The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health

by Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy

Praised by The Lancet , which called it a "lucid account that . . . deserves to be read by everybody interested in the politics of health," and the New England Journal of Medicine , The Health of Nations provides powerful evidence that growing inequality is undermining health, welfare, and community life in America. The book's prizewinning authors also make an urgent argument for social justice as a necessary vehicle for the betterment of society. The Health of Nations is the synthesis of years of groundbreaking research on the connections between social structures and health and welfare, and one which Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen says "has much to offer in reshaping the agenda of the debate on health care." Now in a revised edition which includes a new afterword, it dramatically demonstrates that growing inequalities, far from being a benign by-product of capitalism, threaten the very freedoms that economic development is thought to bring about.

Genres: Health, Nonfiction

263 pages, Paperback

First published July 26, 2006

Reviews

[Noah Enelow · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a well-researched presentation of the impact of socioeconomic inequality on a wide variety of things. Social cohesion, individual health, life expectancy, trust in government, consumer indebtedness - it's all in here. Inequality affects all of it, and it's all moving in the wrong direction here in the United States. Those of us who have been observing trends in U.S. culture over the last twenty years or so won't be surprised.

The book is clearly meant to inspire outrage, and here's where it goes wrong in my opinion. The tone starts out measured, detached and sensible, but devolves into becoming rather shrill towards the end. That's why this book gets only three stars from me. As someone with an inherent distaste for inequality, of course I found my own opinions confirmed, but I don't think the book is likely to make any converts.

[Quiet_Inside · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrative of the underlying mechanism is somewhat nebulous.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought proving book, though the authors did not answer explicitly the question of, how inequality is harmful to my health.

[Katherine]

Read for one of my graduate classes and it is a very provocative book.