Population health tends to be better in societies where income is more equally distributed. Recent evidence suggests that many other social problems, including mental illness, violence, imprisonment, lack of trust, teenage births, obesity, drug abuse, and poor educational performance of...

In this paper, we present evidence which suggests that key processes of social status differentiation, affecting health and numerous other social outcomes, take place at the societal level. Understanding them seems likely to involve analyses and comparisons of whole societies. Using income...

Studies have suggested that members of ethnic minority groups might be healthier when they live in areas with a high concentration of people from their own ethnic group - in spite of higher levels of material deprivation typically found within such areas. We investigated the effects of...

This study shows that living in a better area reduces the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes but, among African-American women, living in an area in which they are in a racial minority may increase the risk. Using the 1991 cohort of single infants born to African-American women in Chicago, we...

There is a very large literature examining income inequality in relation to health. Early reviews came to different interpretations of the evidence, though a large majority of studies reported that health tended to be worse in more unequal societies. More recent studies, not included in those...