INEQLITY

Richard Wilkinson, a professor of medical epidemiology at Nottingham University, and Kate Pickett, a lecturer in epidemiology at York University, emphasise that it is not only the poor who suffer from the effects of inequality, but the majority of the population. For example, rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole population in the most unequal than in the least unequal societies in their survey. One explanation, they suggest, is that inequality increases stress right across society, not just among the least advantaged. Much research has been done on the stress hormone cortisol, which can be measured in saliva or blood, and it emerges that chronic stress affects the neural system and in turn the immune system. When stressed, we are more prone to depression and anxiety, and more likely to develop a host of bodily ills including heart disease, obesity, drug addiction, liability to infection and rapid ageing.

Societies where incomes are relatively equal have low levels of stress and high levels of trust, so that people feel secure and see others as co-operative. In unequal societies, by contrast, the rich suffer from fear of the poor, while those lower down the social order experience status anxiety, looking upon those who are more successful with bitterness and upon themselves with shame. In the 1980s and 1990s, when inequality was rapidly rising in Britain and America, the rich bought homesecurity systems, and started to drive 4x4s with names such as Defender and Crossfire, reflecting a need to intimidate attackers. Meanwhile the poor grew obese on comfort foods and took more legal and illegal drugs. In 2005, doctors in England alone wrote 29m prescriptions for antidepressants, costing the NHS £400m.



////////////////////Eczema's link to asthma uncovered


Eczema causes red itchy patches on the skin
Scientists believe they have found what triggers many children with eczema to go on to develop asthma.
The Public Library of Science Biology study points to a way to stop what is known as the "atopic march".
The US team at the Washington University School of Medicine showed that a substance made by the damaged skin triggered asthma symptoms in mice.
The same substance, thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP), is also produced in the lungs of asthma patients.



//////////////////..........Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous - The End of Intellectual Property
Adrian Bowyer

"Intellectual property is dead." Eric von Hippel, Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in his keynote address to the World Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization, MIT, October 2007.
Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you the keys to their car, and you will receive an abrupt and unhelpful reply. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you their most interesting idea, and fifteen minutes later you will be glancing at your watch and inventing fictitious dentist's appointments.
This prompts a profound biological question: if information is such valuable property, what is the Darwinian selective advantage in the ubiquitous impulse to give it away?
The answer was worked out a few years ago by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He realised that the human mind did not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection - like the peacock's tail - to waste resources in a way that cannot be faked. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails, because those peacocks are strong enough to waste the resources needed to grow the tail and to drag it about. That peacock has good genes for strength, growth, and endurance, and so is worth mating with.


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