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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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Financial development and income inequality: a panel data approach

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed the link between financial development and income inequality for a broad unbalanced dataset of up to 138 developed and developing countries over the years 1960-2008.
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The Voluntary Simplicity Movement: A multi-national survey analysis in theoretical context

TL;DR: Overconsumption in affluent societies is the root or contributing cause of many of the world's most pressing problems, including environmental degradation, global poverty, peak oil and consumer mal... as discussed by the authors.
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Annual Research Review: The neurobiology and physiology of resilience and adaptation across the life course

TL;DR: The capacity of the brain and body to withstand challenges to stability can be considered as "resilience", and under the right circumstances, the brain can re-enter plastic states, and negative outcomes may be mitigated, even later in life.
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High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous

TL;DR: This research finds that the tendency for higher- Income individuals to be less generous pertains only when inequality is high, challenging the view that higher-income individuals are necessarily more selfish, and suggesting a previously undocumented way in which inequitable resource distributions undermine collective welfare.
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.