Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health

A powerful demonstration of how global economic inequality is undermining our nation's health and our quality of life. Applying to the United States the kind of scrutiny that Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen has devoted to developing countries, The Health of Nations demonstrates that growing inequality is undermining health, welfare, and community life in America. Harvard professors Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy review the social costs of inequality, revealing that the United States and other wealthy countries with high levels of social inequality have lower general health than do more equitable societies, rich or poor. , The Health of Nations makes an urgent argument for social justice as the necessary vehicle for the betterment of society, including improving the health of our bodies and our body politic. Synthesizing years of groundbreaking research on the connections between social structures and health and welfare, Kawachi and Kennedy show that the cost of inequality is greater than we realize. They dramatically demonstrate that growing inequalities, far from being a benign by-product of capitalism, threaten the very freedoms that economic development is thought to bring about: freedom from want, freedom from ill health, freedom to exercise democratic choice, and freedom to pursue leisure and happiness. In the vein of Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone, The Health of Nations is a major new work of social science with dramatic implications for public policy.

Author Biography: Ichiro Kawachi is the director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health, and an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Bruce P. Kennedy is an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kawachi and Kennedy are recipients of the Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research.