http://www.thenation.com/blog/178708/how-economic-inequality-kills?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=email_nation&utm_campaign=Email%20Nation%20-%2020140306&newsletter=email_nation_thursday#Here is an excerpt:
"First, lets deal with the what do we mean by inequality? question. Therborn finds the definition of equality developed by economist Amartya Sen to be most helpful. Equality, according to Sen, is equality of capability to function fully as a human being. Such a capability clearly entails survival, health (and aids for disability), freedom and knowledge (education) to choose ones life-path, and resources to pursue it.
"Inequalities, then, are multidimensional barriers to human functioning in the world which are violations of human rights. According to Therborn, there are three main types of inequality: vital inequality, which refers to inequalities regarding health outcomes and life expectancies; resource inequality, which refers to economic inequalities of various sorts; and a concept he calls he calls existential inequality, which he defines as the unequal allocation of personhood, i.e., of autonomy, dignity, degrees of freedom, and of rights to respect and self-development.
"The most eye-opening, and disturbing, passages of the book are those that concern vital inequality, or the impact of inequality on life and health. This is where the killing fields of the title comes in. Inequality kills, states Therborn in the books first sentence. Consider these statistics:
§ Between 1990 and 2008, life expectancy of white American men declined by three years, and low-educated white American women saw their life expectancy decline by five years.
§ The life expectancy between the richest and poorest neighborhoods in Glasgow, a difference of twenty-eight years, is the same as that between the UK and Haiti.
§ The UKs famous Whitehall studies indicate that the odds of poor health and premature death increased as the employees status in the civil service bureaucracy decreasedeven controlling for use of alcohol, tobacco and other factors.
§ The restoration of capitalism to the former Soviet Union is associated with a stunning 4 million excess deaths there.
§ A number of studies show that unemployment is associated with a significant number of excess deaths, even when controlling for other health indicators.
"Those examples and many others that Therborn cites, which make the correlation between hierarchy and death all too clear, are harrowing. (Therborn wields a masterful command of an array of fascinating statistcs). Yet high inequality societies are far from inevitable. Therborn argues that capitalism and capitalists can, under certain circumstances, be taught how to behave. Income inequality in the Nordic countries in the early 1980s was about the same as it was in the Communist bloc. Egalitarianism, he claims, continues to hold a powerful appeal, and there are at least three major reasons why high levels of economic inequality tend to be deeply troubling to many people.