1973. Ahead of its time, the book set forward an argument that environmental constraints of population growth and scarce resources are the real driving force behind economic development. Poverty & Progress was re-issued in July 2022.
“By a happy coincidence I had been reading Malthus’s First Essay on Population only a week before (this) remarkable little book came into my hands….the similarity struck me with immediate pleasure…Wilkinson has the almost intuitive appreciation of complexity that the classical economists had but that, alas, has been replaced in this day when corn and wheat have been replaced by x and y“. Prof. Kenneth Boulding
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The Inner Level
In The Spirit Level we showed that less equal societies fare worse than more equal ones across everything from education to life expectancy. The Inner Level explains how inequality affects us individually, how it alters how we think, feel and behave. It sets out the overwhelming evidence that material inequities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority.
“A wonderful, important book.” Jeffrey Sachs
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A Convenient Truth
In A Convenient Truth: A Society Better for Us and the Planet, co-published by The Fabian Society and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Berlin, we set out a path towards a society that’s better for us and the planet. Inequality drives status insecurity, which fuels the consumerism that is destroying our planet. But the things we buy aren’t making us any happier: the link between economic development and real improvements in quality of life is broken in rich societies. For real improvements in wellbeing, we need a more equal society, which is best achieved by putting democracy at the heart of the economy. We describe the extension of democracy into economic institutions as the next major step in the long project of human emancipation.
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The Spirit Level
Our best-selling and award-winning book on the effects of inequality on health and social outcomes. In it, we show how: income inequality is linked to a wide range of health and social problems; that the effects are significant; and that the whole population are affected, not just the poor
“This is a book with a big idea, big enough to change political thinking”. John Carey, Sunday Times
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Health & Inequality
A 4-volume collection of papers, Health and Inequality – Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare, for libraries and serious scholars.
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The Impact of Inequality
Using detailed evidence from rich market democracies, the book addresses people’s experience of inequality and presents a radical theory of the psychosocial impact of class stratification. The book demonstrates how poor health, high rates of violence and low levels of social capital all reflect the stresses of inequality and explains the pervasive sense that, despite material success, our societies are sometimes social failures. What emerges is a new conception of what it means to say that we are social beings and of how the social structure penetrates our personal lives and relationships.
“A powerful and provocative piece of scholarship”. Prof. Lisa Berkman
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Social Determinants of Health
An authoritative overview of the social and economic factors which are known to be the most powerful determinants of population health in modern societies. Written by acknowledged experts in each field, it provides accessible summaries of the scientific justification for isolating different aspects of social and economic life as the primary determinants of a population’s health.
BMA Medical Book Award, First Prize 2006, Public Health Category
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The Solid Facts
One of the World Health Organisation’s most successful ever publications. Translated into over 20 languages.
Click below to download the free pdf in English and 8 other languages
Mind the Gap
Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health and Human Evolution was published in the Darwinism Today Series by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in the UK and Yale University Press in the USA; also published in Spanish, French and Swedish
Currently out of print. Click below to search for used copies
Income Inequality and Health: the Society and Population Health Reader
An edited collection of key papers and the first volume in two-volume reader on the connections between social sctructure and public health.
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Social Organization and Health
The most powerful determinants of health today are to be found in social, economic and cultural circumstances, including: ecnomic growth, income distribution, consumption, work oganisation, unemployment and job insecurity, social and family structure, education and deprivation, and they are all aspects of ‘social organisation’.
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Unhealthy Societies
‘Unhealthy Societies is much more than another book on inequalities in health – it provides an elegantly argued treatise on the problems facing contemporary societies … It is a methodologically sophisticated, yet inherently readable book … This scholarly and insightful book is recommended reading for all students of sociology and economics, as well as health policy-makers and politicians.’ – Times Higher Educational Supplement’.
“A remarkable book (which) has gained almost canonical status in this field” Crawford Kalian
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Unfair Shares
The effects of widening income differences on the welfare of the young; a report for Barnardo’s
Out of print
Income & Health
Allison Quick and Richard Wilkinson‘s book Income and Health was the fourth of a series of five reports commissioned jointly by Ruskin College Oxford and the Socialist Health Association in 1984. It was published in 1991.
Click below, then click on each chapter heading on the right of the page for an open access view of each chapter
Class & Health
Originally published in 1986, this book discusses issues such as social class differences in health; the effect of unemployment on health; the relationship between income and health; how much of the class differences in death rates can be explained in terms of medically recognized factors. As relevant now as when it was first published the book reviews twenty of the most important longitudinal studies in the area of health and class that had been carried out in the UK at the time.
” a closely argued, thoroughly documented, utterly devastating rebuttal of the attacks made by several scholars on the main conclusions of the Black Report of 1980″ Dr Julian Tudor Hart
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