Clear evidence, clear opportunities

Much of the research that has the most to say about the workings of society and what would make things better comes from the social sciences. These include the disciplines of anthropology, business studies, criminology, demography, economics, education, human geography, law, political science, social psychology, social policy, social work, and sociology. 

My own discipline is a bit of a hybrid; known as social epidemiology, it’s really a combination of science and social science. Very often using scientific methods applied to social issues, robust and rigorous research from these disciplines has a huge amount to offer.

Social science research describes how things are in our society, suggests what works and what doesn’t, what it costs to make change (and what it costs to not do things), and tells us how people feel about the world and how they want it to look. The social sciences are a veritable treasure trove of ‘good society’ evidence. We have facts, data and evidence about how to improve our society at our fingertips, and on a scale un-imaginable even as recently as the start of my own career. There is a vast library of evidence-based blueprints for a good society, ready and waiting to be implemented.

The ‘action gap’

This book is mostly about what we already know: the solutions we already have access to, for tackling some of our biggest problems. It’s about the evidence that we could be guided by, if we took those blueprints off the shelf, dusted them off, and thought carefully about how they can help us change things for the better. 

But it is not just about what is often called an ‘evidence gap’; this book is also very much about filling the ‘action gap’. The best possible blueprints for a good society are of no earthly use if they are never implemented.

We will deep dive into some of the most serious problems we face: health, social care, education and prisons. We’ll see clear and consistent evidence of how things could be better, and where improvements are drastically needed.

Looking at the evidence

I’m asking why men born in the poorest areas of the UK now live almost ten years less than those in the richest areas, and women eight years less, and looking at what the evidence tells us about how to reduce that gap. I look at the looming demographic and economic crisis of us not having worked out how to provide and fund care for either adults or children who need it. 

I also ask why we rank 26^th out of thirty-eight rich countries on young people’s ​­skills – ​­with 37 per cent of our children reaching the age of fifteen without having basic maths and reading ​­skills – and look at what the evidence says about how we can help our children thrive. And I ask why the UK has the highest rate of imprisonment in Western ​­Europe – with numbers having almost doubled over the past twenty years and costs spiralling so that it costs more to keep someone in prison than the average UK salary – when all the evidence suggests that imprisonment doesn’t work to reduce crime. 

These four big issues – health inequalities, social care, education, and criminal justice – are a central focus of the book because if we could get them right, we would have the foundations of a very much better quality of life for everyone.

A new economic vision

I look at the blueprint that has actually been dominating policy-​­making for the past few decades, the particular flavour of economics known as neoliberalism, and ask what the alternatives are. New economic thinking extends far beyond the economy itself and can help us look after the wellbeing of people and planet. 

[We] can make sure that policy is directed towards the society that we, the people, want, and how we can make sure that the best evidence for a good society is flowing into the pipelines that feed policy. I want to make sure that we keep our best evidence off the shelves, and in the hands of those who can put it into action.

The time is right

Where I’m standing, things are sadly and badly off-kilter right now. In the UK we seem in many ways to have stopped making progress towards a good society and to have lost the hope that life will be better for our children and our grandchildren. 

Even leaving aside the existential threat of the climate emergency, progress in longevity first stopped around 2010/11, and then life expectancy fell between 2017 and 2022. Child poverty increased by 20 per cent to 20.7 per cent between 2012 and 2021, more than in any other OECD country; that’s 650,000 more poor children. And 1.28 million children are persistently absent from school, a number largely driven by high levels of anxiety. In 2022/23, local authorities in England and Wales received around two million new requests for social care, expenditures on care rose to £28.4 billion, and yet a third of those asking for help got nothing. And this is in one of the biggest economies in the world.

We are faced with existential war and climate crises, political divisions run deep, inequalities divide us, and progress across multiple areas of life has ground to a halt and in some cases reversed. We often hear that we should be having grown-up conversations about the challenges we face and that we need a vision before we can have a strategy to achieve it. 

Thinking together, acting together, writing a new social contract needs to start with conversations about the kind of future we want. Here is my Good Society. What is yours?

The Good Society: And How We Make It by Professor Kate Pickett is published by Bodley Head, February 2026.

Professor Kate Pickett OBE is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, where she leads the Public Health and Society research group and is Director of the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change.