Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

INEQUALITY IS THE CAUSE OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL PROBLEMSConsensus?For over twenty years, Richard Wilkinson has been theleading proponent of the theory that there is a link betweenincome inequality and health, but other researchers havealso tested the hypothesis. There have been conflictingresults, but a review of 98 studies, published in 2004, concludedthat ‘The evidence suggests that income inequalityis not associated with population health differences – atleast not as a general phenomenon – among wealthy nations’(Lynch et al. 2004). This is also the view of the academicswho summarised the evidence in the OxfordHandbook of Economic Inequality (2009) and concludedthat (Leigh et al. 2009):the relationship between income inequality and health iseither non-existent or too fragile to show up in a robustlyestimated panel specification. The best cross-nationalstudies now uniformly fail to find a statistically reliablerelationship between economic inequality and longevity… Our reading of the evidence is that most studiesof health and inequality find no statistically significantrelationship either across countries or over time.Other claims made in The Spirit Level have not receivedanywhere near as much attention among researchers asthe health-inequality hypothesis. Aside from some of theirclaims about violent crime, Wilkinson and Pickett’s theoriesare supported mainly, and often exclusively, by studieswritten by themselves. This was acknowledged by Richard159