Professor Richard Wilkinson is also Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at University of York. He is best known for his book with Kate Pickett The Spirit Level, first published in 2009, which claims that societies with more equal distribution of incomes have better health, fewer social problems such as violence, drug abuse, teenage births, mental illness, obesity, and others, and are more cohesive than ones in which the gap between the rich and poor is greater.

Whilst such proposals may not surprise many, in particular those who campaign against social injustice, the point is made that in more equal societies the rich also do better in a variety of markers than in more unequal ones. Prof. Wilkinson attributes this to the social stress in those who, being well off, live side by side with the outright deprived. We do not really need statistics to tell us that walking past a homeless person, or a begging mother, or a child selling plasters, does something to us. It may be compassion or anger, but something happens inside. Not many scientists take the time to quantify the horrors of the present system, making lots of powerful enemies on the way.
Prof. Wilkinson’s presentation at TED can be seen [here]( http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_wilkinson.html)

Is social stress the only way the well off of society can be affected by inequality? In reality there are many factors created by the growing gap between rich and poor against which nobody can truly firewall oneself from.

– Infectious diseases: there are a growing number of bacteria (e.g., TB) resistant to all known antibiotics emerging from deprived environments due to their patchy access and poor understanding of their use due to lack of education. Those microorganisms eventually spread to the whole of society, irrespective of social class.

– Blood: blood banks are fighting a tremendous battle against contaminant viruses, such as HIV, Hepatitis C and many others. Exclusion of risk groups and testing has not been able to eliminate them completely. As the epidemics of AIDS and drug addiction continue to devastate deprived communities nobody, not even the super-rich travelling to Africa with a bottle of their own blood, is completely safe.

– Crime: business for insurance companies and security firms are booming. The criminalisation of poverty is a well tested way for market economies to abrogate responsibility for the social ills they create, but eventually it ends up reaching the more affluent as they flaunt their wealth as a measure of self-worth.

– Social unrest: there is a tipping point in which inequality leads to riots and revolutions. There are some symptoms that we are getting there. Most countries have now “enclosed” neighbourhoods where the rich retreat behind private armies, but that makes them also more concentrated targets.

– Economic collapse: as the concentration of wealth continues unabated more of the rich and powerful find themselves as bankrupt as the lower end of the social scale. The system has a limit and then it breaks. Nobody is safe.

Not for lack of warning: “progress for the few ends up being progress for no one” [Silo]( http://silos-message-uk.blogspot.com/2011/04/we-are-at-end-of-dark-period-in-history.html). There is no “us and them”, we are all in the same boat and the sooner the top 1% realise that, the quicker we are all going the emerge from the present mess.