There is a steep rise in health from very poor to lower middle class, but it flattens out in the upper SES range
Income inequality is a strong predictor of poor health because it is about being made to feel poor. However, moving up the SES ladder is associated with better health (by whatever measure you are using), but each incremental step gets smaller. A mathematical way of stating this is that the SES/health relationship forms an asymptote—going from very poor to lower middle class involves a steep rise in health that then tends to flatten out as you go into the upper SES range. So if you examine wealthy nations, you are examining countries where SES averages out to somewhere in the flat part of the curve.
Therefore, compare two equally wealthy nations (that is to say, which have the same average SES on the flat part of the curve) that differ in income inequality. By definition, the nation with the greater inequality will have more data points coming from the steeply declining part of the curve, and thus must have a lower average level of health. In this scenario, the income inequality phenomenon doesn’t really reflect some feature of society as a whole, but merely emerges, as a mathematical inevitability, from individual data points. However, some fairly fancy mathematical modeling studies show that this artifact can’t explain all of the health-income inequality relationship in the United States.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Chapter 17. The View from the Bottom (p. 527). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Psychology / Neuropsychology / Social Psychology / Medicine / Politics / Economics Status:☀️