Richard Wilkinson’s TED Talk on how economic inequality harms societies outlines how income inequality affects various aspects in the society. According to Wilkinson, Talk there are several variables and determinants that are influenced by the income inequality in the society. One of the variables that he mentioned as being affected by economic inequality is the life expectancy. He argues that the United States which has the highest gross national income in the world is the fourth lowest based on the life expectancy in comparison to the modern countries. This indicates that income inequality can negatively impact on the life expectancy. In essence, the statistics show that countries with the high gross domestic income will have low life expectancy when compared to the countries at the same stage of economic development. However, this can differ from the countries at different stages of development such as the emerging economies where high gross national income can mean high life expectancy.
Another notable social variable that is affected by income equality is the richness of a country. In the comparison of the richness of a nation, it is evident that there is a significant difference in terms of income inequality between the top 1/5 of countries to the bottom 1/5 (Wilkinson, 2011). The statistics show that Singapore is ranked the highest based on income inequality when comparing the advanced nations. However, the top 1/5 was established to be 9.7 times richer than the nation that ranked bottom of 1/5 (Wilkinson, 2011). The United States ranked the second in terms of income inequality in the top 1/5 and this was 8.5 times richer than the bottom 1/5 advanced economies (Wilkinson, 2011). Japan was having the lowest income gap of about 3.4 times followed by the three Scandinavian countries that include Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. This shows that income inequality can play a significant role in determining how rich or a poor a nation.
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Health and social problems is another determinant that is impacted by income inequality. The correlation of the income inequality to social problems is typically the same ( Côté, House & Willer, 2015) . For instance, it was established that in developing nations, economic development and national income are the main factors that fix the social or health problems. However, this is contrary for the advanced nations where income inequality fixes health or social problems. Wilkison proves this by making a comparison of prisoners in different countries. For example, Singapore and the United States had the most prisoners in the advanced countries. He stressed that the statistics are not related to crime but about the harsher or punitive sentencing of the prisoners.
The data provided by Wilkison is not surprising since it is evident that inequality can determine many of the social problems in society. Just like poverty, it is difficult to control inequality as well to determine its consequences in the society ( Cingano, 2014) . The Wilkinson argument is true since it is backed with real statistics and data from the selected economies. Currently, there are various statistics that show how inequality is a widespread problem that is difficult to control in society. As a result, I agree with the argument of Wilkinson regarding the social problems and determinants that are affected by inequality. My thinking has not changed after the decision of income inequality and its impact on society. Many of the arguments for Wilkison are supported with the decisions from Module Two.
References
Cingano, F. (2014). Trends in income inequality and its impact on economic growth.
Côté, S., House, J., & Willer, R. (2015). High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 112 (52), 15838-15843.
Wilkinson R. (2011). TED Talk, “How Economic Inequality Harms Societies." Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson/transcript?language=en on October 28, 2018
