Category: Science

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Compassion & Altruism Are The Keys To Personal, Social & Global Happiness Says Neurologist Dr. James Doty

Compassion & Altruism Are The Keys To Personal, Social & Global Happiness Says Neurologist Dr. James Doty

It has been stated many times that survival is of the fittest, but when one reads Darwin closely this is not the case. Rather, the more accurate statement, coined by Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. and other leading social scientists, is ‘the survival of the kindest.’ Paul Ekman, Ph.D., a leading expert on emotion describes an ever expanding body of scientific evidence that being compassionate affords significant benefit to oneself and society in his recent article in JAMA. In addition to evidence that survival may be enhanced by caring for others, there are now findings suggesting that the statement made by the Dalai Lama, ‘if one wishes to make others happy be compassionate, if one wishes to be happy be compassionate,’ in fact, has great validity.”

Dr. James Doty, a Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and Director of The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education found in his research that compassion directly affects a person’s well being.

Compassion Increases Happiness & Immunity & Decreases Stress

But happiness alone is not the only benefit of being compassionate. In a number of studies using a variety of psychological and biological measures and neuroimaging techniques, compassion not only stimulates one’s pleasure (reward) centers but also leads to a decrease in biological markers of stress and an increase in indices of adaptive immune function.”

Compassion Improves Survival Of The Species, Leads To Happiness & Improved Health

So what’s not to like about being compassionate? It improves survival of the species, leads to happiness and results in improved health. The reality is that while science and technology have the potential to offer incredible benefit, it is the simple interventions known to us for thousands of years that can have a profound effect on the lives of individuals and society.”

Compassion, Not Science, Will Be The Influence That Will Lead Humanity To The Peak Of Its Potential

Science and technology have the ability to have a profound influence on the human landscape. But that influence can lead us to the deepest valleys of suffering, or can lead us to those peaks of our greatest potential. It is my belief that compassion is going to be the instrument that allows us to see the latter, and not the former. It is the key that will unlock that which separates us. It is the key that will address the issues, which we all think of as isolated issues, such as global warming, war, conflict, poverty. Fundamentally, these are not entities that are external to ourselves; these are problems of the human heart.”

All Crises – Personal, Social, Global, Ecological – Are Problems Of The Human Heart

The chain of causation that has resulted in ecologic catastrophe, global warming, poverty, war, these are not external events, external to ourselves. I submit to you that they are problems of the human heart. While science and technology offer great hope for many things, until this technology is focused on afflictions of the heart, I do not believe that there is hope for our species.”

Image: Knitted Neurology by estonia76

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Agriculture In The 21st Century: The Need For Global Partnership To Address Poor Food Distribution, Waste, Malnutrition And Famine Worldwide

Agriculture In The 21st Century: The Need For Global Partnership To Address Poor Food Distribution, Waste, Malnutrition And Famine Worldwide

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase.”

– World Hunger Education Service.

Rising food prices are at a dangerous level, and global cooperation is needed to tackle the increasingly challenging issue.”

– Robert B. Zoellick,  World Bank Group President [source: “World Bank chief urges global cooperation to tackle food security challenge“]

The food scarcity part of the argument in the population debate is an interesting one—people are hungry because they cannot afford food, not because the population is growing so fast that food is becoming scarce.

The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account.”

–  Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies

Throwing Food Away

30% of all food produced in the world each year is wasted or lost. That’s about 1.3 billion tons… That’s as if each person in China, the world’s most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people, had a one ton mass of food they could just throw into the trashcan.”

Distributing Food Poorly

The amount of grain produced in the world today could provide each person on the planet with the equivalent of two loaves of bread per day…The problem lies in the distribution of the world’s food.

The majority of food is produced in economically more developed countries such as USA, but those countries that are really in need of their share of the food to solve their hunger problems, cannot afford the high prices that these farmers charge and can get from other richer countries.”

Hunger, Malnutrition & Famine

Hunger is a term which has three meanings (Oxford English Dictionary 1971)

  • the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food
  • the want or scarcity of food in a country
  • a strong desire or craving”

Malnutrition is a general term that indicates a lack of some or all nutritional elements necessary for human health.”

