Extract from Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett’s The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being
I took two valuable ideas away from the quote below:
1. It is more psychologically and socially damaging living in wealthy, unequal countries than poor, more equal countries.
2. It is more psychologically and socially damaging to be among those who see you as inferior than it is to be excluded by them.
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| A cartoon making light of the serious psycho-social effects of relative deprivation. |
“The effects of low social status are often confused with the effects of poverty. It is often assumed that deprivation and poverty affect people primarily through the direct effects of exposure to poor material circumstances, such as damp or overcrowded housing, low quality food and so on. However, even though material standards become less important for their own sake as societies become richer, they remain important as indicators of people’s ability to take part in the normal life of society and avoid ‘social exclusion’. This is why poverty in developed countries is now almost always measured in relative terms. For instance, the European Union defines poverty as living on less than 60 percent of the median income in each country.
This is a recognition that what matters is how your material standards compare with others – your relative deprivation. Although the predominant view focuses on ‘social exclusion’, what is actually most demeaning about the experience of poverty is living in circumstances that define you – in most peoples eyes – as inferior to others.”
~Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, ‘The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being’
Sometimes it’s just better to walk away.
One of my favourite short songs:
Link: Counting Crows - Walkaways
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