Why isn’t inequality within small areas related to health and social problems?
Research on relative deprivation has found that if you ask people who they compare themselves with, they usually say it is people like themselves – such as neighbours, friends or relations. People sometimes suggest that income inequality must work through social comparisons, through people feeling out-done by neighbours who perhaps have a better car or bigger house. If so, it ought to have its most powerful effects when people getting very different incomes live close to each other and encounter each other face to face. This kind of reasoning led some researchers to compare inequality and health measured in small areas. But a review of nearly 170 studies found that ones where inequality was measured in small areas were least likely to find a relationship between inequality and health. The explanation is of course that small deprived neighbourhoods do not have poor health because of the inequality within them. They have bad health because they are deprived in relation to the wider socie
