Monday Reading, June 27th

In “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger”, Wilkinson and Pickett explain that these days, people are losing their true happiness by feeling relative deficiency caused from comparing with other people’s life in unequal society and doesn’t recognize what is real valuable factor in their life while people are trying to get individual material affluences. This situation indicates negative outcome of unequal society because while people are constantly pursuing their material richness, material richness doesn’t guarantee happiness of people’s life mentally and physically on today. This condition is supported by explanation of Wilkinson and Pickett that “…as countries get richer, further increases in average living standards do less and less for health” (6).

In spite of that fact, people are still concerning on what is their social location in society by comparing with live of other people. One criteria of this is income. According to relative income, people evaluate their location in a society; Income inequality in a society eventually negative influences on health problem because the poor can feel relative deficiency in social location compared with the wealthy people’s life, so one of the important factor deciding happiness of a society isn’t degree of wealth of that society but how income in divided between people in a society. (18, 19, and 20) In addition, as well as health problems, diverse troubles in a society are made from unequal distribution of wealth because people feel relative deficiency of their wealth when compared with wealth of other people: “The problems in rich countries are not caused by the society not being rich enough…but by the scale of material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society” (25). Thus, from this relative mental deficiency, social inequality isn’t ignorable problem because people made diverse troubles in a society as well as hurting their health: “Not only do large inequalities produce all the problems associated with social differences and the divisive class prejudices which go with them, but…it also weakens community life, reduces trust, and increases violence” (45). Thus, it is important having diverse efforts to decrease inequality in a society to make healthy society, especially in terms of governmental policy.