| >> Is the problem inequality or that the income is below... I'm not sure this is a valid (in a Popperian sense) QUESTION. Income is interrelated to a motherload of other population factors that interact in complex ways. Things can be both cause and effect. You live in a cheap neighborhood because you're broke. Maybe this low income neighborhood or has worse jobs or worse schools. Maybe crime is high. Stress. Mental health. Relationship consequences. Financial consequences Etc. These things are complex in practice and can span communities/societies. I don't think we can understand these things fully or mechanically. There's plenty of evidence, theory, and common sense that such problems stack. No theory or measurement is definitive, IMO. Weather you theorize about the world or deal in data, you're probably not distinguishing between income and income inequality well. They're too tightly interlinked in practice. That said, I doubt that middle-quintile income groups in much poorer countries than Denmark exhibit the same mental health patterns as bottom quintile groups in Denmark. So... "income threshold, not income inequality" probably isn't true in that sense. I wouldn't jump to the opposite conclusion either, that absolute income thresholds don't matter either. I just don't think we can reach conclusions about social issues in perfect isolation from each other. Society doesn't work that way, so it's hard to reach conclusions about it that way. In practice, income and income inequality within societies exist in an interlinked way. We don't generally affect one without the other. We can't easily study/measure it either. Parsed as a strict-sih Popperian question, it just ends up being a moot question. Maybe in a human petri dish it's possible that mental health is totally unrelated to income. Does that even mean anything? |