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

Inequality

[bobby1933.livejournal.com]

I think it is also worth mentioning that income distribution (how much we made last year) is not nearly as complete an index of economic well being as wealth distribution ( the value of all the things we own --homes, businesses, investments, savings, personal property, etc. Wealth is far more unequally distributed than income.
(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.

Re: Inequality

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

Yes. That is also intuitive but well worth bringing to the front of our awareness. As The Long Emergency commences, those with nothing now will have less than nothing in short order, whereas those who are well set up because of accumulated wealth, and the bonus that wealth begets wealth, will continue rule the world for generations to come.