wheels turning wheels turning wheels
I've been reading a book called The Impact of Inequality, by Richard Wilkinson. And because it's been slightly blowing my mind, I thought I'd bring it up here, because... well.
The main idea behind the book was to look in to why, exactly, poor people are generally sicker and have a significantly lower life expectancy than rich people. It's not just the extremes, either - it's a steady progression, as you go down the social ladder, so people making $100,000 are generally sicker than millionaries but a bit healthier than people making $50,000, who are in turn way healthier than the poor sods on minimum wage. It's true for pretty much every disease, and for pretty much everywhere that people have data for, and it doesn't instinctively make sense. After all, once you're talking about people in countries countries where the basics like food, shelter, and drinking water are met for the vast majority of people, and once you've taken violent death into account... shouldn't it level off with the middle classes, if it's a poverty thing? What's going on there?
Some of it seems to be that poor people (at least in countries like the US where the health industry is, um, what I'd call insane) can't afford all the treatment they need. But it's more than that, because if that's all it was, you'd see rich people going to the doctor more than poor. But the opposite is true: poor people see their doctors waaay more often, on average, than rich people do.
I'm a huge healthcare nerd, and I'd like to try to get over exactly how mindblowing that is.
That is a huge piece of evidence that poor people get sick more because they're poor. And Richard Wilkinson has a shedload of studies and data which supports exactly that conclusion. They've tested it as best they can between nations: the richest nations aren't the healthiest, the most socially/economically equal societies are. They've run simulation tests where they gave a whole load of people the cold virus, then checked to see who got a cold. Guess what: the rich, successful people were almost universally fine, and the lower down the social spectrum you got, the more likely they were to get ill. They ran simulations with apes - they saw that dominant males were less likely to be ill, so they put a load of alpha males in a pack together, so some of them would have to become subservient. And those apes were the ones who got sick.
My brain is spinning with all the implications of this. Of course, it's not some magical, mystical thing: it seems to largely be about stress hormones, both in your life and in your family's life as you're gestating/growing up. At least some of it probably is situational - poor people going on public transport rather than a sealed-off car, or not being able to mend the central heating, or whatever. And it is, of course, a statistical correlation only. But they are regularly getting correlation levels of over fucking eighty percent.
These things lead on to pretty much every other social ill you can think of, too. Crime is almost always highest not in the absolute poorest areas, but the areas which are most socially and economically "inferior" to the ones nearby. People get stressed and pissed off and unhappy - seeing people so much higher in the social food chain seems to naturally set off all the 'THIS IS A DANGEROUS SITUATION' buttons in people's heads: all the panic and stress hormones go up vastly the second people are reminded that there's someone who could, however metaphorically, boss them around. And people with panic and stress hormones going are more violent, and that sets off more of the stress hormones and only makes people more on edge, less trusting, more likely to lash out against percieved problems, and... more likely to die.
And this means that equality is, quite literally, a life and death issue. Treating people as lesser can quite literally end up knocking up to 20% off their life expectancy. It's not about absolutes, it's about relative social position, and every little thing that might help get everyone on as level a playing field as possible is, if not quite the equivilant of giving blood or learning CPR, significant.
God, I still can't get over this. How the hell did I not read about all these studies in school? In university? And the book is even decently written, too. Seriously, people: check it out. And on that note, I'll link to something I've been meaning to get round to passing around:
Skin Coloured is intended to be a collaborative, visual exploration of what it is to be non-white in a white culture. Make-up, plasters and tights - even when they’re marked “flesh-coloured” - are not the colour of skin that isn’t white. And whilst white women may have trouble matching these items to their skin, for women who don’t class themselves as white, this inconvenience is symptomatic of a wider problem.
To help illustrate this problem, therefore, Skin Coloured is looking for submissions. Send us photographs that illustrate the inadequacy of provisions for non-white people, and we’ll post them on the blog, and hopefully both those submitting, and those who’re here to learn, will gain something from it.
Further information can be found here. Please help us by reposting this.
