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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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Citations
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Factors related to the depth of the latest crisis for EU-27 countries: The key role of relative inequality/poverty

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relationship between the intensity of the recent global economic crisis and the current economic position of EU countries on the one hand and relative poverty and/or inequality on the other.
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Bring it Back in

TL;DR: Piketty's book on Capital in the Twenty-First Century (CTFC) has received massive attention and much (but not unanimous) praise, both from econ... as mentioned in this paper.
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Aspirations, health and the cost of inequality

TL;DR: In a model of perpetual youth, people have heterogeneous upward-looking aspirations and value their consumption relative to the conditional mean of those above them in the distribution; their survival depends on health capital produced from time investment and health goods.
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An Argument for the Foundations of Population Mental Health

TL;DR: If the global burden of disease has shifted from the infectious diseases of the nineteenth and early twentieth century toward a growing burden of chronic illness, the understanding of disease causation has commensurately shifted over time and McMichael suggests that preoccupation with individual genetic or behavioral factors falls short of the larger socio-ecologic context.
Dissertation

The impact of corporate power on consumption, debt and inequality : doctoral dissertation

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that consumerism leads to growing household and public debt with multiple transmission mechanisms that work simultaneously and reinforce each other, and that the inequality causes an increase in corporate power.
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.