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This is a big contribution to this debate. Thanks Michelle!
Quick thought though:
A life expectancy gap is bad and efforts to narrow it are laudable.
Unless the solution is to kill old people to harvest their organs to save
people who are dying younger.
I'm just pointing out that an income gap being bad doesn't mean that
forced redistribution is good (or even necessarily helps the poor in
absolute terms).
--- \/ FROM Michelle Sternthal AT 07.09.01 10:11 (Saturday) \/ ---
> I have remained silent for too long! I have to admit, that as a sociologist
,
> the notion that income inequality is good for society is anathema to our
> discipline (which is probably one reason sociologists and economists have a
> noted rivalry).
>
> But putting intellectual/philosophical disagreements aside, from a purely
> rhetorical/debate perspective, I have been somewhat frustrated by the notable
> absence of empirical evidence used to back up the arguments that income
> equality is good for society or at least "fair." Since we are loyal
> positivists who embrace the scientific method, allow me to introduce some
> research on the matter.
>
> Since my area of interest, forgive me if I focus on the health effects of
> income inequality. A question which has preoccupied health
> researchers/sociologists, and even health economists is whether, indeed, the
> growing gap between the rich and poor is good for a society's health (let 's
> use mortality, a nice objective indicator. Dying young is less good than
> dying old, all else being equal).
> There are reasons to believe that income inequality hurts everyone,
> even those not on the bottom. Let's assume two states have the same average
> income-- $50,000. In one state, the distribution is pretty wide, so there
> are people really poor and people really rich; in another, the distribution
> hovers around the $50,000 mark. Which state would we want to live in, from
a
> health perspective at least? Research suggests that it would SUCK to live
in
> the first for a couple of reasons. First off, in an unequal society, you
are
> much more likely to be in the bottom than on the top, and being poor is a
> well-established cause of bad health. Second, David Marmot, an
> epidemiologist, has argued that simply being in a stratified society can harm
> health. A twenty-five-year follow-up from the Whitehall study found that
the
> higher the position in the occupational hierarchy in Britain, the lower the
> mortality rate from all causes, from coronary heart disease, and from a range
> of diseases not related to smoking Note that NONE of these men was poor in
> any usual sense of that word. They were all in stable, office-based
> employment in and around Whitehall, London. (Marmot, "Inequalities in
> Health," New England Journal of Medicine (12 July 2001): 134 136). Here ,
> relative income deprivation mattered more than absolute.
>
> But even beyond that, it seems that a society with large income inequality
> hurts those at the top. One of the more famous studies, by George Kaplan of
> U. of Michigan and colleagues (1996) examined income inequality among the
> states. Kaplan et al. showed that that income share held by the least
> well-off 50 percent of the population in each state was strongly correlated
> with the state's mortality in 1990 (r=3D-.62, p association was not affected
by median state income, was consistent across
> age groups, and ALL income brackets. Moreover, areas with high income
> inequality have not only high mortality but high crime rates, especially of
> homicide. Such factors can affect everyone, not just the poorest ( M. Wilson
> and M. Daly, "Life Expectancy, Economic Inequality, Homicide, and
> Reproductive Timing in Chicago Neighbourhoods," British Medical Journal (
> April 1997): 1271 1274). T
>
> But even assuming that the "utility" gained in terms of health for rich
> people was unaffected by the distribution of income, it may still make
> "economic" sense to have a less unequal society. It may be more efficient
> and maximizing everyone's utility. Angus Deaton, a British health
> economist, has shown that there is a nonlinear increase in probability of
> dying with decreasing income (Deaton, "Health Inequality and Economic
> Development",Working paper, Princeton University Research Program in
> Development Studies and Center for Health and Wellbeing, 2001). Meaning,
> that if, at low levels of GNP, a small increase corresponds to a large
> increase in longevity, then taking some money from rich people will have less
> effect on their mortality than giving the same money to the poor will affect
> theirs. Therefore, other things being equal, a population with more
> egalitarian distribution of income will have better health than another with
> the same average income but greater income inequality.
>
>
> Here are some other articles attached for more discussion on the matter.
>
> --Michelle
>
--
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves - - search://"Daniel Reeves"
"Strategy: A long-range plan whose merit cannot be evaluated until
sometime after those creating it have left the organization."
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