http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
This is the latest Ted Talk to cross my viewscreen. It's Richard Wilkinson, speaking about the differences between societies with wide vs narrow differences between the highest and lowest income groups. The finding is intuitive, but the specific data that he pulls together, and the way he makes sense of it, is very interesting. At the end of brings it all together with some science about stress. According to him, the stressors that cause the greatest increase in cortisol are "social evaluative threats" to one's esteem or status. In other words, "people are sensitive to being looked down on". In societies where there is greater equality, there is less stress, hence explaining the increased longevity, health and peace that is seen in those societies. Of course, the US rates only second to Singapore in his scaling of wealth disparity, with Japan and Sweden at the other end of the scale. Anyway, it's worth seeing for yourself, if you have the 15 minutes.
This is the latest Ted Talk to cross my viewscreen. It's Richard Wilkinson, speaking about the differences between societies with wide vs narrow differences between the highest and lowest income groups. The finding is intuitive, but the specific data that he pulls together, and the way he makes sense of it, is very interesting. At the end of brings it all together with some science about stress. According to him, the stressors that cause the greatest increase in cortisol are "social evaluative threats" to one's esteem or status. In other words, "people are sensitive to being looked down on". In societies where there is greater equality, there is less stress, hence explaining the increased longevity, health and peace that is seen in those societies. Of course, the US rates only second to Singapore in his scaling of wealth disparity, with Japan and Sweden at the other end of the scale. Anyway, it's worth seeing for yourself, if you have the 15 minutes.
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/09/robert-lerman-responds-to-comments-on-socuial-security-medicare-and-inequality.html
The problem is thath they exempt all the social welfare programs, which in a real accounting do count toward the ability of the poor to acquire goods and services.
Also, the wealth gap in the US even according to the traditional accounting methods isn't as wide as many would like to think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
Sorting by r/p 10 and scroll down, you'll find the US fairly close to the middle.
I was just thinking though... It's not actual *disparity* that would have the physiological effects, it'd be *percieved* disparity. All the discussion of the disparity and the magnitude of it could easily *invoke* the physiological effects of a great disparity whether or not one existed. It's so hard to separate causes from effects sometimes.
I really want to check out Singapore. I heard an interview with one of its leaders on NPR once and he was a fascinating character. Laughed out loud that America "permits" an "underclass" to exist. He had some good points.
Edited at 2011-11-04 06:26 pm (UTC)
It also doesn't exactly address the annuity values of the social programming.
The presence of some "low Gini" states in Africa and in other poor countries creates the interesting possibility of doing the sort of analysis Wilkinson discussed on those poor countries, Does a poor country with a low Gini index have fewer social problems than a poor country with a high Gini index?
I would be interested in seeing the study you're mentioning, I suspect that in nations that have "real" poverty, like the low gini african nations, other factors will begin to dominate the equation and the gini impacts will be reduced in significance.
I don't feel like getting into the debate that this is heading toward in this forum. Suffice to say that I do not consider inequality to be a particularly big deal in the scheme of things, at least compared to real problems like sytematic oppression, suffocating poverty, and outright genocide. So I oppose socialism, because it leads to one of those as day leads to night. You disagree. I can live with that.
I have studied and taught on this for fifty years.
Never have i seen it as well presented as by Mr. Wilkinson here!!!
I would have required at least an hour to share the same material. And he also did some of the research.
We are the wealthiest country in the world. The disparities in income are wider than in any developed country except Singapore (and i wonder about that) and Russia (where the social problems are even greater than they are here)
When Russia changed from "Communism" to "Capitalism" it went quickly from being one of the more egalitarian countries to one the most unequal of the developed countries.This may help account for the resurrection of Russian mobs, internal terrorism, ethnic conflict, and crying out for the "good old days" of Stalin .
We are among the most inegalitarian countries, and are quickly becoming even more unequal. As we search for our own "austerity measures" to ease the debt problem, we are almost certain to affect the poor disproportionately.
As the video made clear, it is the way wealth is shared, not how much there is to share that matters. Terrence Cook theorized three basic theories of distribution: the Aristocrat's way (the poor should restrain their desires),the socialist's way (society should create more wealth and share it equally), the capitalist's way (society should create more wealth and not worry about how it is shared), and the saint's way (everybody, especially the rich, should restrain their desires). I think i have almost always preferred the "saint's" way.
Wilkinson's data shows that both the aristocrat's way and the capitalist's way are destructive of souls.
The Occupy movement, by bringing the homeless and unemployed (who are the ones who persist in camping in business districts when others must go back to their homes and work) into direct contact with the well-employed business elite, is accentuating the differences and escalating the stress.
I personally would like to help create a local sustainable community that is able to isolate itself from mainstream society sufficiently enough to eliminate these stresses.
One of the things that I am wondering on that basis is how the state level inequality indices compare to the national indices of europe. They will still probably be higher, but almost certainly the discrepancy ill be smaller.
(e.g. Whites earn twice as much as Blacks but have fourteen times as much accumulated wealth as Blacks. The richest one percent earn percapita, sixty-three times as much as the poorest twenty percent, but they have 500 times the percapita wealth of the poor, EVEN WHEN THOSE WITH NO WEALTH OR NEGATIVE WEALTH ARE IGNORED!) In the mid 80s, when there was less inequality than there is now. six percent of the households owned fifty percent of all personal wealth.