  1. “Malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases.”
  2. “One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished.”
  3. “Every year 15 million children die of hunger.”

What Is Food Security?

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to enough safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy lifestyle.

To be food secure means that:

  • Food is available – The amount and quality of food available globally, nationally and locally can be affected temporarily or for long periods by many factors including climate, disasters, war, civil unrest, population size and growth, agricultural practices, environment, social status and trade.
  • Food is affordable – When there is a shortage of food prices increase and while richer people will likely still be able to feed themselves, poorer people may have difficulty obtaining sufficient safe and nutritious food without assistance.
  • Food is utilised – At the household level, sufficient and varied food needs to be prepared safely so that people can grow and develop normally, meet their energy needs and avoid disease.”

A Lack Of Global Partnership

At the turn of the millennium, the global community set itself an ambitious target: to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. It is not going to happen.

At present, the total quantity of food that is produced globally is good enough to meet the daily needs of 11.5 billion people. If every individual were to get his daily food requirement as per the WHO norms, there would be abundant food supplies.”

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Now You Can Understand Why Connecting To Other People Is Great, Thanks To This Shouting Sociologist

Now You Can Understand Why Connecting To Other People Is Great, Thanks To This Shouting Sociologist

The benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs!”

Nicholas Christakis, MD PhD, in his powerful TED Talk “The Hidden Influence of Social Networks,” lays down the omnipotent role of social networks and the benefits of connecting with other people…

Social Networks Naturally ‘Sustain & Nourish The Good’ & ‘Reject The Bad’

We form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate.

So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love, kindness, happiness, altruism and ideas.

If we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.”

An Example Showing How Certain Properties Reside Not In Individual Parts, But In The Interconnections Between Them

Think about these two common objects. They’re both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way – on the left – and you get graphite, which is soft and dark.

But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms.

So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is not just what’s happening to these people – whether they’re losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy – that affects us; it’s also the actual architecture of the ties around us.”

Human Beings Are Not Reducible To The Study Of Individuals, But Must Be Understood In Reference To The Collective

Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we’re residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism.

Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. Like, for example, a hive of bees that’s finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that’s evading a predator, or a flock of birds that’s able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that’s able to bring down larger prey.

Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena – like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption.”

Watch Nicholas Christakis’ TED Talk ‘The Hidden Influence Of Social Networks’

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Be Careful With What You Think, Do & Say – Biologist Rupert Sheldrake Explains Social Influence & Interdependence Through Morphic Resonance

What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. So we’re more responsible for our actions, words and thoughts on this principle than we would otherwise be. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the affect we have on others.”

British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, author of over 80 scientific papers and books, the most recent being The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

What Is Morphic Resonance?

Morphic resonance is a memory principle in nature. Anything similar in a self-organizing system will be influenced by anything that has happened in the past, and anything in the future that happens in a similar system will be influenced by what happens now. So it is a memory in nature based on similarity, and it applies to atoms, molecules, crystals, living organisms, animals, plants, brains, societies, and indeed, planets and galaxies. So it is a principle of memory and habit in nature.”

 

Interconnectedness Of People & Nature Explained Through Morphic Resonance

An important aspect of morphic resonance is that we’re interconnected with other members of social groups. Social groups also have morphic fields, for example a flock of birds, or a school of fish, or an ant colony. The individuals within the larger social groups and the larger social groups themselves have their own morphic fields, their own organizing patterns. The same is true of humans.

People form all sorts of social groups within modern society, such as a football team, for example. Each player in the team is working as part of a larger whole — the team — and the team works together to score goals. The connections between members of social groups link them together through the morphic field. They’re interconnected through this field and the field is an invisible interconnection that links them. It continues to do so even when they’re far away.

The next time you are far away from somebody you know well, think about them and form the intention to telephone them. They may just pick up on that thought and start thinking about you. Then all of a sudden the phone rings and it’s that person. I call that telephone telepathy, and it is the most common kind of telepathy in the modern world. It’s just another way in which we are all interconnected.”

