For over two decades, Danny Dorling has been cartographically representing and writing about inequalities at all spatial scales, but with particular reference to the UK. His basic theme has been that inequalities there have widened over recent decades. Increasingly his writings took on the character of strong critiques – even polemics – against this trend and its causes, and in 2010 he re-focused them on the injustices underpinning and exacerbating the inequalities. That book – Injustice – has been fully revised and extended in this new edition. Inequality is presented as the antecedent and outcome of injustice; presumably the former can be present without the latter, but the current situation is characterised by both.

The two introductory chapters identify Dorling's five basic tenets of injustice: elitism is efficient; exclusion is necessary; prejudice is natural; greed is good; and despair is inevitable – and these are the subjects of the book's five main chapters. They have replaced the ‘old evils’ that the UK welfare state was designed to counter – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease – and are propagated by those in power, who wish to sustain and extend the inequalities and injustices to promote their own interests and those of their main supporters. The book's aim is to ‘help readers to reject the often subtle propagation of those beliefs’ (p. 3) by uncovering the realities beneath. (He nowhere addresses how power is achieved – either through or despite democracy – nor the key role of the state apparatus in sustaining the injustice-creating mechanisms.)

‘“Elitism is efficient”: new educational divisions’, the first core chapter, suffers from the start because neither elitism nor efficient is defined: indeed, not only are there no definitions, virtually nothing deals with efficiency – however defined. Few would cavil at the core argument: those who have attained power in society through success in its educational system then structure and re-structure that system to their children's advantage, so that they too have well-above-average chances of gaining positions within the powerful strata. But Dorling goes much further, claiming that to promote their own ends the powerful – implicitly, all of them – demonise those whom the system will almost certainly ‘fail’ (in a relative sense; there is no discussion of absolute educational ‘achievements’), and indeed the elite believe those ‘failures’ will become criminals as a consequence. Further, Dorling believes that all are created equal, that any genetic differences which might influence their educational performance are, at best, trivial (p. 97). If all received the same quality of education, received the same respect from teachers all of whom were equally able and dedicated, all would ‘succeed’. How a division of labour might then be created in such a utopia is unclear – but then Dorling implicitly accepts that such utopian ends will never be achieved: his ‘universal tertiary education’ merely requires universities to ‘become more comprehensive’ and not concentrate on ‘a few antiquated subjects’ (p. 95)! Highly desirable – at least the first part – but hardly revolutionary.

‘Exclusion is necessary’ then deals with the divide within society between those who can afford what are considered the basic standards of life and those who cannot – with the latter thus being excluded from society according to the chapter's subtitle, not just from full participation in it. The key criterion determining whether people are excluded or not is income, in particular what it can buy: the excluded, for example, include those who cannot afford an annual holiday. As in the previous chapter, the core argument regarding recently increased inequalities cannot be denied, and there are valuable insights – such as that we operate in a society dominated by multiplicative numbers: if everybody gets a percentage increase in their income, the absolute gap between rich and poor and what they can afford widens. Increasingly, the poor survive because they get into greater debt, which benefits the rich. But again, much of the argument is by assertion rather than evidence – did Pearson fiddle his evidence on rates of pauperisation (we are referred back to the first edition of the book for the evidence base for that claim; and it is unconvincing)? – and too many statements presented as ‘truths’ are, at best, little more than testable hypotheses, but untested. (No citations to any such tests are provided – despite a massive number of notes, in very small print.) Exclusion is linked to geneticism (a new form of eugenics) and racism – but there is no discussion of the chapter's key claim, that exclusion is necessary.

‘Prejudice is natural’ argues that sustaining inequalities and injustices involves the beneficiaries creating negative images of the ‘losers’ – presenting the latter as unworthy. The most common form of such negative prejudices against the ‘undeserving poor’ involves racism, now institutionalised in many countries. Again, the core case is clear – that racist and similar attitudes are social constructions has been long realised – and there are interesting insights, such as use of the concept of indentured labour. But the case's replication here is often sustained by strong claims lacking supporting evidence (do the rich not respect those who do the menial jobs for them – p.173 – and want them to be paid as little as possible – p.178?): some of them are simply wrong – such as the claim that New Zealand introduced a welfare state in the 1930s before many other countries because it wasn't racist (p. 208); it was. And if racism prevented the US fulfilling its republican ideals by not creating a full welfare state, why was this not also the case in republican France? Some of the discussions are far-fetched: several pages present us as living in a world of forced marriages – ‘If people married whoever they wished to marry, their choices not influenced by tradition or another social direction, the world would become a dramatically more equitable place within just a few generations’ (p. 211: the world is really just the US and the UK; the discussion frequently elides from one to the other and rarely brings in other places/cultures). The chapter's strong core contention is occluded – at the very least – by the lengthy questionable side discussions.

‘Greed is good’ contends that capitalist economies (never explicitly recognised as such in the book!) are dependent on growth, which requires increased consumption, which generates waste. Advertising and the cult of celebrity are used to stimulate greater consumption – with those who cannot afford to do so encouraged to get into greater debt. There is an outspoken attack on economists (bean counters), who make assumptions about how people (should) behave and pronounce accordingly; Dorling also makes behavioural assumptions – but doesn't recognise them! Economists also use questionable data, he claims, but much of what Dorling argues is based on data drawn from similar sources.

