[quokwok]

I'm surprised you rate "The Spirit Level". I think it's a pack of lies, partly because of Chris Snowden's book but mainly Tino Sanandaji's many posts about it on his blog. The most devastating criticisms are

1. They use data from a UN report from a particular year. Except for one reference, they use a report from a different year. It turns out that this report contains data which supports their argument, but all the other years disprove it.

2. They use a mysterious sample of countries. When a larger sample is used, the effect goes away or reverses.

More generally, the whole argument is nutty. If you spot an apparent correlation, you have to come up with some causal mechanism. Inequality is supposed to somehow make people unhealthy, through envy or something... nuts.