Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett discuss why the world can't afford the rich. And Cory Doctorow points out that class-based advocacy for better material conditions tends to be a political winner even in the U.S. - but that it's not generally presented as an option by Democrats determined to present themselves as compliant to the wishes of the corporate class.  

- Gavin Schmidt discusses how the climate breakdown is happening faster and more severely than previously projected. Matthew Rozsa reports on new research identifying the human "fingerprints" associated with rising sea surface temperatures. And Chloe Lucas et al. highlight how children are immersed in the reality of a climate catastrophe in progress which our political class is devoted to denying or minimizing. 

- Meanwhile, Peter Dietsch calls out the fanatical opposition to even restricting fossil fuel advertising as the truly extreme position on climate policy. And Les Whittington highlights how the constant carbon tax bleating from the Cons and their provincial proxies is based entirely on misinformation - though we shouldn't fall into Whittington's trap of treating a modest, small-c conservative pricing scheme as the essence of progressive policy. 

- Drew Anderson contrasts Danielle Smith's fervent insistence on pushing the extreme environmental harm caused by dirty resource extraction and pollution against her choice to ban renewable energy in the name of "pristine viewscapes". And David Barrett and Kelly Black point out how much of the population of western Canada stands to suffer from the UCP's willingness to destroy watersheds in southern Alberta. 

- Finally, Darren Cotton writes about the development of repair cafes as a means to give effect to the right to repair and the principle of reducing waste. 

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Richard Wilkinson writes that the key to building back better in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is to close the gap in income and wealth between the rich and everybody else, with the goal of meeting both material and social needs:

(T)he most potent generators of chronic stress are embedded in the social fabric, in our lives and relationships with one another. Three aspects stand out above others: the damaging effects of low social status, whether that is due to poverty, racism or any other cause; the quality of care in early childhood; and the strongly protective effects of friendship and social integration.

Relationships matter so much because other people can be our best sources of security, comfort and cooperation or our worst rivals. Just as bad relationships are highly stressful, friendship is relaxing and restorative. We have evolved an extraordinary sensitivity to relationships, because getting them right has always been crucial to our survival.

Experiments have shown that it is threats to self-esteem or social status, where other people can judge us negatively, that most reliably raise our stress hormones. These feelings are so potent, causing anything from fury to stomach-clenching shame. Even simple experiments have shown they have serious consequences, including slower wound healing and weaker resistance to infection.
...
So what can be done to ensure our health and resilience? The key is that class and status, prejudice and discrimination are strengthened by larger income differences. As George Bernard Shaw said: “Inequality of income takes the broad, safe, and fertile plane of human society and stands it on its edge,” with the result that some people are valued very much more than others. The rich are made to seem more superior and the poor more inferior, inequalities in health and in young people’s life chances increase, while social mobility slows.

The picture could hardly be simpler: almost all the problems that we know are related to social status within our society get worse when status differences are increased. If we want a less dysfunctional society and a healthier population, building back better means addressing the scourge of income inequality.

- And Andrew Jackson challenges Chrystia Freeland to pursue the possibility of transformational change, rather than merely trying to move back toward a lost (and unsustainable) status quo ante.

- On that front, Tom Philpott discusses how the U.S.' food supply is needlessly precarious. And Dana Granofsky, Kira Heineck, Steve Lurie and Kwame McKenzie highlight the danger that we could see a new wave of homelessness connected to a resurgence of COVID-19 this fall - even as Jen St. Denis points out the lack of uptake on tiny homes in Vancouver (or elsewhere in Canada) despite the success of the same idea in U.S. cities which have pursued it.

- Finally, Christopher Cheung and Rochelle Baker each report on a push for action against a drug overdose crisis which is killing far more people than COVID-19 in British Columbia.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Sam Pizzigati discusses the predictable social consequences of allowing inequality to grow:

What sort of unintended consequences [result from increased inequality]? The British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have some compelling answers in their powerful new book, The Inner Level.

The more unequal a society, the pair write, “the more people feel anxiety about status and how they are seen and judged.” And not just poor people, but people at every economic level.

