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of the national average income among the rich countries (including the European countries, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Canada and the USA). This means that the higher the inequality in a country is, the worse health and social problems it has - and the more equal a society is, the better the health and social situation. But inequality between countries doesn´t matter very much.

What seems to matter in the rich countries is not your actual income level and living standard, but how you compare with other people in the same society. When people lack money for essentials such as food, it is usually a reflection of the strength of their desire to live up to the prevailing standards. So you might find it more important to have a proper car or the “right� mobile phone than to eat well.

Despite our rising material living standards, people in many rich countries have experienced substantial rises in anxiety and depression. But since these rises seem to have started well before the increases in inequality during the last quarter of the twentieth century, they cannot have been triggered by inequality. (Maybe the causal relation is in the other direction and rising anxiety and depression has triggered higher levels of inequality as a kind of compensation where people try to lessen their anxiety by more consumption.)

Anyway, Wilkinson and Pickett identified some other factors in modern society that could trigger anxiety and depression: Positive thinking urges us to raise our self-esteem. For some of us, this results in a boosted ego accompanied by a narcissistic defence of an insecure selfimage. A lot of comparisons, judgemental evaluations and conditional love trigger our fear of low status and loss of friends. We must not disappoint others. Shame 16