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