‘”Despair is inevitable”: health and wellbeing’, unlike the other chapters, has an introduction setting out a clear guide to its contents. The core argument is that greater inequality causes greater stress and anxiety, especially among the relatively deprived, which has been countered by greater prescribing of a variety of drugs – which make substantial profits for a wealthy few. Apparently alarming figures are cited about this increase, without recognising that many of the drugs are relatively recent inventions; are more people ill, or are more being diagnosed as having previously unrecognised conditions and being treated with new drugs? (One of the data sets that shows increased rates of depression didn't do so until a new one point was added – creating heteroscedasticity: p.310!) As in the other chapters, there are sections that are – at best – very tangential to the main point, with a further attack on economists’ ‘bird-brain thinking’ said to characterise business schools, especially Harvard's.

David Harvey told us in 1973 that we have more than enough evidence of ‘man's patent inhumanity to man’, and producing more is ‘counter-revolutionary in the sense that it allows the bleeding heart in us to pretend that we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not’ (p. 144). Perhaps 40 years on the world has changed so much that this is no longer the case, that we need more evidence placed before more people. (Harvey has written many books since then uncovering, through deep theoretical appreciation supported by empirical material, how capitalist society is being restructured to promote inequality.) This is clearly Dorling's position. Indeed, he makes it explicit: ‘we need to understand this [recent] history before considering what might be sufficient to reverse this growth of injustice’ (p. 31) and ‘the main argument at the end of this book is that recognising the problem is actually the solution’ (p. 28). Thus no programme for change is offered, and there are few – and then very trivial – suggestions only. (Contrast that with the thoughtful policy suggestions in Putnam's – Reference Putnam2015 – recent book and the extensive proposals in Atkinson's – also Reference Atkinson2015.) Dorling is no revolutionary and accepts that ‘Dispelling the untruths that underlie the injustices we currently live with will not suddenly usher in a utopia’ (p. 356). But what utopia will satisfy him? ‘A world where far more people genuinely disapprove of elitism will still have much elitism, and something else unjust will surely arise’. So there will always be inequality – but how much? Everett and Everett's (Reference Everett and Everett2015) simulated ‘simple model for a perfectly just society’ based on two core principles (identity and adequacy) has a Gini coefficient of 0.208 for the distribution of incomes and 0.400 for wealth. Is that satisfactory?

The book's final chapter – ‘Conspiracy, consensus, conclusion’ – is, to say the least, disappointing. Part of it responds to reviews of the first edition, claiming that it – and this revised version – was not ‘angry’: there are things that make him angry but injustice is just wrong and its full nature should be exposed. But what to do about it? Dorling seems at best to believe in slow gradualism, that we cannot change the system, only vary it – and we will; the current era of growing inequalities is coming to an end we are told – they cannot go on for ever, and won't. Obama's changes in the US offer hope – but how much? And is there just wishful thinking – we are told that ‘The most unequal of rich countries were those most willing to go to war in Iraq 64 years after 1939.. . . It is when injustice is promoted at home to maintain inequality within a country that it also becomes easier to contemplate perpetrating wrongs abroad’ (p. 372: isn't Denmark one of the most equal ‘advanced’ societies? didn't Denmark join the 2003 Iraq war ‘coalition of the willing’?). The final major section has the title ‘What to do’, with subsections entitled ‘How to do it’, ‘Where to do it’ and ‘When to do it’, but they offer very little. Earlier we are told that millions of tiny acts are required to ‘no longer tolerate the greed prejudice, exclusion and elitism that foster inequality and despair’, acts that ‘will require teaching [through reading this book?] and understanding, remembering what is fundamental about being human, remembering compassion’ (p. 372). The illusion of a society driven by individualism will be countered by many small acts of defiance; we have achieved so much and a more humane society will ensure that we all benefit.

This is a long book – too long, despite Dorling's claims to the contrary – with a powerful core argument and many fascinating insights into contemporary society; Dorling has much of value to say. (Although in many cases I was uncertain how strongly many of the claims were sustained by evidence; the original sources are often not cited so second-hand – including media – reports are relied upon, and some claims have no support at all in the extensive footnotes: the author of one of the back-cover ‘puffs’ says the book has ‘Powerful sentences and carefully curated evidence’ – my doubts about some of the latter challenge the former.) But the book is incoherent. Each chapter is divided into sections and sub-sections, and most of the latter read as separately drafted essays rather than parts of a cohesive argument: there are too many tangents, too many repetitions and no synthesis, no theory-based argument tying it all together (as in Andrew Sayer's – Reference Sayer2015 – excellent recent book). Good editing (Dorling tells us that, unlike the first edition, little was done), perhaps reducing it to half the length, would make the book much more attractive to many more readers: they would realise that changes to capitalism's operations, and the support given by captured state apparatus, in the last four decades have been associated with greater inequalities and injustices; and so they would call for action – even if they are given few if any leads as to what that action should be (eat less meat; ride bikes in cycle lanes . . .?!), let alone what the resultant new world might look like.