Once those basic needs are met, it is an inevitable fact that if everyone is poor, and I mean everyone, then no one is. In order to understand why stress and psychological factors have so much to do with the SES/health gradient, we have to begin with the obvious fact that it is never the case that everyone is poor thereby making no one poor. This brings us to a critical point in this field—the SES/health gradient is not really about a distribution that bottoms out at being poor. It’s not about being poor. It’s about feeling poor, which is to say, it’s about feeling poorer than others around
...more
