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on most of their wellbeing and solidarity measures, so it contributes heavily to their findings suggesting that low levels of inequality produce high levels of wellbeing. But Japan is far from the egalitarian culture that their analysis pretends it is. If, as their theory predicts, acute status anxiety causes human misery and social dislocation, then Japan should be scoring appallingly badly on all their indicators, for it is one of the most statusconscious countries in their sample. When youngsters attend their crammer schools in the hope of gaining entry to a prestigious university, and when their parents compete for favoured positions in the most prestigious corporations, Japanese people suffer levels of stress that tend to be far in excess of anything experienced in Britain, Australia or the United States. I am not the only critic to mention this; as I explain in Beware False Prophets, Professor John Goldthorpe, Britain’s leading writer on social stratification and inequality, has expressed the same misgivings. This is not surprising, for sociologists have been emphasising the importance of this distinction between economic inequality and status differentiation for more than a century. Weber, for example, famously argued that status involves a claim to social honour and prestige that may be grounded in birth, education, specific kinds of occupations, or adoption of particular lifestyles. While it may coincide with riches, it often stands in sharp contrast to the pretensions of mere wealth; and while some societies are stratified principally by money, others are ordered much more by status distinctions.13 Japan is one such society, where family honour and personal shame are often far more important than how much you earn. Wilkinson and Pickett appear not to understand this distinction. They respond to this criticism by explaining why they neglected sociological measures of class, but this is not the central issue.14 The key problem is that their theory involves a claim about status distinction, but the basic indicator they adopt to ‘test’ it does not measure the importance or intensity of status divisions. I can find only one sentence in all their rebuttals and responses that even hints that they understand this problem. ‘For all its imperfections