> it's healthier to be at the top of a poor culture than at the bottom of a rich one, even if the absolute level is lower

That Big-Fish-Little-Pond effect is seen to be relevant in a lot of places, including academic performance [1][2], depression, and suicide rates.

[1] http://aer.sagepub.com/content/47/2/390.abstract

[2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-008-9075-6

I commented on this in a recent thread and was crucified for being a self centered sociopath... better luck to you.

Heh. I think think the sociopathic conclusion would be to claw one's way to the top no matter what. The compassionate conclusion would be to reduce inequality, so all benefit.

Unless you can reduce inequality to zero - Harrison Bergeron style [1] - you can't fix this by reducing inequality. It's an ironclad law of mathematics that 20% of the population will be part of the bottom fifth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

I believe the level of inequality, and the level of social mobility (which is probably related to the magnitude of inequality), is more important than the existence of inequality.

Are you aware of any academic literature on the subject?

It's not my area, but putting some keywords in Google Scholar yielded some results pretty quickly. E.g. this paper

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504850701720197

"We investigate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. Proxying fathers' earnings with using detailed occupational data, we find that sons who grew up in countries that were more unequal in the 1970s were less likely to have experienced social mobility by the late-1990s."

This article is about one of the mechanisms, which wasn't well known.

We know there's a bunch of reasons why poor people are unhealthy - more smoking, more alcohol, worse food, less exercise, more dangerous jobs, less protection in those dangerous jobs, less exercise, less access to health treatment (even if it's free).

But this study:

> The findings, in Science, had nothing to do with the unhealthy behaviours that are more common in poorer groups.

Don't forget the oft-overlooked poor stress coping mechanisms and the associated psychological and personality disorders; and "privilege deficits" such the lack of healthy social support systems, the inability to build healthy relationships that increase knowledge, self-awareness, and expand skills that promote personal, social and economic growth.

> Above survival level, it's healthier to be at the top of a poor culture than at the bottom of a rich one, even if the absolute level is lower.

This does not apply to Switzerland and the Nordic European countries. (It does clearly apply to the US, though.)

>This is well known. Relative social status has an influence on health.

You mean outside of health choices made for financial reasons? That was news to me. Simply being in bottom hurts you, even if you are doing everything else the same.