Occupy Wall Street & Inequality
I’m at a conference this morning and just heard a fantastic talk from Dr. Kate Pickett. She is a social scientist who researches income inequality and its effect on society. She presented the graph above which shows the correlation between income inequality and a number of health and social ills. The index includes low life expectancy, poor literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage pregnancy, obesity, mental illness, drug use and poor social mobility. She also has figures that link the prevalence of each individual problem to levels of inequality in a society. The media has been making a fuss about the diversity of causes represented at the Occupy protests, but it seems to me like there’s a pretty obvious unifying explanation.
