Inequalities are Unhealthy
Inspired by an article in Monthly Review. A common discussion when studying economics and development studies is the question of poverty - what is it? Can someone in Bramford who cannot afford to send their kids to summer camp really be compared to a struggling family in Ethiopia, barely surviving off subsistence farming? Of course not - but if there is something my travels have taught me, it is that you cannot judge the quality of life just from the hard cash that someone has access to. Certainly there are some basic priorities - food, clothes, shelter and clean water… if you are struggling for survival every day, then things become very absolute.
However, once you are over that extreme minimume, a lot depends on the conditions around you (I have seldom seen so happy people as the Laotians - they would be singing on the bus as we drove along potholed unpaved roads, kids in the villages running after our pickup smiling and shouting Saybadee - yet Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world in real income.) According to Vicente Navarro’s article in the Monthly Review “Inequalities are unhealthy”, one of the most important health factors are in fact relative poverty and inequality. He drives the point home with the example that a poor person in the US (making $12,000 in a year) would have a shorter life expectancy than a rich person in Ghana (making only $9000 in a year). (He doesn’t mention whether the figures have been adjusted for PPP).
“The answer is that inequality is in itself bad, i.e., the distance among social groups and individuals and the lack of social cohesion that this distance creates is bad for people’s health and quality of life. Studies performed among civil servants in Great Britain have shown, for example, that life expectancy (the years that people can expect to live) among the top civil servants, grade 32, is longer than the life expectancy of civil servants of grade 31, who have longer life expectancy than civil servants of grade 30, and so on, reaching the lowest life expectancy at grade 1. There is no poverty among British civil servants, but there are significant differences in their life expectancies.”
“The difference between the two poles [in Spain]—the corporate class and the chronically unemployed—is ten years. This average distance in the European Union is seven years. In the United States, it is 14 years.”
He cites different reasons for this disparity - stress, frustration, lack of representation (in for example TV programmes) , and then goes on to show how countries with strong labour unions and lower levels of inequalities have better general health indicators, mentions how the most significant increases in life-expectancy in the UK were achieved during the Second World War (everybody standing together, fighting against a common enemy), and how both Thatcher’s and Bush sr.’s impact can be felt in the statistics.
Good reading,
Stian
