i want you to welcome richard wilkinson and kate pickett and we will start with richard wilkinson. [applause] >> the key very much. it is lovely to be here and it is a store called the we should have this on martin luther king day it feels the right thing to do. can we have on the projector whoever is controlling that? i think we're here to tell you what you already know. many people for hundreds of years of at the intuition that any quality and income differences are socially divisive and corrosive. that is all i need to show you. intuition is sure that we have imagined. we thought what you might feel different from what we deal with in our everyday life but what is surprising is a difference of inequality between democracies or the quality of our lives. we will take you through the data. before i do so i should just clear up one thing. the title of our book, "the spirit level" mini americans don't know what that means are what we mean. in england it is a confidence level. it has to do with the social gradients in the inequalities that a lot of our book has graft with sloping line

i want to thank our two offers, kate pickett, richard wilkinson, the authors of "the spirit level." for those of you who want to get more involved in work on ending inequality, both kate and richard called for a social movement to end in equality. there are many ways you can do this. at the institute for policy studies, we have a program on inequality and the common good which is both helping to bring forward new work like this, but also helping to steer people towards campaigns that both pull up the bottom. there will be many this year, everything from campaigns around the employee free choice act, to anti-poverty pro cairns, as well as campaigns to pull down the topic that will be a lot of initiatives by many groups to pull down the top by raising taxes on the very rich, as well as a series of measures around executive pay. so i encourage you to join us at ips at www.ips d.c. i encourage all to buy this new book am of the spirit level. thank you all for coming and thank you to richard and kate. [applause] >> richard wilkinson is professor emeritus at the university of nottingham me