New research has helped answer a nagging question among scientists who study population health: How much time has to elapse before a society growing more unequal starts paying the price — in higher rates of illness and death? The best estimate: five years after inequality spurts.
From Manhattan to Monaco, the world’s deepest pockets are fashioning themselves into a new global tribe of footloose affluent souls. The business press has dubbed them the “stateless super rich.” The rest of us get to gawk at their excess — and wind up footing the ultimate bill.
So few Americans are cheering America’s rising productivity, a new Economic Policy Institute report suggests, because so few Americans are sharing in the new wealth that boosts in productivity have been creating over the past three decades. That wealth has gone largely to the top.
Bits and bytes would be doing a lot more to help make our lives less nasty, brutish, and short if we shared wealth as routinely as bandwidth. From San Francisco, a new lesson in that reality.
Even rich people sooner or later have to drive over bridges. So why aren’t the wealthy screaming about America’s inadequate — and increasingly unsafe — basic infrastructure?
We obsess over health care in the United States, because we all want to be healthy. In the process, new evidence suggests, we’re ignoring the social dynamics that actually determine our health.
Psychologists have been tracking the phenomenon of “biased self-perception” for years now. But new research suggests that they’ve been blaming the wrong social culprit. Levels of economic inequality, not core culture, seems to be driving how we project ourselves to others.
Any resemblance between democracy and U.S. Presidential politics has become, in our new super PAC era, purely coincidental. The only mystery: Why aren’t billionaires making even bigger bets?
Today’s swaggering rich are increasingly stuffing their dollars into investments that do America’s 99 percent not one whit of good.
TED Talk: We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.