If nothing else, this confirms that its authors aren’t writing for apparatchiks. Inevitably, it’s already being trashed - by the Left for not saying enough and by the Right for saying too much. (Luckily for some, the blurb explains this as “international research on the social determinants of health.”) Meanwhile in Grimsville (or, if you insist, “Great Britain”), The Spirit Level, Why Equality is Better for Everyone, has become required reading across the political spectrum. The book’s authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have long worked in the sphere of epidemiology. But whatever caused its restricted distribution (I’m going for Unflawed Friends of Unfettered Capitalism), a film I might never see will always be associated in my mind with a 2009 book I have actually read - or rather the 2010 edition, where it’s mentioned favourably in some revised back pages. In this view, The Flaw is possibly too gentle, too factual - in short, not beastly enough. Sharing more scraps, The Beast growls that Sington is not as “blistering” as Charles Ferguson, whose own documentary, Inside Job (2010), also covered Greenspan’s epiphany/confession. While experts still argue about what Greenspan really meant, stubborn innocents still say: if we put everything into a static housing stock and nothing into maintenance or new builds, our investment - or “home” - will be as safe as any other balloon pumped till it bursts. The Daily Beast tells us that this all starts with Alan Greenspan’s statement to Congress that, shamefully, there had been a “flaw” in his understanding of American capitalism. Probably not coming soon to a cinema near you, Sington’s latest feature is The Flaw. “Sturdy” does rhyme with “nerdy,” but in a world where facts are often loosely screwed into anything but weight-bearing conspiracy theories, there’s room for some dull exactitude. Starting with a series of shorts in British TV, for two decades David Sington has been making sturdy, fact-based documentaries.
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