Some respond by losing all self-confidence. Social gatherings “become an ordeal to be avoided.” The more they withdraw, the more they “suffer higher levels of anxiety and depression.”

“Others react quite differently to the greater ego threat of invidious social comparisons,” observe Wilkinson and Pickett. “Instead of being modest about achievements and abilities, they flaunt them.”

Narcissism becomes endemic in highly unequal societies, and the issues of dominance and subordination that become so much more intense in unequal societies also exacerbate other mental illnesses and personality disorders.

Maybe worst of all, greater inequality undermines the “social relationships and involvement in community life” that researchers have “shown repeatedly” to determine health and happiness.
“By making class and status divisions more powerful,” sum up Wilkinson and Pickett, rising inequality “leads to a decline in community life, a reduction in social mobility, an increase in residential segregation, and fewer inter-class marriages.”

Unintended consequences.

So let’s by all means debate the unintended consequences of bold egalitarian reform proposals. But let’s not stop there. Let’s make sure the debate on these proposals also addresses the unintended consequences of letting our our lives continue to become ever more unequal.

- Stephen Kidd notes that narrowly-targeted social programs ultimately serve the interests of the wealthy who avoid funding more effective solutions, rather than the people who are forced to rely on a threadbare safety net.

- Jim Stanford points to the D-J Composites lockout - and the Newfoundland government's utter neglect of the workers affected - as a prime example of how political power is all too often used to favour wage-suppressing employers over workers. And Iglika Ivanova and Mark Thompson offer their suggestions to update labour and employment law to address new forms of exploitation.

- And on the bright side, Terry Pedwell reports on the pay equity arbitration decision won by rural and suburban postal carriers.

- Finally, Tom Parkin writes that the Ontario Court of Appeal's decision allowing Doug Ford to drastically interfere in Toronto's municipal elections should serve as a signal of the importance of political organizing.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Stephen McBride offers some important lessons on austerity from government responses to the 2008 economic crisis.

- Zoe Drewett reports on the rising level of poverty in the UK. Andrew Jackson points out how the Libs' measuring stick for poverty seems aimed at doing the bare minimum, and stands to leave many people behind. And Dawn Foster interviews Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson about the damaging effects of inequality on our health and well-being:

The Inner Level, their long-awaited follow up published earlier this year, looks at the more personal, individual effects of inequality: how the social effects of the gap between rich and poor impact on people. “We’re talking about how inequality affects our intimate lives, our inner lives; our mental wellbeing, our relationships with friends and family,” Pickett says.

The Inner Level examines a society that has dealt with 10 years of austerity, and seen almost every family impacted by stagnant wages, increased job insecurity, swingeing cuts and changes to the benefits system and public services nationally and locally, as well as a surge in problems with mental health across society. “It takes a whole argument and evidence about the effects of inequality to a deeper and more intimate level. In The Spirit Level we were dealing with things about society ‘out there’ – the size of the prison population, homicide rates, obesity rates and so on. But this takes it into the sphere of our social fears and anxieties,” Wilkinson says. “Worries about self worth: all the things that make social contact sometimes seem rather awkward and stressful. Your fears about self presentation and so on are all exacerbated by inequality.”

The problems scrutinised in the book – self doubt, social anxiety, stress, and fear of how we are seen by others – have an impact on day-to-day emotions for individuals, but also a wider impact on relationships, our ability to build functioning communities, and the health and wellbeing of entire populations. These issues are massively exacerbated by inequality, and a belief in meritocracy means that any failure is deemed a personal failure, the book argues. “The reality is that inequality causes real suffering, regardless of how we choose to label such distress. Greater inequality heightens social threat and status anxiety, evoking feelings of shame which feed into our instincts for withdrawal, submission and subordination: when the social pyramid gets higher and steeper and status insecurity increases, there are widespread psychological costs.”

