TEDxRainier – Stephen Bezruchka
In this video, Stephen Bezruchka discusses the health of average Americans compared to people in other countries. He finds that health and wealth are intricately connected. Highlights include:
- We spend half of all the money spent worldwide on health care, and we spend it mostly during the last few years of life.
- We stand 49th among nations in the world ranking for length of life.
- We live 3.9 years less than people in the healthiest nation, Japan.
- For those over 50 yrs. old, length of life has been declining compared to other countries.
- In almost a third of U.S. counties, life expectancy for American women is declining.
- Stress is the tobacco of the 21st Century.
- Over 200 studies demonstrate that the greater the income gap, the worse health becomes… the medicine that would heal us is a healthy dose of "Robin Hood."
- What about the quality of our shorter-lived lives? Measures of happiness and well-being have been declining in the last 40 years, especially for women.
- We consume half of the world’s anti-depressants.
- Our shorter-lived lives are not healthy ones.
- Most of the longer-lived countries smoke more than we do. Why are people smoking more and living longer? What matters most in producing a healthy, long life is the nature of "caring and sharing" relationships in society. These matter more than exercising, not smoking, and eating well.
- Caring and sharing are closely linked to the economic gap between rich and poor. The gap has reached record levels over the last 35 years. During this time, our choices have limited our potential for achieving greater health.
About this video by TEDxTalks
Dr. Stephen Bezruchka seeks to expose why health disparities among nations around the globe are at record highs and empowers people to address the socioeconomic inequities that have most impact on the health of populations. He is especially interested in how people in the USA don’t live very long or healthy lives… Bezruchka worked in clinical medicine for 35 years. He received the UW School of Public Health’s 2002 Outstanding Teacher Award and the 2008 Faculty Community Service Award. He founded the Population Health Forum to raise awareness of, promote dialogue about, and explore how political, economic and social inequalities interact to reduce the overall health status of our society. TEDxRainier is an independently produced TED event held in Seattle, Washington.
****
In this next video, Richard Wilkinson talks about How economic inequality harms societies. He discusses why societies with huge income gaps are "somehow going wrong" and shows the real effects of widening wealth gaps on people’s health, lifespans, and basic values such as trust.
Transcript:
You all know the truth of what I’m going to say. I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. What’s changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. I’m going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I’m going to be showing you exist.
But first, see what a miserable lot we are. (Laughter) I want to start though with a paradox. This shows you life expectancy against gross national income — how rich countries are on average. And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. There’s no suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. This, again, is life expectancy.
These are small areas of England and Wales — the poorest on the right, the richest on the left. A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. So income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them. The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we’re looking at relative income or social position, social status — where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. And as soon as you’ve got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger or smaller?
And that’s what I’m going to show you. I’m not using any hypothetical data. I’m taking data from the U.N. — it’s the same as the World Bank has — on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies. The measure we’ve used, because it’s easy to understand and you can download it, is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country. And you see in the more equal countries on the left — Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden — the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. But on the more unequal end — U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore — the differences are twice as big. On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies.
Now I’m going to show you what that does to our societies. We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder. Internationally comparable data on life expectancy, on kids’ maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness — which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction — and social mobility. We put them all in one index. They’re all weighted equally. Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things. And there, you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I’ve just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data. The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. It’s an extraordinarily close correlation. But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there’s nothing there, no correlation anymore.
Richard Wilkinson studies the social effects of income inequality and how social forces affect health. In The Spirit Level, a book Richard coauthored with Kate Pickett, he presents statistical evidence that, among developed countries, societies that are more equal –with a smaller income gap between rich and poor — are happier and healthier than societies with greater disparities in the distribution of wealth. More here >
