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

Comments

[ford_prefect42]

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.

[liveonearth]

Yeah, not really surprising that his data was skewed in this way. Everybody's pushing something these days...

[ford_prefect42]

Aren't they just.

I was just thinking though... It's not actual *disparity* that would have the physiological effects, it'd be *percieved* disparity. All the discussion of the disparity and the magnitude of it could easily *invoke* the physiological effects of a great disparity whether or not one existed. It's so hard to separate causes from effects sometimes.

[liveonearth]

True enough. Perception is what matters most, and it is only faintly anchored in reality.

[bobby1933]

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.

[liveonearth]

You're welcome. ...Did you see the other comment, that suggests that his estimation of the income disparity in the US is biased by not considering aid to the poor? I'm interested to know where in the spectrum you think we fall.

[bobby1933]

No, i have not seen the other comment, and so i am not responding to it. I do think that many people who talk about the poor and what they are or are not getting are simply talking bullshit. I trust Wilkinson's data to have considered the relevant factors, and more egalitarian countries also practice charity, maybe even more so

[liveonearth]

What strikes me about this is my perception, based on one of his early slides comparing communities in Britain, that what matters most is the most local of disparities, not even so much the disparity within a country. What I take from this is that if one lives in such a way as to not be "less than" others on a daily basis, one is less likely to be stressed out by one's status even if it is low. So if the poor live among the poor, they may actually be quite happy and not so stressed. I have witnessed this in my travels, for example among poor Mexican farmers for whom it is no big deal to not possess an iphone: they have food, family and home, and it is all they need. When left to their own devices they are grateful and not overly stressed. It is where the interfaces occur that the stress occurs

Inequality

[bobby1933]

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.

Re: Inequality

[liveonearth]

Yes. That is also intuitive but well worth bringing to the front of our awareness. As The Long Emergency commences, those with nothing now will have less than nothing in short order, whereas those who are well set up because of accumulated wealth, and the bonus that wealth begets wealth, will continue rule the world for generations to come.