The More People That Learn Something, The Easier It Becomes

If somebody learns a new skill, say windsurfing, then the more people that learn it, the easier it becomes for everyone else because of morphic resonance. However, if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place, like Los Angeles, then rats all over the world should be able to learn the trick more quickly because the first group of rats learned it.

That’s what I’m saying morphic resonance does. It’s the kind of interconnection between all similar organisms across space and time. It works from the past and connects like a kind of collective memory, and it interconnects all the members of a species.”

Watch Dr. Rupert Sheldrake Discussing Morphic Resonance

Further Reading:

Images: [1] Drops and Ripples by Pictoscribe. [2] The Puzzle of Life by Pictoscribe. [3] Kermit by Pictoscribe. [4] The Erosion of a Log by Pictoscribe

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Big Love. Big Hearts. A Plan For The Creation Of One Global Extended Family

Big Love. Big Hearts. A Plan For The Creation Of One Global Extended Family

Big Love. Big Hearts. A Plan For The Creation Of One Global Extended Family

With the current globalization of our problems, we need to extend our circle of empathy and view humanity as a worldwide extended human family. As long as we refrain from facing that challenge, divisiveness and unsolvable conflicts will persist.”

Professor Rodrigue Tremblay is an author and Emeritus professor of economics at Université de Montréal. In addition to his writings on economics, he has also written extensively on the subject of ethics; and most recently, on the urgent need for a new level of universal ethics, morality, and empathy to be developed and maintained in the world.

The Super Golden Rule

[In a more universal civilization], first and foremost, the scope of human empathy would be more universal and more comprehensive, and would not merely apply to some chosen people, to members of a particular religion or to persons belonging to a particular civilization. In practice, this would require that we establish a higher threshold of human morality, beyond the traditional norm of the Golden Rule (‘Treat others as you would have others treat you.’)

It would require that we adopt what I call a Super Golden Rule of humanist morality that incorporates the humanist rule of empathy: ‘Not only do to others as you would have them do to you, but also, do to others what you would wish to be done to you, if you were in their place.’ — Of course, the corollary also follows: ‘Don’t do to others what you would not like to be done to you, if you were in their place.’”

 Three Interrelated Moral Imperatives

Three interrelated moral imperatives that have always been sound moral values, but which I feel will become increasingly required for humanity to go forward and survive. And I refer to:

  1. More human EMPATHY.
  2. More interpersonal TOLERANCE.
  3. More interpersonal SHARING (altruism and generosity) as a foundation for a more harmonious, for a freer and for a more prosperous world.”

 The Empathy Principle

According to the empathy principle, one must aim at treating others as if one were in their place, and not necessarily expecting reciprocity as is the case in the traditional Golden rule of morality that one finds in virtually all moral systems (‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’).

The empathy principle can thus be framed this way: “Do to others what you would wish to be done to you, if you were in their place.

That is why I say that empathy can be the solid foundation of a more civilized global society based on the solidarity of all human beings. It is the awareness that other people can suffer, be happy and flourish just as one does, and that one should treat others accordingly.”

 Ten Commandments For A Global Humanism

Lastly, here is Tremblay’s ten commandments for the creation of global humanism, a foundation for the building of a global extended family:

  1. Proclaim the natural dignity and inherent worth of all human beings.
  2. Respect the life and property of others.
  3. Practice tolerance and open-mindedness towards the choices and life styles of others.
  4.  Share with those who are less fortunate and mutually assist those who are in need of help.
  5. Use neither lies, nor spiritual doctrine, nor temporal power to dominate and exploit others.
  6. Rely on reason, logic and science to understand the Universe and to solve life’s problems.
  7. Conserve and improve the Earth’s natural environment—land, soil, water, air and space—as humankind’s common heritage.
  8. Resolve differences and conflicts cooperatively without resorting to violence or to wars.
  9. Organize public affairs according to individual freedom and responsibility, through political and economic democracy.
  10. Develop one’s intelligence and talents through education and effort.

