Some men steal out of need or greed; others kill themselves out of sadness. Putting togeth

er, these individual tales will display obvious regularities. As a result, some social scientists who first applied the rules of probability to human affairs even questioned the very notion of free will. "Society prepares the crime," wrote Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician, in 1835,"and the guilty person is only the instrument."

The findings of those statisticians' successors -- that poor children are more likely to fail at school, poor adults to commit crimes and die young, and so on -- are nowadays uncontroversial. And policymakers mostly avoid metaphysics (形而上学). Instead, they try to break such links by spending to "end child poverty" and by targeting health and education initiatives on the neediest. Yet such attempts are doomed to disappoint, because they conceive of each social ill in isolation, rather than treating their shared root cause. Moreover, they misidentify that cause: it is not poverty as such, but inequality.

The evidence, here painstakingly collected, is hard to dispute. Within the rich world, countries where incomes are more evenly distributed have longer-lived citizens and lower rates of fatness, misbehavior. and teenage pregnancy than richer countries where wealth is more concentrated. Studies of British civil servants find that senior ones enjoy better health than their immediate subordinates, who in turn do better than those further down the ladder.

And the evidence is that the differences in status cause these "gradients (梯度)". Low-status Indian children do worse on tests if they must state their identities beforehand. High-status monkeys grew up in captivity(囚禁) show increased levels of stress hormones and become iii more often when they are moved to groups where they no longer dominate.

What to do about this sickness caused by other people's wealth？ Increasing taxes on the rich, or smaller , differences in pay in the first place, say the authors, citing Sweden and Japan as instances of the two choices. A decade ago even left-wing politicians were "intensely relaxed about people getting rich". Now, as it becomes clearer that some of the rich got that way by theft, the idea that they have also caused injury more subtly will gain a readier hearing.

Too ready, perhaps: what if the price of greater equality is lower growth？ The .received wisdom is that rich rewards are necessary to stimulate the innovation on which growth depends. "No loss", say the authors," We have got close to the end of what economic growth can do for us." But that is a claim that needs to be supported, rather than simply made in a few sentences. If our ancestors had declared themselves thus satisfied, we would be without many things that we value -- and that they would have valued too, could they have imagined them. Should we be ready to give up joys we have never known？

What can we learn about statisticians' findings on the poor in the passage？

A．It is controversial for it destroys the reputation of the poor.

B．It may be caused by a deep social phenomenon--inequality.

C．They are individual tales with no regularities and special meaning.

D．They totally change the previous rules of social scientists.