In their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argued for the ‘benefits’ of income redistribution. Although enthusiastically welcomed by the left, CIS Senior Fellow Peter Sanders showed in his critique Beware False Prophets that much of The Spirit Level’s evidence linking equality with wellbeing was flawed, its analysis is misleading, and its statistics invalid. Saunders’s book received a furious reaction. In this new Australian edition, When Prophecy Fails, Saunders has added a new 9,000-word postscript to address Wilkinson and Pickett’s attempts to discredit their critics.
