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We’ll only listen to you if you’ve been peer-reviewed
Since it was published last year, The Spirit Level – Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s book on why equal societies do better than unequal ones – has become a sparkplug for heated, testy debate. Not one, not two, but three pamphlet-length critiques of it have been published, while others have rushed to man the book’s intellectual barricades (‘This book’s inconvenient truths must be faced’, said a Guardian editorial).

Yet now Pickett and Wilkinson have imposed an extraordinary condition on future debate about their book. Because much of the criticism of The Spirit Level has consisted of ‘unsubstantiated claims made for political purposes’ (in their view), ‘all future debate should take place in peer-reviewed journals’, they decree.

Wow. In one fell swoop they have painted any criticism of their book that appears in non-peer-reviewed journals as somehow illegitimate. They snootily say that ‘none of [the] critiques are peer-reviewed’ and announce that from now on they’ll only engage in discussions that ‘take place in peer-reviewed journals’. So any peep of a critique that appears in a newspaper, a book published by a publishing house that doesn’t do peer review, a non-academic magazine, an online magazine, a blog or a radio show – never mind those criticisms aired in sweaty seminar rooms, bars or on park benches – is unworthy because it hasn’t been stamped with that modern-day mark of decency, that indicator of seriousness, that licence which proves you’re a Person Worth Listening To: the two magic words ‘Peer Reviewed.’

One of Pickett and Wilkinson’s severest critics – the non-peer-reviewed Christopher Snowdon, author of The Spirit Level Delusion – is taken aback. ‘This displays an eagerness to close down debate and hide behind the supposed gatekeepers of knowledge’, he tells spiked. ‘Some people who don’t understand what peer review is seem determined to present it as some arbiter of truth’, he continues. ‘But it just means a study is fit for publication or is not obviously fabricated.’...

...Now there’s a lot in this that one might want to have a row with, even if one – like me – has not been peer-reviewed (which is fast becoming the intellectual equivalent of being deloused). For example, Pickett and Wilkinson argue that where the methodology in the three published critiques of their work has been ‘seriously flawed’, their methodology is based on sound scientific fact and evidence; they even flirted with the idea of calling their book ‘Evidence-Based Politics’. Yet I would argue that if they did indeed find ‘evidence’ that there’s more anxiety and other mental afflictions in well-off but unequal countries than there are in more humble but more equal societies, then it might be because the ‘therapy culture’ is more pronounced in these, largely Western parts of the world. If more people in America, for example, claim to have an angsty, emotional, brain-based issue than do people in Cuba, then I bet my weekly wage packet that it isn’t because of growth and consumerism, but because there is a widespread, very influential, Oprahite invitation to American people to define their every problem in therapeutic terms, whereas that isn’t yet the case in Havana and its surrounds....