How economic inequality harms societies | Richard Wilkinson (2)

Interestingly,

some parallel work going on in social psychology:

some people reviewed 208 different studies

in which volunteers had been invited

into a psychological laboratory

and had their stress hormones,

their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured.

And in the review,

what they were interested in seeing

is what kind of stresses

most reliably raise levels of cortisol,

the central stress hormone.

And the conclusion was

it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat --

threats to self-esteem or social status

in which others can negatively judge your performance.

Those kind of stresses

have a very particular effect

on the physiology of stress.

Now we have been criticized.

Of course, there are people who dislike this stuff

and people who find it very surprising.

I should tell you though

that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data,

we never pick and choose data.

We have an absolute rule

that if our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at,

it goes into the analysis.

Our data source decides

whether it's reliable data,

we don't.

Otherwise that would introduce bias.

What about other countries?

There are 200 studies

of health in relation to income and equality

in the academic peer-reviewed journals.

This isn't confined to these countries here,

hiding a very simple demonstration.

The same countries,

the same measure of inequality,

one problem after another.

Why don't we control for other factors?

Well we've shown you that GNP per capita

doesn't make any difference.

And of course, others using more sophisticated methods in the literature

have controlled for poverty and education

and so on.

What about causality?

Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality.

We spend a good bit of time.

And indeed, people know the causal links quite well

in some of these outcomes.

The big change in our understanding

of drivers of chronic health

in the rich developed world

is how important chronic stress from social sources

is affecting the immune system,

the cardiovascular system.

Or for instance, the reason why violence

becomes more common in more unequal societies

is because people are sensitive to being looked down on.

I should say that to deal with this,

we've got to deal with the post-tax things

and the pre-tax things.

We've got to constrain income,

the bonus culture incomes at the top.

I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees

in any way we can.

I think the take-home message though

is that we can improve the real quality of human life

by reducing the differences in incomes between us.

Suddenly we have a handle

on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies,

and that's exciting.

Thank you.

(Applause)