Understanding How Inequality in the Distribution of Income Affects Health

Research on the determinants of health has almost exclusively focused on the individual but it seems clear we cannot understand or improve patterns of population health without engaging structural determinants at the societal level. This article traces the development of research on income distribution and health to the most recent epidemiologic studies from the USA that show how income inequality is related to age-adjusted mortality within the 50 States. (r 520.62, p 5 0.0001) even after accounting for absolute levels of income. We discuss potential material, psychological, social and behavioral pathways through which income distribution might be linked to health status. Distributional aspects of the economy are important determinants of health and may well provide one of the most pertinent indicators of overall social well-being.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66686/2/10.1177_135910539700200303.pd

WELFARE REFORM: Recent Policy and Politics

Public policy research has not combined policy and political analysis as its pioneers imagined. Mostly, political scientists study just the policy process, abandoning prescriptions to policy specialists. A better approach is to combine policy and political analysis, using positions on issues to assess policymaking, and vice versa. This article illustrates that approach by applying it to recent welfare reform. I take raising work levels as the chief goal of reform and assess the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 against it. FSA was a timid compromise that achieved little while PRWORA was a conflicted measure that achieved more, but at unnecessary risk. I also ask how the tensions between best policy and politics might be resolved. This approach makes public policy research more relevant to the real stakes in policymaking. [142 words.] Copyright 2002 by The Policy Studies Organization.

The onward sweep of social capital: causes and consequences for understanding cities, communities and urban movements

This article examines the way 'social capital' has been deployed by researchers and practitioners in the field of urban movements and community development. It reveals the powerful and in many ways effective role the concept is playing in framing the contemporary reconfigurations of local state-society relations which impact especially on the trajectory of third or voluntary sector development. The article identifies the gaps and weaknesses the 'social capital' perspective responds to, thereby explaining why it looms so large within the urban development discourse. Its own blind spots and ambiguities, however, limit our understanding of contemporary urban change. By prioritizing specific forms of civic engagement (and neglecting others), the concept filters the contemporary reconfigurations in the relationship of civil society, state and market in a peculiar way, which is conducive to supporting the spread of market forces to areas so far beyond the reach of capital. By directing attention to the self-activation potential of different communities, whether in the form of civic engagement of well-to-do volunteers or in the form of activation/reinsertion (into the low-wage labour market) of the marginalized, this new discourse plays a crucial role not only in current efforts to unburden the local (welfare) state, but also in the expansion of market forces into new areas. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.