Equality works best: Courtesy of "Corporations_ate_my_BABY!" from MySpace

A most excellent blog from: Corporations Ate My Baby

 

January 8, 2010 - Friday 

A More Equal Society Always Does Better Category: News and Politics Last year, relieved Bush was out, I settled in to enjoy the improvement of our society. Well... that chance never came as the insanity of the weak minded got equal time with policy debate and eventually had overtaken it. We had no ability to discuss let alone debate policy in any meaningful way without having to be screamed at by partisan ORCS shouting about NONEXISTENT threats. Then I saw my friends get irrational too. I define irrational as taking out a crystal ball looking into it - seeing the future - then stating it as some kind of FACT. I admit, I have done that especially back in 2005, but we were under duress. Bush was shutting down the democratic society... not "was going to" but WAS ACTUALLY DOING IT. Since January 20, 2009, things have only been getting freer, better and more democratic. Sure the "change" has been slow. The CHANGE is happening however. I get that Liberals can be impatient... they want everything fixed in 30 minutes with commercials ala the Brady Bunch. I understand. But we missed a year of meaningful discussions of POLICY. It was when I heard these lovely British guests on the Ron Reagan (jr) Radio Show yesterday that I began to see why people still have trouble thinking clearly... and so in line with my desire to make 2010 more affirmative and positive even in my cranky blogging I offer you this amazing research: ===== click for Audio of Richard and Kate: http://download.guardian.co.uk/audio/kip/standalone/books/1236684481340/6627/gdn.bks.090310.pm.spirit.mp3 The Book: http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies-Stronger/dp/1608190366/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262983920&sr=8-1 It is well established that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. Now a groundbreaking book, based on thirty years’ research, takes an important step past this idea. The Spirit Level shows that there is one common factor that links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Not wealth; not resources; not culture, climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore, more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them—the well-off as well as the poor. The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level reveals striking differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost every modern social problem—ill-health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness—is more likely to occur in a less-equal society. This is why America, by most measures the richest country on earth, has per capita shorter average lifespan, more cases of mental illness, more obesity, and more of its citizens in prison than any other developed nation. Wilkinson and Pickett lay bare the contradiction between material success and social failure in today’s world, but they do not simply provide a diagnosis of our woes. They offer readers a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society. The Spirit Level is pioneering in its research, powerful in its revelations, and inspiring in its conclusion: Armed with this new understanding of why communities prosper, we have the tools to revitalize our politics and help all our fellow citizens, from the bottom of the ladder to the top. Here is a discussion of this research ... it's eye opening: We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, 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'd trust each other more. Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don't soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why. The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality 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; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet's resources. Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years' standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny. They use the information to create a series of scatter-graphs whose patterns look nearly identical, yet which document the prevalence of a vast range of social ills. On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country's level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable "low" end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable "high" end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between. This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world's richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence - murder, in particular - that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality - within a country, within states and Continued Here What do you think my friends? Can you see the argument for a move towards what Europe and Japan call "Social Democracy"?