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Two British intellectuals — one a distinguished, gray-haired professor emeritus, the other a rising young academic superstar — have just
finished a 15-day speaking tour across the United States. They came to
fan the flames of “populist rage.”

We don’t, of course, normally associate populist rage with sophisticated scholars. Our most eminent pundits almost always employ
"populist rage” as a condescending, even derisive, put-down, a tag for
an unfocused, unthinking anger directed toward elites — a cry from the
great unwashed masses born of frustration and envy.

But Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, our two recent scholarly British visitors,
would beg to differ. Populist rage at bank bailouts and Wall Street
bonuses, they believe, actually reflects state-of-the-art scientific
insight.

Wilkinson and Pickett both work as epidemiologists. They study the health of populations, and, over recent decades,
pioneering work by Wilkinson has helped reveal the most reliable
foundation for good health and long life. Want to live long and
prosper? Go live in a relatively equal society.

Over 200 studies since the early 1980s have now documented that people living in
societies where wealth has concentrated at the top of the economic
ladder live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than people who
live in societies that spread their wealth more evenly.

And we’re not talking just poor folks here. All people in unequal societies
do worse. Middle-income people in the United States, the world’s most
unequal developed nation, have shorter lifespans than middle-income
people in Japan, Sweden and a host of other more equal nations.

This same dynamic, Wilkinson and Pickett show in their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, is operating on all our most basic yardsticks of social decency. On
everything from homicides and teen pregnancies to drug addiction and
levels of trust, people living in more equal nations do better — from
three to 10 times better — than people in societies where treasure
tilts to the top.

And that treasure, in the United States, is tilting top-bound as rapidly as ever. The latest Wall Street bank bonus
totals may have no precedent in American history. Seldom — if ever —
have so few profited so profusely in the midst of a general economic
collapse.

The 32,500 souls fortunate enough to work at Wall Street banking giant Goldman Sachs will pocket an average $498,153 for
their labors in 2009. Their total compensation for the year, $16.2
billion, runs $3.3 billion more than the pay that went the year before
to the 207,315 teachers who staff New York state’s public schools.

We see this same top-heavy distribution of income throughout the U.S. economy.

Two weeks ago, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that
just a tad over a million U.S. taxpayers will take home over $500,000
in 2010. These one million top-earners will collect $200 billion more
in income this year than the 80 million taxpayers who make $40,000 or
less.

The data from epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett remind us that gaps like these have consequences: they
translate into ever-higher levels of stress and insecurity in nearly
every corner of our daily lives. This economic insecurity assaults more
than just our household finances. Over time, the chronic stress it
causes actually wears down our immune systems. Our epic inequality, in
essence, is quite literally killing us.

Last week, on the last day of the Wilkinson and Pickett U.S. speaking tour, Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich joined the two British scientists at an Economic Policy Institute forum in Washington, DC.

Democratic Party politicos, Ehrenreich charged, “have failed to speak to the resentment out there on inequality."

Average Americans will rage, and rightfully so, until they do.