Dissatisfaction and Social Inequality in Developed Nations

The media brings us bad news every day. Today it can be about obesity and its dangers, tomorrow about increasing crime rate and violence, the next day about babies left in the trash. Problems are like bags in a line just like in airports: they come and go but there are always plenty of them.

Off course the media writes about negative stuff because it attracts attention and more viewers. But the media does not write about something that does not exist at all. The media is a mirror of reality, although sometimes it is a bit crooked. Today we are bombarded with questions that we cannot answer.

So the main question is: are we unhappy? Yes, we have freedom, we can go wherever we want, we can get educated, and we can search for a better job.

We can have everything that we want and yet we are still unhappy, but why? Someone might say that our morals have gone. But lets think about it. Were our morals so high back in the old days? Humans committed crimes and violence, there was poverty back then.

Unhappiness is now common in the whole world. And the economic crisis has nothing to do with it unless because of it the unhappiness has become more visible. Religion does not help every single time.

Politics and philosophers are conserved about this. Despite the incredible and fast growing of technology, general wellbeing, people are more and more depressed. Countries give a lot of money to establish police, modern prisons, and new hospitals. But it does not help.

Prof. Richard Wilkinson of Nottingham University to investigate the problems of society chose a ruthless weapon - statistics. They gathered distinctive statistical data from developed countries and came to a simple but sensational outcome - difficult social problems, lack of trust, and hate between social classes are the biggest reasons why people are unhappy. The most important thing of all is that these problems do not go anywhere when economy goes up and a country gets rich. When this data was summarized a fact emerged that the biggest number of problems and crime are in state which has the biggest inequality among people.

United States of America - one of the richest countries in the world which spends more money on health care than any other nation. Still, a child born in Greece has more chances to stay alive his whole life than a person born in USA, although in Greece people earn half as much as in America. Mental illnesses are more common in USA than in Japan which has the best equality among people in the world. The more wealth people have, the more they are afraid to lose it and they protect themselves by gathering more wealth.

All in all these statistics show that such countries like United States, Great Britain, Portugal where 20 percent of people who are in the top class of society earns 7 or 10 times more than 20 percent of people who are in the lowest level of society, these countries with the huge inequality have a lot more social problems than egalitarian countries like Japan or Sweden.

Sources used: http://research.nottingham.ac.uk/NewsReviews/newsDisplay.aspx?id=239