Click on any phrase to play the video at that point.Close You
all know the truth of what I'm going to say. I think the
intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has
been around since before the French Revolution. What's changed
is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies,
more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. I'm
going to take you through that data and then explain why the
links I'm going to be showing you exist. But first, see what a
miserable lot we are. (Laughter) I want to start though with a
paradox. This shows you life expectancy against gross national
income -- how rich countries are on average. And you see the
countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as
rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. And it makes no
difference to their life expectancy at all. There's no
suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look within our
societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health
running right across society. This,