How Inequality Kills

antrim | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Saturday September 10, 2005 00:12 by kup

Does inequality of wealth really matter?, Richard Wilkinson Professor of sociology, has been researching and gathering evidence of the damage done by extreme inequality between the rich and the poor. As in todays society as the rich get richer, whilst the poor get even poorer. Despite however rich a country is, that country will be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and depressed if the wealth gap between the social classes grows too wide.

In the UK, infant mortality rates for the poor are rising, as life expectancy rates of the poor fall.

So the people living in a relatively poor country such as Greece, have longer life expectancy than poor people living in 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. Taking violence and drugs out of the equation, 2/3 of the reason for the shorter lives of poor people in the US is due to heart disease. Not brought on by bad diet, as the people of Bangladesh, have a similar nutrition deficiencies, it is due to the stress of living on the lowest rung of society, the stress of disrespect and lack of esteem for the poor.
Bad nutrition does less harm than depression.

Professor Wilkinson found during research that subordinate, low status monkeys had high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which causes arteriosclerosis.

When high status monkeys were separated from the low status monkeys, the pecking order changed, as the some of the high rank monkeys found themselves the new subordinates and developed a five fold increase in arteriosclerosis. Meanwhile the low rank monkeys now freed from domination by high rank monkeys, had a sharp drop in levels of stress hormone cortisol.

Professor Wilkinson found that social status and respect matter beyond anything, and the psychological damage done by being at the bottom social rung was crippling.

Social environment can be more toxic than any pollutant, low status and lack of control over on'e life is a destroyer of human health and happiness.

An orphanage in hungry post war Germany, found that children on the same meagre 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 lack of a particular necessity. Social respect is measured in money, low pay tells people that their labour and themselves are worth little.

Children on free school meals, with no holidays to talk about, unable to afford school trips, who never invite anyone back to a shabby home, painfully understand their place in the hierarchy from their first day at school.

Taken from 'The impact of inequality'. by Richard G Wilkinson