Future thrills

The Venus Project is advocating a new science based future for all – giving advice on how to remove poverty, crime and the rest of it.

Today’s numbers are quite clear: if you are poor your health will most likely be poor (relatively speaking), your lifespan will most likely be shorter than the rich, poor people are more criminal and so on.

The book “The Spirit Level” tells you about the pain of inequality – inequality breeds unhappiness. It all comes together: bad health, violent crime, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness, early death.

But there is more to it than that. The book “The status syndrome” tells a story about how social standing also affects health and longevity – if you are down there your health and lifespan suffers.  The author introduces a health-gradient concept where low social status and lack of control over the way you are able to lead your life leads to stress and consequent illness, reduced longevity. This happens in spite of being economically well-to-do.

A future society should take these factors into account. Political, social and economic greed should all be reduced – and we will all be better off?

See books:

• Michael Marmot -”The Status Syndrome”
• Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – “The Spirit Level”.
• Buy from Amazon!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 10:46 am and is filed under What humans do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.