I've always been a big fan of fairness. Whether the idea that the
law should apply equally to everyone, or that the rungs of the ladder of success shouldn't be tougher to
climb for the poor than for the rich or that everyone should have access to
healthcare are all pretty obvious. What I didn't realise, until I read well down in an article entitled
Advantage: The Brits that a lack of fairness is not only harmful to the poor and underprivileged, but that it harms everyone in the system.
In other words, fairness isn't just a good idea for some Christian/liberal/feel-good reasons, it's important for the health of the society at large.
Follow me across the flip for the important excerpts from Post article and more comments.
The article starts by explaining that the British have better health - at all levels of society - than we do, even though the standard diet in England is pretty awful; the author mentions fish and chips and shepherd's pie, though I'd suspect that burgers, shake and supersized fries would be even worse. And of course the startling fact that the UK spends about half the amount per capita on health care. So what makes the difference?
Both the U.S. and the U.K. have larger rich-poor gaps than many other countries, but Britain's is relatively smaller, which may explain why its middle-aged people are healthier than their American counterparts.
Wilkinson points out that in the United States, where life expectancy at birth is about 77, the top 10 percent earn 16 times as much as the poorest 10 percent. In the United Kingdom, where life expectancy is about a year longer, the top tier earns 14 times as much. But in Sweden and Norway, where the top 10 percent earn only six times as much as the poorest, life expectancy reaches about 80. In Japan, the richest earn 4.5 times as much, and life expectancy is 82.
And so here, buried in the depths of this article, we come to the real crux: A society with less income inequality is healthier. Why is this? I have no idea. The author posits something about lower violence in countries with greater equality, which may be true. Or that there may be lower levels of stress in egalitarian societies. However, one has to realize that correlation is not causation and I can't imagine that living in Japan is so much less stressful than in the US. So, who knows if lessening the inequality of life would actually improve the health of our citizens. But it is interesting to see that the pattern does hold in the US as well. The article goes on:
The same pattern can be seen within the United States. Some states -- New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin, Utah -- where income differences are smaller "have death rates as low as Britain," explains Wilkinson in an e-mail. Death rates are highest in states with the biggest income differences -- Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Alabama, Kentucky.
The past 5 years have been nothing but a wholesale attempt to increase inequality, to squeeze out the middle class, and to ensure that the wealthy stay wealthy. This is a recipe for disaster, and it will be disastrous not only for the poor, but for everyone living in this society. The Democrats should take this up as one of their primary rallying cries (John Edwards made a good start on it during his run) and the data shown above can be a powerful weapon in making sure that this is not dismissed as some liberal, feel-good blather.