The older I get the more I despair at the mess our society has got itself into. And I despair at the lack of connection between ordinary people and our political class.
We appear to have created a new elite; a celebrity elite who now occupy almost every aspect of our lives and the politicians have now started to think that they are part of this strange group. Reading Boris Johnson's speech this weekend where he celebrates greed and inequality and uses the IQ statistics to prove that most of us are stupid anyway made me look at the dat and reread The Spirit Level. Sad, how out of touch with us some of our politicians are and how ignorant of the facts they quote so glibly!!
The IQ data is simply based on the statistics of a normal bell curve where the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. This means that about 34% of us have IQs between 100 and 115 and about 34% of us have IQs between 85 and 100. About 13.5% have IQs between 115 and 130 and about 13.5% have IQs between 70 and 85. This isn't rocket science and doesn't tell us anything about the population... only how good we are at IQ tests!
The Spirit Level shows is that unequal societies are unhappier and that applies to people at both ends of the unequal society. Underachievement is worse, anti-social activity is worse and the prison population is greater. So greed, envy and inequality are not the recipe for success!
I am starting to believe, like Russell Brand, that we need to rethink and reconnect the political system so that these people who speak for us and govern us, represent us and reflect our views.
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