Oh, and since humour helps relieve stress, have Hamlet: the Facebook News Feed edition. Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float. Hah!
The main idea behind the book was to look in to why, exactly, poor people are generally sicker and have a significantly lower life expectancy than rich people. It's not just the extremes, either - it's a steady progression, as you go down the social ladder, so people making $100,000 are generally sicker than millionaries but a bit healthier than people making $50,000, who are in turn way healthier than the poor sods on minimum wage. It's true for pretty much every disease, and for pretty much everywhere that people have data for, and it doesn't instinctively make sense. After all, once you're talking about people in countries countries where the basics like food, shelter, and drinking water are met for the vast majority of people, and once you've taken violent death into account... shouldn't it level off with the middle classes, if it's a poverty thing? What's going on there?
Some of it seems to be that poor people (at least in countries like the US where the health industry is, um, what I'd call insane) can't afford all the treatment they need. But it's more than that, because if that's all it was, you'd see rich people going to the doctor more than poor. But the opposite is true: poor people see their doctors waaay more often, on average, than rich people do.
I'm a huge healthcare nerd, and I'd like to try to get over exactly how mindblowing that is.
That is a huge piece of evidence that poor people get sick more because they're poor. And Richard Wilkinson has a shedload of studies and data which supports exactly that conclusion. They've tested it as best they can between nations: the richest nations aren't the healthiest, the most socially/economically equal societies are. They've run simulation tests where they gave a whole load of people the cold virus, then checked to see who got a cold. Guess what: the rich, successful people were almost universally fine, and the lower down the social spectrum you got, the more likely they were to get ill. They ran simulations with apes - they saw that dominant males were less likely to be ill, so they put a load of alpha males in a pack together, so some of them would have to become subservient. And those apes were the ones who got sick.
My brain is spinning with all the implications of this. Of course, it's not some magical, mystical thing: it seems to largely be about stress hormones, both in your life and in your family's life as you're gestating/growing up. At least some of it probably is situational - poor people going on public transport rather than a sealed-off car, or not being able to mend the central heating, or whatever. And it is, of course, a statistical correlation only. But they are regularly getting correlation levels of over fucking eighty percent.
These things lead on to pretty much every other social ill you can think of, too. Crime is almost always highest not in the absolute poorest areas, but the areas which are most socially and economically "inferior" to the ones nearby. People get stressed and pissed off and unhappy - seeing people so much higher in the social food chain seems to naturally set off all the 'THIS IS A DANGEROUS SITUATION' buttons in people's heads: all the panic and stress hormones go up vastly the second people are reminded that there's someone who could, however metaphorically, boss them around. And people with panic and stress hormones going are more violent, and that sets off more of the stress hormones and only makes people more on edge, less trusting, more likely to lash out against percieved problems, and... more likely to die.
And this means that equality is, quite literally, a life and death issue. Treating people as lesser can quite literally end up knocking up to 20% off their life expectancy. It's not about absolutes, it's about relative social position, and every little thing that might help get everyone on as level a playing field as possible is, if not quite the equivilant of giving blood or learning CPR, significant.
God, I still can't get over this. How the hell did I not read about all these studies in school? In university? And the book is even decently written, too. Seriously, people: check it out. And on that note, I'll link to something I've been meaning to get round to passing around:
Skin Coloured is intended to be a collaborative, visual exploration of what it is to be non-white in a white culture. Make-up, plasters and tights - even when they’re marked “flesh-coloured” - are not the colour of skin that isn’t white. And whilst white women may have trouble matching these items to their skin, for women who don’t class themselves as white, this inconvenience is symptomatic of a wider problem.
To help illustrate this problem, therefore, Skin Coloured is looking for submissions. Send us photographs that illustrate the inadequacy of provisions for non-white people, and we’ll post them on the blog, and hopefully both those submitting, and those who’re here to learn, will gain something from it.
Further information can be found here. Please help us by reposting this.
Oh, and since humour helps relieve stress, have Hamlet: the Facebook News Feed edition. Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float. Hah!