HLTH 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Diminishing Returns, Victim Blaming, Social Comparison Theory
16 Jan 2018
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Recap: income-health gradient: wherever we look richer people are healthier and live longer disability free lives, at different scales: Income as determinant of determinants: poverty, housing, early life opportunities, access to care. Insurance & life saving technology: cost of medication, transportation to hospital, psychosocial stress. Gini coefficient: most commonly used measure of inequality, coefficient varies between 0 and 1, 0=complete equality, 1=complete inequality (one personal has all the income, others have none) Income inequality is a market of societal inequality. High income inequality diminishes social capital, break down in societal values, and crime. Issue of scale in social comparison: problem with animal experiments, positive externalities. Income inequality has widened: social benefits have been diminishing, effects on social cohesion. Three main theoretical hypothesis for understanding links b/n income inequality and health: materialist (emphasis on living conditions, psychosocial (emphasis on individual, neo-material (emphasis on societal distribution of resources)
