Equality ? Commenting on : "The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better"

By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

I didn't read the book itself but read a review of it on the Economist.com website (http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13176890).

The book presents and discusses the very intriguing argument that solving many social ills doesn't happen by fighting poverty, rather by fighting inequality. It takes the statistical approach and proves that countries with a more even distribution of wealth tend to have longer lived citizens, lower obesity rates, less delinquency, depression and teenage pregnancy than richer, more concentrated-wealth countries!


( I don't know how accurate the statistics are, as statisticians as far as I'm concerned have a record of missing so many arguments, falling an easy victim to the 'black swan' phenomena, and lacking many analytical skills needed to dissect all relevant parameters to a certain cause ..... there always seems to be one parameter that they don't notice and that can render all their research useless ..... however let's for argument's sake assume that there is a degree of truth to these findings )
The issues discussed reminded me of a few questions that i was thinking about earlier:

- What is poverty anyway? Is it a certain 'absolute' level of living, or should it be defined as the huge disparity of access to the overall resources available between different parts of the population, which oppresses a certain group without just reasons? ( a popular song by Ziad Rahbani says something to the extent of "... And did money by itself fall on this one so much ... ? and on that one so little ? " )

- Why do these studies never consider the roles of non-materialistic ( non-financial ) aspects in achieving social equality through creating a smarter social system capable of determining the 'missions' of its individuals and allocating and rewarding them for following their own dream paths ?? [ yes, yes ... Its quite difficult ]

- What is the relevance of this to the Idea of communism in the sense that its a hard - complete - equality , as opposed to the more moderate 'socialism' ? is the traditional concept of 'social justice' simply not enough ??!