Here is Professor Tremblay speaking further on the necessity for the development of universal global ethics:

[seeing as the video is an extended interview, many topics are covered throughout—fast-forward-to (20min. 53seconds) for content of the Professor speaking specifically on the topic of global humanism]

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4404833

Quotes of Professor Tremblay courtesy of The Code for Global Ethics, and his blog.

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Bruce Lipton – The New Biology: Where Mind And Matter Meet

You are personally responsible for everything in your life once you become aware that you are personally responsible for everything in your life.”

– Bruce Lipton, Ph.D.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVECAlT4AXY

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcg_ldoU40c

Related Materials:

Bruce Lipton’s complete library of DVD’s and video is available through:
Spirit 2000, Inc.
1 (800) 550-5571

Visit:

Write:
Spirit 2000, Inc.
P.O. Box 41126
Memphis, TN
38174-1126

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Can You Change The Future?

What the people really needed was just some basic common-sense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth – that their way of life was coming to an end – and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.” 

– Richard Heinberg

Now, You Face A Bleak Future

“A Letter from the Future” is an imaginary letter written in the year 2101 to by a 100 year old Richard Heinberg – senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of 10 books on issues of energy, the economy and ecology – to people of the world living in our times, about the tough future expected according to tendencies scientists and economists foresee humanity experiencing in the coming century.

It portrays a picture of a humanity struggling to make its way when the life it created for itself throughout the 20th century faces its depletion:

  • depletion of energy resources,
  • devaluing of money and products above the level of necessity,
  • scarcity of food and water, and
  • political motions toward fascism and war.

After painting a bleak picture of a suffering humanity dealing with all of the above during the 21st century, Heinberg raises the question…

 

Can You Change The Future?

Possibly, as a result of reading this letter, you might do something that would change my world [the world of the person living in the year 2101]. … Then, I suppose this letter would change, as would your experience of reading it. And as a result of that, you’d take different actions. We would have set up some kind of cosmic feedback loop between past and future. It’s pretty interesting to think about.

Maybe I should mention that I’ve come to accept a view of history based on what I’ve read about chaos theory. According to the theory, in chaotic systems small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes in outcomes. Well, human society and history are chaotic systems. Even though most of what people do is determined by material circumstances, they still have some wiggle room, and what they do with that can make a significant difference down the line.”

 

Read ‘A Letter From The Future’ By Richard Heinberg

Related Material:

Image: No Identity by HaPe_Gera

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3 Ways The Environment Shapes Human Behavior

Many scientific researches have shown an obvious fact, that the behavior of a human being is created by the environment. If genes predispose a certain behavior but the environment doesn’t support it, then that behavior won’t manifest, so in this case, genes aren’t important.”

– TROM Narrator

The section ENVIRONMENT in the documentary TROM (The Reality Of Me) shows how the environment shapes human beings’ behaviors via:

  • Scientists’ explanations of their research,
  • Scenes of how certain behaviors become accepted as norms in different cultures and situations.

 

Watch ENVIRONMENT From TROM

 

How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 1:

Your Experiences Can Change Your Neural Connections

Dr. Gregory Forbes, recorded at TEDGlobal 2010:

We live in a remarkable time the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That’s why we look different. I’ve got brown eyes you might have blue, or gray; but it’s not just skin-deep.

The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies, and yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes.

Likewise, every connectome changes over time.

What kind of changes happen?
  • Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and then can lose old ones.
  • Synapses can be created, and then can be eliminated; And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller.
2nd question: What causes these changes?

It’s true; to some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that’s not the whole story, because there are signals: electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons, and chemical signals, that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change.

If you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that’s why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might be true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome; an idea that you may find empowering.

Think about the way you act, your facial expression, the values accepted by you, the way you talk, everything, and remember that they are a result of your environment.”

– TROM Narrator

 

How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 2:

Male & Female Behaviors That Result From Environmental Conditioning


Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and author of The Female Brain (2006) and The Male Brain (2010), recorded at Dominican University of California, March 31, 2010

The nature nurture debate … is dead … for the following reason: the brain is very, very malleable.

