Inequality causes laundry list of social impacts – drug abuse, prison, infant mortality
Polacko 21 – Matthew Polacko is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Département de science politique, at the Université du Québec à Montréal, PhD in Politics and International Relations from Royal Holloway, University of London (2021), an MSc in Public Policy and Management from King’s College London, and an MA in History from McMaster University, (“Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality – An Overview”, 10/20/21, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/spp-2021-0017/html?lang=en)//CG
Escalating income inequality has been linked with numerous negative outcomes. On the economic front, negative results transpire beyond the obvious poverty and material deprivation that is often associated with low incomes. Income inequality has also been shown to reduce growth, innovation, and investment. On the social front, Wilkinson and Pickett’s ground-breaking The Spirit Level (2009), found that societies that are more unequal have worse social outcomes on average than more egalitarian societies. They summarised an extensive body of research from the previous 30 years to create an Index of Health and Social Problems, which revealed a host of different health and social problems (measuring life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, trust, imprisonment, homicide, drug abuse, mental health, social mobility, childhood education, and teenage pregnancy) as being positively correlated with the level of income inequality across rich nations and across states within the US. Figure 3 displays the cross-national findings via a sample of 21 OECD countries.