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

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

The wealth disparity studies... aren't exactly correct.

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.

[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.

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.