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The spirit level : why greater equality makes societies stronger

TLDR
The strong version of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's argument in The Spirit Level implies that President Obama's fight to reform health care was pointless as discussed by the authors, and that extending the availability of health insurance cannot substantially improve Americans’ health.
Abstract
The strong version of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s argument in The Spirit Level implies that President Obama’s fight to reform health care was pointless. Extending the availability of health insurance cannot substantially improve Americans’ health. Instead, the president would make us all happier, healthier, and longer-lived, their logic suggests, if he could get the richest, say, 5 percent of Americans to leave the country.

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Subjective Well-Being and the Welfare State: Giving a Fish or Teaching to Fish?

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that a theoretical preoccupation with the overall generosity of social policies obscures more than it reveals about the mechanisms through which the state can shape how individuals experience spells of unemployment.
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Economic performance and public concerns about social class in twentieth-century books

TL;DR: The findings of this study demonstrate that economic conditions play a significant role in literary references to class throughout the century, whereas income inequality does not.
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Collaborating on evolving the future

TL;DR: The authors group evolutionary change into five categories: what counts as evolutionary, ethical considerations, complexity, complexity, symbolic, and who decides, and what intentional cultural change might look like.
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Community, consumerism and credit: the experience of an urban community in North-West Ireland

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on how consumerism and international monetary system impact on small local communities, in this case, a relatively deprived, urban, public housing estate in the City of Derry, Northern Ireland.
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The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning a Prosperous Way Down

TL;DR: The sufficiency economy as discussed by the authors is an alternative economic system, which is focused on meeting mostly local needs with mostly local resources, without the society being relentlessly driven to expand by the growth-focused ethics of profit-maximisation.
References
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Book

Happiness: Lessons from a New Science

TL;DR: In this new edition of his landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives as discussed by the authors, which is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research.
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Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England

TL;DR: The US population in late middle age is less healthy than the equivalent British population for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease, and cancer.
Posted Content

Cross-Country Determinants of Life Satisfaction: Exploring Different Determinants Across Groups in Society

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries and show that only a small number of factors, such as openness, business climate, postcommunism, the number of chambers in parliament, Christian majority, and infant mortality robustly influence life satisfaction across countries.
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Social Trust and Fractionalization: A Possible Reinterpretation

TL;DR: In this paper, the importance of fractionalization for the creation of social trust is examined and the determinants of trust can be divided into two categories: those affecting individuals' trust radii and those affecting social polarization.
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Do Neoliberal Economic Policies Kill or Save Lives

TL;DR: The authors found that open international trade policies, low-inflation macroeconomic environments, and market-oriented property rights regimes promote human development across the world, even when controlling for countries' economic performance.