Thoughts?
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence
correlation does not equal causation - do they even provide a theory as to what kind of causal relationship may exist?
Obesity=wealth.
The second chart lacks Soviet Union.
Here:
- Correlation does not prove causality. What reasons are there for thinking that inequality is the cause of such a wide range of health and social problems?
To suggest that these relationships are causal does not involve a major departure from what we know already. Within countries we know that all the components of our Index of Health and Social Problems are strongly related to social status: the further down the social ladder the more common they become. The new part of the picture is simply that if you stretch out the social status differences all the problems related to social status become more common. Rather than postulating entirely new causal processes we are therefore only providing a bit more information about the relationships that have always been recognised.
People who have studied the graphs on this web site and in The Spirit Level carefully will have noticed that there is a clear tendency for countries which do badly on one outcome to do badly on others. We show evidence that 10 or 12 different problems tend to move together. That implies that they share an underlying cause. The association between inequality and our Index of Health and Social Problems is very close and no one has yet suggested an alternative.
Lastly, as the different chapters in our book show, many of the causal processes leading from inequality to the various health and social problems are already known. For example, the effects of social status on health have been demonstrated among monkeys in experiments which kept diet and material conditions the same while altering social status by moving animals into new groups) and the effects of chronic stress on the immune and cardiovascular systems are increasingly well understood. Similarly, violence is more common in more unequal societies (where status competition is intensified) because it is so often triggered by people feeling looked down on, disrespected and humiliated.
So in other words, no.
It’s pretty steeped in vagaries, methinks. Does it identify causes of gross inequality (e.g., the State), or is the USA = capitalism = inequality = suffering the rationale underlying this report? Even so, just because inequalities of some kinds are reduced, it does not follow that competition is thereby eliminated or mitigated; Nozick made the point that as the areas in which one can compete become progressively more delimited, competition in those areas (e.g. looks, intelligence, athletic performance &c.) becomes more intense, so wealth inequalities - far from intensifying competition - widen the spheres in which competition is possible. Sounds plausible to me, or at least as plausible as what this study said. And anyway, where is status more prevalent? In politicised oligarchies, like social democracies, one would think, where political connections are what make or break you &c., like Russia nowadays, in short in most banana republics (including many of the “respectable” western democracies…)
Those three graphs are nonsense. Notice for instance that both the US and Japan are industrial/commercial societies but one has the highest rate of people in jail and the other has the lowest.
Glad I live in Japan. Anyway,
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For infant mortality, looks like homogeneity in the population could be the factor - Japan and Scandanavia (homogeneous) vs. USA (melting pot) is most striking. I wonder if there is a genetic/biological explanation for that.
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Same correlation for prison pop.
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Japan is a major exception to the wealth aspect; the reason Japanese are thin is because of food culture and general culture. USA has huge portions, and purveyors pride themselves on quantity, so it’s largely food-cultural.
As for income equality, shouldn’t it correlate positively to economic freedom but negatively to overall wealth?
The War on Drugs in the USA explains the large Prison population.
As for the graph, note how the poor today are better off than the rich of 1900.
See, this is just a crude and unsophisticated, I would have expected, at the least, some sort of multivariate regression or even less, a link to some sort of peer reviewed journals (although, at least they provided some p-values). It looks to me as if they’re handpacking the tests they’re doing also, providing the data that fits their theory.
As pointed out, obesity and wealth are positively correlated. If you don’t have money eat, there’s little chance of you getting fat (Yuri Maltsev said that in the USSR it was easy to spot a government spy: they were fat). So, as far as I can tell, the last graph shown here is nothing more than an appeal to the emotions.
Another thing I find amusing is that they completely ignore the type of government in each of the countries. For example, they said there’s huge wealth inequalities in Portugal, the USA, Australia, the UK, Greece, Italy and Ireland. And yet, with the possible exception of the USA, all of these countries are social democracies. They can’t have their cake and eat it to, either social democracy alleviates inequality, or inequality isn’t such a big deal. Look where the relatively capitalist Switzerland comes on all of those graphs, for example.
I’d also like to know how they calculate the measure of inequality with more depth. For example, Portugal may well have a very unequal distribution of wealth (as somebody who lives here, trust me, it does). But I’d rather be a poor person in Portugal than a poor person in the UK any day of the week. I’m not sure how they calculate the income inequality in country like this where quite a bit of the population live in small rural communities.
Why aren’t there any third world countries on the graph. The whole thing’s been cherry picked. I’d like to see an analysis of prison population vs. spending on justice system. I’d like to see and analysis of mortality rates vs. private health care spending. And obesity and welfare spending. I’m pretty sure you would have stronger correlations.
This is the typical garbage created by college kids who take introduction to econometrics. They correlate shoe size and propensity to consume. America has the highest standard of living in the world. The American who makes $30,000 a year is wealthier than the Brit who makes $40,000 a year. Income per capita does not show wealth. You’re showing cultural differences, nothing more, nothing less. Americans culturally have had a love affair with fast food, they have insane drug laws which imprisons millions every year because they decide to smoke weed; and many nations blatantly lie, or don’t count children who die during birth, in order to make their results more favorable, Sweden does it all the time.
Does that surprise you? Japan is a classical example for a ethnically homgenious society, while the US, while founded as a country for Whites, has become a multicultural society nowadays.
I should bring the stats on corruption ratings for different countries as well.
The other interesting one is the correlation between crime and poverty. Now does poverty cause crime, does crime cause poverty or is there maybe a third (or fourth) reason for both.
It doesn’t surprise me. I know that the US has the highest number of people in jail because in some ways the US is pretty totalitarian, is run by religious fundamentalists and is a racist society. So, the subhumans get sent to jail for different reasons, none of which having anything to do with ‘justice’.
The idea that Japan has a low rate of incarceration because it’s ‘ethnically homogeneous’ is sheer nonsense. They have less people in jail simply because they are in that respect less brutal than other ‘civilized’ people.
LOL. So, the black slaves were white eh ? Do you need a basic history book or something ?
Juan, you should read and think about what has been said before responding.
Torsten, you should give up racism and conservatism. It is beyond silly.
lol.
Okay so if income inequality correlates with babies dying, then they shouldn’t have included Singapore on that chart. Of course they are displaying trends.
i’d like to see how they wieghted income inequality. In the US with 50 states, of course there are massive gaps in lifestyle. No other country has as many millionares and billionares as America, so i think that can really throw off any kind of perspective lens.
You think your wordisms are smart, Juan? What I said has got some vast historical backing, your responses are only childish.
Unlike most here, I know what I am talking about first hand.
Juan, there is nothing either racist or conservative about the assertion that close proximity between different cultural groups is an indicator for societal unrest. That’s just the obvious conclusion based on the majority of data ever collected on the topic.
LOL! From the first chart I get that we should be more like Singapore (not what the creators of those charts wanted, eh?). And from all of these charts, I get that correlation does not equal causation. You can’t reliably say that income inequality causes any of those differences!