The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier

Why does the United States, the richest country in the world, rank twenty-fifth in international life expectancy? Richard Wilkinson, an epidemiologist and a pioneer in exploring inequality's impact on health, shows in The Impact of Inequality that the quality of social relationship is central to the link between greater inequality and poorer health. In wealthy countries, that link is not simply a matter of how your material circumstances determine your quality of life and access to health care; it is how your relative social position makes you feel about those circumstances. Inequality begets stress, and stress begets not just ill health but also a poorer society, plagued with higher levels of violence and depression. Other books have addressed the link between inequality and ill health, but The Impact of Inequality presents a more radical idea: a theory of the psychosocial effect of social stratification, with particular emphasis on health and the quality of social relations, that addresses people's experience of class and inequality and the widespread sense that modern society, despite material success, are social failure.

Richard Wilkinson is Professor of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, and visiting professor and Associate Director of the International Centre for Health and Society at University College London. He is the author of Unhealthy Societies, Mind the Gap, and Poverty and Progress.