Kelly of Siam

The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier -- Thom Hartmann's Independent Thinker Review

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 09/04/2009 - 2:26pm. Thom Hartmann

THOM HARTMANN'S INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Each month, BuzzFlash is privileged to have Air America progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann review a progressive book or DVD exclusively for BuzzFlash. See other DVDs and progressive premiums at the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

If the number of dog-eared pages thickening the upper corner of a book on my bookshelves is any indication of how important that book was to me (and it is), then "The Impact of Inequality" is one of the top ten books in my library (and it is).

Wilkinson has, quite simply, identified the One Single Issue That Drives Everything Else.

Obesity, cancer, infant mortality, homicide, gun violence, imprisonment ratios, depression, drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, venereal disease rates, use of prescription antidepressants, workplace satisfaction, trust of one's neighbors – pick from the menu. ALL of them are driven by a single variable.

And that variable isn't wealth. While America is the richest nation in the world with a median income of around $44,000/year, we're way in the back of the pack in all the indices mentioned above. So is the second richest nation, Great Britain.

And it wasn't that way in the period from 1940 to 1980.

The reason it is now, it turns out, is pretty straightforward. While most European and developed nations have a ratio of about 3:1 to 5:1 between the wealth of the poorest 20% of the populace and the richest 20%, the UK and US are running in the neighborhood of 8:1.

The more unequal a society is, the more problems it has. Regardless of how rich it is.

Conversely, the more equal a society is the better it does. Regardless of how poor it is (so long as they're above a baseline survival threshold, which appears to run around $5000/year). Costa Rica, at around $7,000 a year, does better than the US or UK on all of the items on the list above – and more.

And it's not just differences in these indices between nations: they also occur between states or provinces in nations. Wilkinson documents in his book how the most equal of the states of the US and provinces of Canada have the best outcomes in all the cases listed above, and the most unequal of the states have the worst outcomes. The relationship is absolutely definable, linear, and predictable.

Richard Wilkinson builds a powerful and irrefutable case in this book for a radical re-think of the role of wealth – and government and taxes – in society. Without this incredible piece of the puzzle, no other discussion of tax policy, industrial policy, educational policy, or rules of business can make serious sense.

"The Impact of Inequality" is one of the most important books you will ever read. And as a bonus, it's also one of the most readable. I started it on a Friday afternoon, and was so stuck to it that I was finished by Sunday afternoon, complete with having made pages of notes and folded over and marked up at least sixty or seventy pages. Buy two or three copies, because this is a book you'll want to share with everybody you know.

(Note: Wilkinson has published a sequel to "Impact" in the UK, titled "The Spirit Level," which will become available in the US this winter. Its website is here. I ordered it via a British bookseller and read it cover-to-cover, but found it to be mostly a rehash and update of the contents/statistics/arguments of "Impact." While "Spirit Level" will definitely be worth buying when it comes out, I recommend you not wait but get "Impact" now and familiarize yourself with what I predict will become the hottest topic of discussion in economic and political circles over the next few years.)

m Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his program. You can also listen to Thom over the Internet.

THOM HARTMANN'S INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH


Inequality kills

What counts is not wealth or poverty, says Polly Toynbee after reading Richard G Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality, but your place on the social ladder

The Guardian, Saturday 30 July 2005


Buy The Impact of Inequality at the Guardian bookshop

The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier

by Richard G Wilkinson

355pp, Routledge, £19.99

Does inequality really matter? The poor have what their grandparents would think unimaginable luxuries - TVs, telephones and washing machines. So why should it matter to them if in some unseen stratosphere the gated kleptocrats on company boards award themselves staggering sums of money? Does anyone really mind the gap?

That is a reasonable question and it niggles away at those on the left, too. Equality has gone out of fashion. Social justice under Labour means heaving the poorest over the poverty threshold and lifting the life chances of children from lower social classes. Tony Blair said early on that he was not bothered about wealth, only about abolishing poverty. Talk of inequality sounds like the old politics of envy. Equality of opportunity, yes, but equality for its own sake, why?