The stress of poverty also influences the cognitive development of babies and children. Measuring the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in infants found that poverty, and the amount of time spent in poverty, can hamper the mental development of children. Pickett and Wilkinson find that “family income is a more powerful determinant of cognitive development than being brought up by single parents, or maternal depression”, and that if children are enrolled in support services like Sure Start and their equivalents in other countries, some of the effects of poverty are offset, and children’s educational and psychological performance improves.
...
Wilkinson and Pickett cite extensive statistical evidence that unequal societies are responsible for less fulfilling personal lives, and in turn harm public health, scupper educational progress, increase crime and lower life expectancy. “We debunk some of the myths that people use to explain why [society] is willing to tolerate greater levels of inequality, namely that inequality is a natural result of our human nature, that we are competitive, individualistic and out for ourselves – that’s the way we are, it’s just human nature and nothing can be done about it,” Pickett says. “That is not the case. We also provide evidence to counter the argument that actually we’re living in a meritocracy, and that inequality is simply a case of the capable and talented moving up, and those who are less capable, less clever, moving down.”

- Daniel Tencer reports on Canada's place among the riskiest housing markets in the world when comparing current prices to long-term averages. 

- Andrew Parkin and Erich Hartmann discuss the need for a national pharmacare program to be fair to provinces who have already made the effort to ensure residents have needed access to medications. And Thomas Walkom follows up on the work of the Institute for Research on Public Policy in showing how a pharmacare system could be put together.

- Finally, Bill Curry and Tom Cardoso report on the Libs' continued use of cash-for-access fund-raising events.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Julian Baggini discusses the importance of talking about taxes as a force for the common good - particularly as a response to (and inoculation against) inane "tax freedom" rhetoric:

(W)e need to counter the subtle ways in which we are complicit in the taxophobics’ game. Think about how every newspaper and news outlet reports the budget. The bottom line is always presented in terms of whether tax changes leave specific types of people better or worse off, usually by mere pennies per week. The most important test of a budget should not be how taxes hit individuals’ pockets, but whether overall government is sustainably improving the state of the nation. Taxing less than we need to is as bad as taxing more than is necessary.

These changes in how we think and talk might strike you as modest and uncontroversial. Proof that they are anything but is that a campaign to start celebrating social solidarity day would today be laughed off as some kind of politically correct joke. Unless and until we make it normal to see taxation primarily as a valuable contribution to our own and the common good, the narrative that government is the enemy and tax is theft will continue to prevail.

- And Thomas Torslov, Ludvig Weir and Gabriel Zucman study the massive amounts of tax revenue being siphoned into tax havens to enrich shareholders at the expense of any contribution to the public interest.

- Toby Helm writes about the latest research demonstrating a connection between rising inequality and decreasing union membership. And Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett comment on how inequality leads to stress and anxiety. 

- Finally, Tom Parkin writes about Ontario's rejection of one form of cynical politics - though it's worth noting that both the Wynne Libs and Ford PCs managed to achieve their end-of-campaign goals which put political interests ahead of the public.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Andrew Anthony interviews Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett about their new book on the connection between inequality and mental illness. And Danny Dorling discusses the external (and preventable) causes of many mental health issues:

People working in separate disciplines are coming to the same conclusion: that our social worlds impact on us, they can give us health or cause us harm. As the UN puts it, “mental health policies and services are in crisis—not a crisis of chemical imbalances, but of power imbalances. We need bold political commitments, urgent policy responses and immediate remedial action.” This recent report calls for a shift from biomedical models of mental distress to a more radical, human rights-based approach, acknowledging the impacts of social inequality.

Another recent report published by the British Psychological Society, “The Power Threat Meaning Framework,” looks at the contextual factors which may make us sick. PTM acknowledges power inequalities and the impact of oppression. Being on the wrong side of power can lead to feelings of entrapment, shame and humiliation, as well as a sense of lacking control.

The framework highlights links between “poverty, discrimination and inequality, along with traumas such as abuse and violence, and the resulting emotional distress or troubled behaviour.” Adverse childhood experiences have a negative impact on health and wellbeing, for example.

Both The Inner Level and PTM reframe the narrative around why people get sick—refocusing the question from “What’s wrong with this individual?” to “What’s going wrong in this society?”

