My Take | The perils of being poor in a rich society

Being poor is literally bad for your health. That’s according to a new air pollution study by the University of Hong Kong. The poorer and more rundown the neighbourhoods, the worse the air gets. But of course, Hong Kong people already know that. The study helps quantify the problem, which its researchers call “environmental injustice”.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Overseas, a rich research literature by epidemiologists and social scientists has identified a range of bad social and health outcomes for poorer people in rich societies. To me, it’s the strongest scientific argument against extreme inequalities in developed economies. Hong Kong fits this negative profile well.

In their groundbreaking 2009 book, The Spirit Level, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett call many modern, rich societies “social failures despite their affluence”. For the poorer segments of society, such failures include higher incidence of mental illness, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage sex and pregnancy, obesity/poor diet; and poorer education performance, worse health and lower life expectancy, and low social mobility.

Note that they are talking about 23 of the world’s richest countries, all of them full and/or long-standing democracies, though some may argue about that in the case of Singapore. The problems cannot be solved by growing the economy because they are caused by the material differences between people being too big.