Research by Kawachi and others shows another feature of income inequality that translates into more physical and psychological stress: the more economically unequal a society, the more crime—assault, robbery, and, particularly, homicide—and the more gun ownership. Critically, income inequality is consistently a better predictor of crime than poverty per se. This has been demonstrated on the level of states, provinces, cities, neighborhoods, even individual city blocks. And just as we saw in chapter 13 when we looked at the prevalence of displacement aggression, poverty amid plenty predicts
...more