- Darren Bernhardt talks to Anna Cooper about the futility of trying to deal with homelessness by criminalizing and displacing homeless people, rather than dealing with the underlying causes. And Nick Saul points out that a fair minimum wage goes a long way toward ensuring that people can workers can afford a reasonable standard of living.

- Alex Press writes that the success of teachers' strikes in the U.S. offers an important reminder of the effectiveness of collective action. Mike Konczal comments on the role unions have played in reducing both economic and racial inequality, while Eric Levitz highlights how the labour movement as a whole is the antithesis of a "special interest group" but instead a positive force for the general public. And Gerard Di Trolio previews what workers in Ontario could expect from an NDP government.

- Meanwhile, David Moscrop discusses the no-brainer choice between Doug Ford's circus and the responsible social democracy of Andrea Horwath. And David Bush comments on what's at stake in Ontario's election.

- Finally, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Yonatan Strauch write about the folly of betting Canada's economic future on the hope that humanity will fail to address the existential threat of climate change.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write that equality of opportunity is an illusion if people don't have the necessary equality of income to make meaningful plans:

British social mobility is damaged by the UK’s high income inequality. Economists have argued that young people from low income families are less likely to invest in their own human capital development (their education) in more unequal societies. Young people are more likely to drop out of high school in more unequal US states or to be NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) in more unequal rich countries. Average educational performance on maths and literacy tests is lower in more unequal countries.

It isn’t that young people in unequal societies lack aspirations. In fact, they are more likely to aspire to success. The sad thing is they are less likely to achieve it.

But the ways in which inequality hampers social mobility go far beyond educational involvement and attainment. In unequal societies, more parents will have mental illness or problems with drugs and alcohol. They will be more likely to be burdened by debt and long working hours, adding stress to family life. More young women will have babies as teenagers, more young men will be involved in violence.
...
The evidence which shows the damage caused by socioeconomic inequality is mounting. The UK government risks being on the wrong side of history if it continues to fail to address the divide – and condemn us all to its devastating impact.

- Ben Chu talks to Richard Blundell about the importance of combining fair wages with social supports to ensure people can stay out of poverty, rather than assuming the former is a full replacement for the latter. Paul Tulloch charts the large number of Canadian workers clustered at the low end of the wage scale, while the Star's editorial board weighs in on the need to improve wages. And David Bush discusses the slow path toward a $15 minimum wage being charted by the B.C. NDP.

- Matt Bruenig responds to the possibility of increased antitrust enforcement by noting the futility of merely breaking up corporate structures which remain substantially owned by broadly similar groups of people - and instead proposing that we focus on common ownership as a policy goal.

- Dean Baker notes that the development of the Zika vaccine offers a clear example of the value of publicly-funded research. And Danyaal Raza writes about the need for further public investment in the health of Canadians - particularly in the form of pharmacare and dental care for all.

- Finally, Owen Jones points out how the right-wing media has fanned the flames of bigotry and fascism.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson comment on the moral and practical harm done by continued inequality:

Inequality matters because, as a robust and growing body of evidence shows, the populations of societies with bigger income differences tend to have poorer physical and mental health, more illicit drug use, and more obesity. More unequal societies are marked by more violence, weaker community life, and less trust. Inequality also damages children’s wellbeing, reducing educational attainment and social mobility.
...

You might think that evidence of harm, alongside the growing concerns of world leaders, academics, business, civil society, and government would be enough to turn this problem around. But from our perspective as social epidemiologists working on inequalities, the record on tackling health inequalities does not inspire optimism. Decades of research has led to a consensus among public health academics and professionals that we need to tackle the structural determinants of health if we want to reduce health inequalities; yet this has not happened and health inequalities have not diminished. In many cities in the UK and US, for example, we continue to see life expectancy gaps of five to 10 years, and occasionally 15 to 20 years, between the richest and poorest areas.

The long term failure, even of ostensibly progressive governments, to tackle these glaring injustices is perhaps one of the reasons why public opinion has swung so strongly away from the established political parties. And the public’s sense of being left behind will only be exacerbated by the negative health effects of austerity, which are starting to emerge in our health statistics.

...

