The Spirit Level

The Spirit Level

Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

This lecture was curios and somehow has confirm my personal idea that the income inequality effects our daily life (and as the tables in the PPP showed what was directly affected like: our weight, health and the most important of all our life length).

Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, but in some cases appears to be damaging our health (as the example in the graphics regarding USA)

Every body of us tried to be rich enough. But is this the right way to follow?

I mean the market economy has showed until now to be the right one to follow, however Inequality (and here I refer myself to the Inequality economic distribution) causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes!

So If our Albanian government were concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavian countries, we could each have seven extra weeks holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we would trust each other more.

So, I think that every one of us should think in an optimistic way, with a transformative, rather than revolutionary, programme for making our sick societies healthier. A society in which all citizens can feel free to look each other in the eye and to feel themselvess more valued than at the present.

Br,

Idi SULO