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Date: | Fri Jun 23 10:14:32 2006 |
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While I hae no doubt that stress affects health
negatively, your contention here does not seem to be
generally true. A health economist I know claims that
people with higher incomes feel less stress becuase
they feel safer- they live in safer neighborhoods,
spend more on security and safety devices and so on.
Of course, people who feel threatened endure stress,
but this is not a necessary consequence of inequality.
It depends upon the degree to which inequality is seen
as unjustified. I would expect that wealthy elites in
France and Russia were quite stressed prior the the
revolutions aganst them, but these are unique
historica episodes. In other instances wealth
ineqality is more acceptable. Hence the wealthy feel
less stress in these circumstnces. The problem you
speak of would therefore depend upon not only the
objective facts (the actual measured inquality) but
also the subjective interpretion of these acts (the
prevailing ideological mindset) which determines
whether or not inquality is acceptable. to say that
inequality genertes resentment and stress assumes a
prevailing ideology or mindset whereby the perceived
source of the existing inequality
is illegitimate. This assumption will be valid in
sometmes, but not always. Popularity of an ideology
that accepts existing sources of inequality means that
the rich do not have to "exert control to protect
their privileges from the poor".
Given the current American mindset I doubt that BIll
Gates worries at all about losing his fortune.
Americans do disagree about such things, but most
Americans are not about to expropriate billionares.
Mindsets change, but the fact remains that the problem
you speak of exists only in specific circumstances.
Doug MacKenzie
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