Letchworth Heritage Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I thank Dr Alf for reblogging the article entitled “Why Are the Wealthier Healthier?” by Clare Bambra and published by Project Syndicate. I would like to share some of my own observations and personal insights.
95% of us will die of heart disease or cancer and insurance statistics compiled over 200 years show that people with money, stable, married lifestyles, a good education and income at a high level outlive people who are single, gay, cohabiting and poor.
The UK Civil Service study on stress, morbidity and mortality conducted over several years across 135,000 civil servants ranging from Mandarins to Juniors showed a direct correlation between physical height and the top ranking of a civil servant in terms of pay and conditions.
The shorter the civil servant the less likely they were and are to gain promotion and advancement. Stress levels were measured across all 135,000 civil servants and were highest at the bottom of the pile along with heart attacks and early death from cancer or heart disease.
Those civil servants at the top who were the tallest and the best educated and best paid lived longest and led better lives, freer of affliction and illness than those at the bottom.
Diet, vitamin supplementation, and having a comfortable home life with enough disposable income results in people so blessed living longer than people who live in areas where industrial processes take place and have just £97 gbp in disposable income at the end of the month is the norm for the average family of 4.
In my own town of Baldock, Hertfordshire, people who used to live at the north end of the town, downwind from Ebenezer Howard’s Letchworth Garden City and close to pubs where beer was consumed in cigarette smoke-filled environments are nearly all dead at an average age of 70 (based on my reading of headstones in my local cemetery where my late parents are buried).
My house is at the south end of the town and is adjacent to a 500 acre wood with 300 year old trees and open countryside.
People live well into their 80s and 90s in the street despite having earned the same money and worked at the same places as the other Badockians 1 mile and a half to the north.
Maps of the UK broken down on the ESD Toolkit show that in the areas of high stress, worklessness, crime and deprivation people get sick more often and die sooner than people who are wealthy and who lead gilded lifestyles.,
So in London, the people in Sir Malcom Rifkind’s Kensington constituency live longer than practically everyone else in the country, whilst impoverished Scotsmen in the Gorbals, Glasgow die the fastest.
Having money means you can buy good food, eat in decent restaurants, marry, go out, have friends, live in good conditions, do business, get good jobs through your connections, have expensive hobbies and be relatively free of stress.
The lives of the poor are nasty, brutish and short and Government policy seems to be to widen the gap between them and those with money until it is unbridgeable.
Certainly the Adult Social Care recipients and benefit recipients do not come from the ranks of the wealthy and we know from the shipbuilding redundancies in the Northeast that the highest death rate was amongst unemployed single men who could not find other jobs and lacked the get up and go shown by immigrants to these islands.
John Gelmini
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