During the last generation, economic growth ceased to improve health, happiness, and the quality of life in rich countries. Now, more than ever, we need an inspiring vision of a future capable of creating more equal societies that increase sustainable wellbeing for all of us and for the planet.

- On that front, Andrew MacLeod examines how British Columbia's disability income assistance is nowhere near enough to allow people to live with security and dignity. And Lynne Fernandez and Simon Enoch write that Brad Wall and Brian Pallister seem determined to inflict austerity measures which will make matters even worse for people already facing an uphill battle to get by in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

- David Cay Johnston highlights how Donald Trump's economic policy looks to instead reflect nothing more than allowing the corporate sector to shamelessly fleece the public without repercussions. And Sean McElwee, Jesse Rhodes, and Brian Schaffner discuss how big money distorts the U.S.' political system.

- Finally, Jesse Winter reports on today's protests against Justin Trudeau's broken promise of electoral reform, while PressProgress weighs in on the unprecedented 100,000 signatories to Nathan Cullen's petition demanding the Libs live up to their commitments. John Ivison notes that Trudeau's tone-deafness is making him a punchline for progressive Canadians, while Greg Squires examines the bridges he's burned among core voting groups. But Karl Nerenberg argues that the greatest danger arising out of the preservation of first-past-the-post is to Canadian democracy, not merely to the Libs' political fortunes.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Sam Pizzigati interviews Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett about the fight against inequality and the next piece of the puzzle to be put in place:

[Pickett:]...In The Spirit Level, we have all these correlations between inequality and social problems, and we have theories and hypotheses about what is driving these correlations. But we didn’t know then whether or not the drivers we hypothesized — things like status anxiety — were actually higher in more unequal countries. Now those kinds of data are being used increasingly in psychological research. So, for instance, there are papers looking at levels of social solidarity in relation to inequality in different European countries.

Wilkinson: Solidarity in terms of whether people are kind and helpful toward each other, whether people are willing to help old people or their neighbors or the disabled.

Too Much: Your upcoming new book, which I hear has the working title, Crisis of Confidence, will go into much of this new psychological research?

Wilkinson: Yes. I worry that many people think that these things we’ve been writing about — like violence or poor educational performance — all go on out there in “society” and have nothing to do with what they think matters most to them, like their own personal and emotional ups and downs and the well-being of their friends and family. So I’m rather keen to show how inequality gets into our intimate worlds.

- Meanwhile, Rick Noack looks at how inequality has undercut economic growth in numerous developed countries including Canada. And Joseph Stiglitz writes about the damage ineequality has done to the U.S.' youth.

- Keith Reynolds discusses Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk's findings about the gross waste resulting from the use of P3 structures based on unfounded assumptions:

Risk transfer is the magic bullet that is used to justify spending more money on public-private partnerships. The thinking is that the private partner absorbs large amounts of risk that would otherwise be carried by the province and that this justifies additional costs. In the Ontario example, the AG says the government uses calculations that assume there is five times as much risk from public procurement as there is from a public-private partnership.

How much risk is actually involved? The Dominion Bond Rating Service published a document in February outlining how it rated the credit worthiness of P3s. It concluded most P3s were "of low to moderate risk." If this assessment is good enough for P3 investors listening to the DBRS, maybe we should be listening too. As a specific B.C. example, a Finance Department memo obtained under Freedom of Information looking at the Fort St. John Hospital P3 questioned the return the company was getting for taking on risk. The Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is the return the company expects to get back on its invested capital. The government memo said that the IRR the company was demanding in return for accepting "risk" was ridiculous given that:

• There is no revenue risk in a hospital project.
• Counter-party risk is the province, so as long as the proponent manages the projects minimal equity risk.
• Only political risk, which is relatively low.

The Ontario auditor general went even further questioning the whole underpinnings of the "risk transfer" justification.  She found that there was absolutely no "empirical data" supporting the valuation of the cost of risks transferred to the private sector by P3s.  The risks to justify the enormously higher costs, she reported, were anecdotal.

- But perhaps even more telling than the strength of Lysyk's findings is the weakness of the counterargument - and Paul Boothe for one isn't going to let the fact that the argument for P3s relies on wishcasting stop him from keeping up a steady stream of fact-free anecdotes and reliance on an incestuous consultant industry to evaluate itself.

