Ordinary Gweilo

I was slightly surprised to find that Conrad had suddenly taken an interest in obesity and inequality, having rather mysteriously started reading liberal columnists in The Guardian for inspiration.

Polly Toynbee’s column was one of dozens (if not hundreds) in the UK on the subject of obesity, which seems to be a current national obsession – well, not really, but it fills up column inches in the newspapers. Ms Toynbee’s angle on this is that it is inequality that leads to obesity, and so we should be attacking the real problem and not the symptoms. She backed this up with statistics that purport to show that the rich countries with the highest level of inequality (USA & UK) have the biggest problems, whereas the social democracies of Scandinavia have less of a problem.

Her argument is that if people are poor and have little self-respect (because they can’t see any prospect of things improving), eating gives them a form of instant gratification. If their lives were improved, they would also take more care of their health, including eating less and exercising more.

It’s pretty much exactly what I would expect from Polly Toynbee, and I am sure it goes down well with the social workers and teachers who read The Guardian. In fact, I’d guess that most of the people who read the column already share Ms Toynbee’s view of the world, and those who disagree probably don’t waste their time.

However, Ms Toynbee has obviously touched a raw nerve by saying that "America has by far the most unequal society", which has provoked some right-wing bloggers to respond. They have found something called the Gini index that ‘proves’ that "Latin American and African countries have the most unequal societies – by far."

This, of course, totally misses the point. Anyone who read Polly Toynbee’s article would have realized that she was talking about rich countries in Europe and North America, and making a comparison between the US at one end and the Scandinavian countries at the other end of the spectrum. Poor countries have different problems, and obesity amongst ordinary people is not one of them.

Conrad jumped on this bandwagon on Monday, with the following piece of cleverness:

The nation with the greatest income inequality in the world is Sierra Leone, where UNICEF says "malnutrition is very widespread" and where, when I visited a few years ago, I did not encounter many corpulent Mende tribesmen. Ranking second in the inequality tables is the Central African Republic which, according to UNICEF, also suffers from hunger and severe malnutrion.

Scanning the Gini table, one learns that income inequality in Thailand is almost precisely the same as in US, yet one rarely sees a fat Thai. Vietnam, a nation hardly renowned for its lumbering porkers, is less equal than either Britain or Australia and the most equal country on earth is Belarus, where lardassness abounds.

Oh dear. How easy it is to demolish an argument when you willfully misunderstand it. Anyone who thinks that Polly Toynbee was arguing that inequality in Sierra Leone or Thailand was a cause of obesity just isn’t paying attention.

UPDATE: Another viewpoint on this comes from Mark Steyn in The Daily Telegraph. Incidentally, in case it’s not clear, I am not expressing an opinion on Ms Toynbee’s article, just on Conrad’s choice of examples to refute it.