Here is the answer. Richard Wilkinson is a professor of social epidemiology, an expert in public health. From that vantage point he sees the world in terms of its physical and psychological wellbeing, surveying great sweeps of health statistics through sociological eyes. He has assembled a mountain of irrefutable evidence from all over the world showing the damage done by extreme inequality. However rich a country is, it will still be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and sad if the gap between social classes grows too wide. Poorer countries with fairer wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal nations.

This book is timely since the NHS annual report has just found that Labour has missed two key goals, both symptoms of inequality. Infant mortality and life expectancy figures are both moving in the wrong direction. If Labour is perplexed as to the reason why, Wilkinson can suggest plenty of answers here. Life expectancy in rich nations correlates precisely with levels of equality. So Greece, with half the GDP per head, has longer life expectancy than the US, the richest and most unequal country with the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. The people of Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh. When you take out the violence and drugs, two-thirds of the reason is heart disease. Is that bad diet? No, says Wilkinson, it is mainly stress, the stress of living at the bottom of the pecking order, on the lowest rung, the stress of disrespect and lack of esteem. Bad nutrition does less harm than depression.

The book blisters with research like this: tests found that subordinate, low-status monkeys had high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, which leads to arteriosclerosis. When the high-status monkeys were all put together and low-status monkeys put in another enclosure, all the pecking orders changed. When some previous high-rankers became subordinate they developed all the same physical symptoms, including a five-fold increase in arteriosclerosis within less than two years. Meanwhile, some of the low-rankers who suddenly found themselves dominant, had sharply dropped levels of stress hormone.

People, says Wilkinson, are the same. Social status and respect matter beyond anything, and the psychological damage done by being at the bottom is crippling. A survey of Whitehall civil servants found junior ranks were three times more likely to die in a year than seniors, with a fine sliding gradation from top to bottom according to status. If one office was found to be killing three times more than another next door, it would be evacuated instantly. Yet social environment may matter almost as much as asbestos.

Homicide rates (and other crimes) track a country's level of inequality, not its overall wealth. The fairest countries have the highest levels of trust and social capital. The American states that have the more equal income distribution also have most social trust: New Hampshire, the most equal, is least likely to agree that "most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance".

Wilkinson's message is that social environment can be more toxic than any pollutant. Low status and lack of control over one's life is a destroyer of human health and happiness. The wealth gap causes few to vote or participate in anything in a world of fear, conflict and hostility.

It is not primarily five-a-day fruit and veg or obesity that need targeting, but social injustice itself. Infant mortality is mainly a result of low-birth weight babies, something the government has tried hard to improve. Wilkinson shows that these days small premature babies are not caused by bad diet: even poor nutrition by British standards will rarely harm a foetus. It is stress in pregnancy that does it, high cortisol levels which affect the foetus for life - and poorer mothers are more depressed, with less social support. Psyche matters more than vitamins, all through life. An orphanage in hungry post-war Germany found children on the same diet were found to have grown most under the kindest matron and least under the unkindest matron.

Poverty in rich nations is not a number or the absence of a particular necessity. A poor vicar may bring up children well on lentils and respect. But for most people respect is measured in money. Low pay tells people that their labour and they themselves are worth little. Poverty is not, as the government imagines, a line to pull people over but it is a position on a line. If it tilts too sharply upwards, the pain of those at the bottom can be measured in hard statistics.

This book is evidence for what common sense already knows. Children on free school meals, with no holidays to talk about, unable to afford the school trips, who never invite anyone back to a shabby home, painfully understand their place in the hierarchy from their first day at school. Adults know the same, noses pressed up against the window of lifestyle shows on TV. This is a book that puts the numbers to a psychological truth: inequality is the real enemy.

· Polly Toynbee's Hard Work is published by Bloomsbury.