Reducing inequality will help make our society more sustainable

A recent report and article in the British Medical Journal by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett highlight the relationship between sustainability and income inequality. They find that happiness and life expectancy are no longer related to wealth. The graphs below from the report show that we have well and truly passed a point of diminishing returns where large increases in wealth have relatively little effect on life expectancy or happiness.
 

However, relative incomes within a society are strongly related to health and wellbeing outcomes (see more graphs from the report below - there are many more examples in the report). They argue that this is related to status differentials rather than material benefits. 

Greater inequality leads to competitive consumerism, as people compete for material displays of status, which in turn leads to much higher greenhouse gas emissions (see graph from the report below).

They conclude that achieving a more equal, sustainable society will require "people's willingness to act for the common good" rather than "private greed, short termism and sectional interests" (p45). We need to focus more on developing social capital; and less on economic growth. 

Can status-seeking drive sustainable behaviours?

A recent study by Griskivicius et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has linked peoples' preference for green consumer products to status seeking behaviour. Their experiments showed that people were more likely to choose less luxurious green products after reading a short story that activated their status motive. This effect increased when the choice was made in public rather than in private, and when the green products were more expensive than the non-green products. They explain their findings using evolutionary psychology - costly signalling theory, which suggests that conspicuous conservation behaviours show others in a social group that a person a) is pro-social rather pro-self, and b) that they have the spare capacity to sacrifice resources (time, money, etc) to choose the less personally-beneficial product.

These findings have implications for corporations who are marketing green products - although the idea of increasing prices to make green products more attractive may have undesirable outcomes from an equity point of view! These findings are also interesting when imagining the role of private enterprise in a sustainable society - it may be false to assume that status-seeking behaviours inevitably lead to poor environmental outcomes.