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The following charts come from The Equality Trust, a foundation that measures the well-being of developed nations and works against the kind of destruction that has befallen the people of United States. There are plenty more where these came from:
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Infant Mortality
There are now over 170 studies of income inequality in relation to various aspects of health. Life expectancy, infant mortality, low birth weight and self-rated health have repeatedly been shown to be worse in more unequal societies. These studies have been reviewed in the journal Social Science and Medicine.
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Child Well-Being
The Unicef index measured six different aspects of child well-being. Material well-being included such things as living in a home with few books, or where no adult was employed. Health and safety included items like immunization rates and deaths from accidents. Educational well-being included scores on performance tests and the proportion of children going into further education. Peer and family relationships were measured by such things as whether or not children viewed their peers as kind, and the numbers of children living in single parent and step-parent families. Behaviors and risks included smoking and drinking, how many children had sex by age 15, etc. Subjective well-being included self-rated health and other measures of how children felt about themselves.
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Violence and Murder
In Britain, 35% of people say they are worried about mugging, 33% are worried about being attacked, 24% of women are worried about rape, and 13% are worried that they might be the victim of racial violence. People also fear harassment. Although fear of crime doesn't always reflect actual trends in crime and violence, it is clear that some societies are much more violent than others. In the USA a child is killed by a gun every three hours and in the UK over a million violent crimes were recorded in 2005-2006.
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Teenage Births
One and a quarter million teenagers become pregnant each year in the rich OECD countries and about three quarters of a million go on to become teenage mothers. The differences in teen birth rates between countries are striking. In the USA the teenage birth rate is 52.1 per 1000 women aged 15-19, more than ten times higher than Japan, which has a rate of 4.6.
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Mental Illness
Until recently it was hard to compare levels of mental illness between different countries because nobody had collected strictly comparable data, but recently the World Health Organization has established world mental health surveys that are starting to provide data. They show that different societies have very different levels of mental illness. In some countries only 5 or 10% of the adult population has suffered from any mental illness in the past year, but in the USA more than 25% have.
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Drug Abuse
The World Drug Report 2007, compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime, contains the results of sample surveys on the prevalence of the use of opiates, cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy and amphetamines. We combined these in one index, giving them equal weights, and found a strong tendency for drug abuse to be more common in more unequal countries.
Among the 50 states of the USA, drug addiction and deaths from drug overdoses are highest in those states with the greatest Income Inequality.
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Foreign Aid Contributions
Greater equality within the rich countries seems to lead them to adopt policies which are more helpful to poorer countries. Two pieces of evidence suggest that this is true. Rich countries with the smallest income differences within them tend to spend a higher proportion of their Gross National Income on aid to developing countries.
When looking at the role of different countries in international trade agreements it looks as if the proposals supported by more equal countries are less dominated by attempts to serve their own economic interests at the expense of other countries. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands have also contributed many times more in total (not just per head) than has the USA to the World Trade Organisation's Global Trust Fund set up to finance technical assistance to developing countries.
How can this link between the amount of inequality within societies and their policies toward other countries and the international community be explained? The answer is simple. What people learn about human relations and motivation in their own society establishes their basic assumptions about human nature which they then apply not only within their society but to the world at large.
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