- A new OECD working paper finds that contrary to the Cons' spin, a properly-administered set of environmental regulations doesn't need to cost the economy anything. And Scott Vaughan points out that Canada could easily turn renewable energy into a far larger export industry if we weren't stuck with a government determined to push the dirtiest energy sources available.

- Finally, Jim Stanford offers some good economic news from 2014 (while pointing out that there's still a long way to go). 

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- David Atkins highlights Gallup's latest polling showing that U.S. trust in public institutions continues to erode. And Paul Krugman notes that there's reason for skepticism about the snake oil being peddled as economic policy in order to further enrich the already-wealthy:

Why, after all, should anyone believe at this late date in supply-side economics, which claims that tax cuts boost the economy so much that they largely if not entirely pay for themselves? The doctrine crashed and burned two decades ago, when just about everyone on the right — after claiming, speciously, that the economy’s performance under Ronald Reagan validated their doctrine — went on to predict that Bill Clinton’s tax hike on the wealthy would cause a recession if not an outright depression. What actually happened was a spectacular economic expansion.

Nor is it just liberals who have long considered supply-side economics and those promoting it to have been discredited by experience. In 1998, in the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw — very much a Republican, and later chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers — famously wrote about the damage done by “charlatans and cranks.” In particular, he highlighted the role of “a small group of economists” who “advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue.”
...
(H)ow can you justify enriching the already wealthy while making life harder for those struggling to get by? The answer is, you need an economic theory claiming that such a policy is the key to prosperity for all. So supply-side economics fills a need backed by lots of money, and the fact that it keeps failing doesn’t matter.

And the Kansas debacle won’t matter either. Oh, it will briefly give states considering similar policies pause. But the effect won’t last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn’t about evidence; it’s about finding reasons to give powerful interests what they want.

- And on the subject of corporate capture, Alan Pyke reports that Michigan's idea of making prison food services more efficient has involved hiring a private contractor which doesn't seem interested in actually feeding anybody. And Jenny Uechl points out Kinder Morgan's sweetheart deal from the National Energy Board which is allowing it to force the public and to foot the bill for a nine-figure pipeline application - from which it would of course claim the profits.

- Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document (PDF) the role of unions in working toward greater equality (h/t to James Bloodworth), while reminding us what role we should expect unions, workers and corporations to play in a healthy society:

Companies have two functions. One is to produce the goods and services which we all need, but the other is to concentrate wealth and power among top executives and generate profits for shareholders. We need the first of these, but not the second. The second has been the mainspring of rising inequality and has provided powerful perverse incentives to top management.

Increasing employee representation on company boards and expanding the share of the economy made up of mutual, cooperative and employee owned companies would begin to tackle growing inequality and the concentration of wealth at the top. More democratic companies tend to have much smaller pay ratios among their staff.
...
As well as smaller income differences and good economic performance, cooperatives, employee owned companies and others in the stakeholder business sector have other advantages. Community life has weakened substantially in rich countries over the last generation but, as Oakeshott remarks, an employee buyout can turn a company from being a piece of property into a community¹. Perhaps a stronger sense of community at work could replace the sense of community that has declined in residential areas.  It is also likely that less hierarchical structures at work could begin to change the experience of work – making it possible for more people to gain a sense of self-worth and of being valued from their employment. Certainly, a sense that you don’t have control over your work, of unfairness, or an ‘effort-reward imbalance’, have each been linked to worse health and wellbeing.

The scales of top pay and of tax avoidance are two indications of how problematic the mismatch between profit seeking and the public interest can be. Other indicators include corporate-funded opposition to scientific evidence of harm associated with company products, such as the role of fossil fuel companies opposing climate science, the manipulation of regulatory bodies set up to safeguard the public interest, and the purchase of political influence on a scale which threatens the effective functioning of democratic institutions.

- Finally, Denis Campbell interviews John Ashton about the importance of greater equality as a matter of public health. And Faiza Shaheen writes that we can't have sustainable development without challenging inequality.