Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"The book blisters with research. . . This is a book that puts the numbers to a psychological truth: inequality is the real enemy." —Polly Toynbee,
The Guardian"We need to be told what we know, instinctively, about what makes a good society. Wilkinson’s book tells us, and shows us that our social instincts have become a science." —Prospect
"A powerful and provocative piece of scholarship . . . presents a challenge to us all to improve popular health by tackling economic and social inequalities." —Lisa Berkman, Harvard School of Public Health
Synopsis
Comparing the United States with other market democracies and one state with another, this book offers irrefutable evidence that unequal societies create poor health, more social conflict, and more violence. Richard Wilkinson, a pioneering social scientist, addresses the growing feeling—so common in the United States—that modern societies, despite their material success, are social failures. The Impact of Inequality explains why inequality has such devastating effects on the quality and length of our lives.
Wilkinson shows that inequality leads to stress, stress creates sickness on the individual and mass level, and overall society suffers widespread unhappiness and high levels of violence, depression, and mistrust across the social spectrum. The evidence he presents is incontrovertible: social and political equality are essential to improve life for everyone. Wilkinson argues that even small reductions in inequality can make an important difference—for, as this book explains, social relations are always built on material foundations.
About the Author
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.