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Showing posts from February, 2010

Income inequality is strongly related to health and social problems

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Coert Visser, 2010 The Relationship between Equality and Thriving Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two English epidemiologists, have written  The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger , a provocative book on how high levels of inequality in societies is harmful for everyone within them. Their research shows that while economic policies in developed countries stress the importance of economic growth, economic growth is only an important determinant of the degree to which societies thrive up to a certain point. After a certain point the contribution of further economic growth begins to create only diminishing marginal returns: the relationship between economic growth and certain objectively measurable outcomes, like life expectancy, level off (see figure 1).