Links between equality and well-being
From an article by Richard Williams in The Guardian (UK)
On BBC Radio 4′s Start the Week yesterday morning, Richard Wilkinson, a former professor of social epidemiology at Nottingham University, outlined his research, published in a new book called The Spirit Level, into the links between equality and well-being.
He found that countries with the greatest degree of economic inequality – including the United States and the United Kingdom – consistently show markedly higher levels of what he described as “almost all the social problems that one thinks of as congregating in the poorest areas of our societies”: violence and other forms of crime, ill health (including obesity), school bullying, teenage pregnancy, mental health problems, and prison population.
He added two things. First, it was not just a question of a difference of even something like 50%: these problems were “three, four, five times worse in more unequal societies”. Second, the adverse consequences of these problems were not confined to the poor members of such societies. The rich, too, are living measurably more troubled and less satisfying lives than their equivalents in countries such as Sweden, Norway and Japan, where the scale of income differences is less extreme.
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