Social Inequality: What a Miserable Lot We Are

[liveonearth]

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.

Comments

[bobby1933.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for sharing this.
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.

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. ...Did you see the other comment, that suggests that his estimation of the income disparity in the US is biased by not considering aid to the poor? I'm interested to know where in the spectrum you think we fall.

[bobby1933.livejournal.com]

No, i have not seen the other comment, and so i am not responding to it. I do think that many people who talk about the poor and what they are or are not getting are simply talking bullshit. I trust Wilkinson's data to have considered the relevant factors, and more egalitarian countries also practice charity, maybe even more so.

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.

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

What strikes me about this is my perception, based on one of his early slides comparing communities in Britain, that what matters most is the most local of disparities, not even so much the disparity within a country. What I take from this is that if one lives in such a way as to not be "less than" others on a daily basis, one is less likely to be stressed out by one's status even if it is low. So if the poor live among the poor, they may actually be quite happy and not so stressed. I have witnessed this in my travels, for example among poor Mexican farmers for whom it is no big deal to not possess an iphone: they have food, family and home, and it is all they need. When left to their own devices they are grateful and not overly stressed. It is where the interfaces occur that the stress occurs.

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.

[bobby1933.livejournal.com]

You make a good point, and i think Wilkinson also made though though it my have got buried in the broader analysis. It is exactly local conditions which are more important in affecting the lives of people, especially the middle class, and especially especially, the poor.

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

It's worth mentioning here that measuring local inequality is exactly hat national level inequality indices such as the gini are bad at. In fact, the larger the area surveyed, the higher the inequality indices will be due to regional fluctuations. A person in the top 10% of upstate NY income would be lower middle in dc.

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.