The Guardian, June 3, 2018: Is rising inequality responsible for greater stress, anxiety and mental illness?
In 2009, when the world was still absorbing the shock of the previous year’s financial crisis, a book called The Spirit Level was published. Written by a couple of social epidemiologists, it argued that a whole raft of data conclusively showed that societies with greater inequality also had a range of more pronounced social problems, including higher rates of violence, murder, drug abuse, imprisonment, obesity and teenage pregnancies.
Given that naked profit motive had just taken the world to the brink of economic collapse, it was a good moment to take stock and reflect on where rising inequality was leading us. For the previous 30 years a broad consensus had operated in politics, particularly in the US and Britain, that as long as those at the bottom were being lifted by the rising tide of wealth, then it didn’t much matter that those at the top were rising much faster.
