Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health

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Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health (Revised) Pub. Date: 8/28/2006 Publisher: New Press, The
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Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health (Older Edition) Pub. Date: 7/1/2002 Publisher: New Press, The

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Overview

A celebrated analysis of inequality's impact on human health.

Praised by The Lancet, which called it a "lucid account that .deserves to be read by everybody interested in the politics of health," and the New England Journal of Medicine, The Health of Nations provides powerful evidence that growing inequality is undermining health, welfare, and community life in America. The book's prizewinning authors also make an urgent argument for social justice as a necessary vehicle for the betterment of society.

The Health of Nations is the synthesis of years of groundbreaking research on the connections between social structures and health and welfare, and one which Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen says "has much to offer in reshaping the agenda of the debate on health care." Now in a revised edition which includes a new afterword, it dramatically demonstrates that growing inequalities, far from being a benign by-product of capitalism, threaten the very freedoms that economic development is thought to bring about.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Following up on studies like The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health is a timely summation of recent economic research that shows how extreme prosperity always comes at the expense of others' poverty and perhaps of one's own well-being. Ichiro Kawachi, director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health, and Harvard School of Public Health professor Bruce P. Kennedy focus on how (as any Buddhist will tell you) "merely wishing for more money seems to lead to unhappiness" and, looking internationally, ask "are we happier and healthier [as Americans] as a result of all our consumption and accumulation?" Their counterintuitive answer is a resounding "no."

Two Harvard School of Public Health professors will irk conservatives with their argument that US capitalism generates disparities that compromise its citizens' health. They chart the correlation between national wealth and life expectancy, and the "Robin Hood index" of proportion of income that would need to be redistributed to achieve equal income distribution; and discuss attitudes in the US, Japan, and Sweden toward government measures to reduce inequality. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Kirkus Reviews

The First World is fat but not happy, and its consumerist ways are spreading like an epidemic to the farthest reaches of the globe. Poverty is a reality even in America, write Harvard School of Public Health researchers Kawachi and Kennedy. But, they maintain, "in an affluent society such as the United States, there are diminishingly few things that the poor cannot afford that would make a difference between life and death." In other words, the economic challenge most Americans face today is not having the wherewithal to get things that they need, but instead having the means to get the things they want: a second television, perhaps, or a boat, or a house in the Hamptons. However, this unprecedented success comes at a cost in terms of social equity and the distribution of goods and services around the world: 200 years ago, the difference in per-capita income between the richest nation, the United Kingdom, and the poorest, China, was a mere $1,200 (in dollars adjusted to 1990), whereas today the difference between the richest nation, the US, and the poorest, Sierra Leone, is more than 25 times that. Inequality is also on the rise within the First World, with wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: in the US, "the incomes of the bottom 60 percent of households have stagnated in real terms during the last twenty-five years, whereas the rich have continued to pull ahead." This inequality, the authors suggest, is something of a disease and in all events has not made the rich any happier, for all their shiny toys; rather, the uneven distribution of wealth yields isolation in the form of gated communities, social angst in the fear of falling behind, and bigger and bigger waistlines asAmericans of all social classes become more and more indolent. More diagnosis than prescription, but the epidemiological view of swollen-wallet sickness makes for highly interesting reading.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781565845824
Publisher: New Press, The
Publication date: 7/1/2002
Edition description: Older Edition
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 8.30 (w) x 5.80 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Ichiro Kawachi is the director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health and professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Bruce P. Kennedy is a social epidemiologist, formerly at the Harvard School of Public Health. They live in Boston.

1	Economic goals and "the permanent problem of the human race"	9
2	Prosperity and happiness	29
3	Prosperity and health	43
4	Keeping up with the [Dow] Joneses	65
5	Inequality : the private and public price we pay	85
6	Stepping on the hedonic treadmill	109
7	The social costs of consumption	137
8	Politics and health	161
9	Conclusion	191

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Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health

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