Canada risks becoming a more violent and anti-social place if it allows income inequality to worsen, one of the world’s leading experts on the subject says.

Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, told The Huffington Post Canada’s editorial board Thursday that Canada is bound to become a society where “people are more out for themselves” if differences between the rich and poor continue to grow.

“I expect if your income differences keep rising, as I think they have been since the early 1990s, you will become a more anti-social society, people will be more out for themselves,” Wilkinson, a retired professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham in the U.K., said in response to a reader question.

He also said he expected Canada’s violent crime rate to become more comparable to the rate seen in the U.S. if inequality continues to grow.

The Huffington Post chose four of the best questions readers asked to put to Wilkinson. Read the complete Q&A below.

PHOTOS: COUNTRIES WITH THE WIDEST GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR

Question from reader Lorax 8: What is the end result for a society -- such as Canada's -- that continues to increase along the rich-poor divide? Can our economy or our society survive another one or two decades of this, and would it be recognizable as Canada?

I think there’s no doubt that … rising income differences do affect the whole social fabric of society. So I expect if your income differences keep rising -- as I think they have been since the early 1990s -- you will become a more anti-social society, people will be more out for themselves. And with that, if you get more unequal more rapidly than other countries, then your position in all sorts of league tables will fall. Instead of being much less violent than the United States, you might get more overlap. And similarly with health.

It’s an extraordinary picture. The U.S., one of the most unequal developed countries, has worse health, in terms of life expectancy, than any of the other developed countries. It has higher teenage birth rates, it has more people in prison, it has more violence, it has worse mental health. A whole raft of things are affected.

At the moment, Canada does much better than the United States. And it almost certainly is doing better because it’s more equal. And you must retain that.

Question from reader Heather Blackett: I see all around me an erosion and a devaluation of what I would regard as institutions of public trust and civic commons; libraries, parks, public spaces, public education and health care, community associations ... The very institutions that protect and promote social equality, mobility and inclusion. Do you believe that this is a one-way slide, or are there still opportunities for my generation to defend -- or create new -- institutions that value and promote equality?

I would say the causality has been primarily in the other direction. You’re losing all those kinds of provisions because income inequality develops an ideology that we have less to do with each other. There’s less reason why the better off should provide for others, [and less belief] that it’s the government’s job to provide these things for society. Growing inequality is about fending for yourself.

So I think the main effort must be in reducing the material differences.

Question from the editorial board: So in your view, the inequality comes first, then the attitudes of selfishness follow from it?

Yes.

It was [Alexis] de Tocqueville, who lived in the States in the 1830s, who said we don’t empathize with each other across material differences. ‘It’s not my job to look after these people.’ We make judgments of each other based on social status, so the prejudiced view of the poor has always been that they’re lazy and stupid, and the rich are brilliant, and growing inequality increases all those [perceptions].

De Tocqueville talked about how the French landed aristocracy empathized with each other enormously over their trials and tribulations, but couldn’t understand what the peasants were fussing about. And similarly with white America, he talked about the extraordinarily cohesive nature of white society, but no empathy with slaves at all. And even in my childhood the most common justification for racism was people saying, ‘Well they just don’t live like us, do they.’

What the question is pointing out is the policy that’s followed in the wake of growing differences, I think. But it has also been affected by an international ideology -- the neoliberal economics [of Reagan and Thatcher] that swept through the developed world, one country after another. Canada caught the disease a little later than others, but Canada still caught it.

Question from reader Djimcintosh: The focus of the past 50 years on computerization and automation has increased productivity on average 2.1 per cent each year since 1961 (StatsCan). This means a 20 per cent improvement every 10 years. We should be living in a Utopian society, except we reduced employment instead. Higher wages and profits for the rich, and a pink slip for the poor. Can Mr. Wilkinson address the role of productivity improvements in establishing the current income inequality? How can we share future productivity improvements across society?

I think that’s a very important question, particularly as we become aware of the environmental limits to economic growth.

The New Economics Foundation in London has argued that we need to take the benefits of increased productivity out not in terms of higher levels of consumerism and so on, but in terms of more leisure, more time for friends, family and community.

I don’t know how they calculated it, but they said we should be moving toward a 21-hour work week.