We’re all born with male or female predispositions, and then we’ll have hormones that increase that circuitry for behavior, which is what a hormone is supposed to do. A hormone’s job is to make us predisposed to certain behaviors.

However, the way we’re raised, for example, little boys: Studies have shown that little boys who were told they’re not supposed to touch something, they often will grab it and touch it, whereas a little girl can be given a verbal demand not to touch it.

Little boys worldwide are punished more frequently for transgressions. Little boys are told not to cry, that they’re supposed to “man-up,” right? Even at a young age, dads sometimes are very, very scared if their little boy is showing any version of effeminate behaviors.

For example, I remember flying coast to coast with a guy who sat next to me. He said his 18 month old son, when he saw his 4 year old sister open a present earlier that week, which was a purse, he said, ‘Oh, can I have a purse too?’ And he said he found himself, like someone had kicked him in the stomach, and he just yelled at his eighteen month old son, ‘No, boys don’t have purses!’ He was reporting to me this event, and he felt so ashamed and embarrassed afterwards, because he realized that his little boy wasn’t expressing anything about being effeminate or not.

So the way we raise little boys, and we raise little girls, our brain circuits are so malleable. For example, we weren’t born learning to play the piano, right? You do practice, practice, practice.

You can retrain brain circuits, to do a variety of things. All of our life, we are trained, gender trained, to be more one way or the other.

Males: facial expressions for example, when they measure them and put electrodes on them, and show them a grizzly photograph that is supposed to make you cringe and emotional, their facial expressions, versus females, actually showed more emotional response in the time before it becomes conscious. Then right after the one second level when it becomes conscious, their facial muscles start to freeze down for frowning or smiling. In females, facial muscles actually amplify, and the males’ go down. Scientists believe, the hypothesis is, that the males have been trained to suppress an emotional feeling.

There is no such thing as: bad, criminal, lazy, brilliant people, thieves or racists. Only people predisposed to such behavior. But if the environment doesn’t trigger them, the behavior never manifests.”

– TROM Narrator

How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 3:

Children Who Lived Isolated From Human Contact From A Very Young Age

The most extreme case is represented by feral children. A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language.

Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in human activity around them.

Oxana Malaya began her life living with dogs, rejected by her mother and father. She somehow survived for six years, living wild, before being taken into care. There are few cases of feral children who’ve been able to fully compensate for the neglect they’ve suffered.

Oxana is now 22, but her future still hangs in the balance. Have scientists learned enough from previous cases to rehabilitate?

For six years, Oxana Malaya spent her life, living in a kennel, with dogs. Totally abandoned by her mother and father, she was discovered, behaving more like an animal, than a human child.

For two centuries, wild children have been the object of fascinating study. Raised without love, or social interaction, wild (or feral) children pose the question: What is it that makes us human?”

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Your Social Network Has The Power To Influence What You Think, Want, Feel, Choose And Eventually Do

Your Social Network Has The Power To Influence What You Think, Want, Feel, Choose And Eventually Do

Your Social Network Has The Power To Influence What You Think, Want, Feel, Choose And Eventually Do

“How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us. Social networks spread happiness, generosity, and love. They are always there, exerting both subtle and dramatic influence over our choices, actions, thoughts, feelings, even our desires. And our connections do not end with the people we know. Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.”

Nicholas A. Christakis, a social scientist at Harvard University and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at University of California present in their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives how people are interconnected, interdependent, and products of their societies.

Watch Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler Discuss The Book

Their book shows many examples of how the social networks people are in profoundly impact all areas of life: health, marriage, economy, politics and more. This post contains a few examples:

Examples Of Social Networks In Health

Have you ever wondered how your social environment can affect your health?

Back Pain – A Culture-Bound Syndrome

“The rate of lower back pain among working-age people is 10 percent in the United States, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, 62 percent in Germany, 45 percent in Denmark, and 22 percent in Hong Kong. In some ways, this varying prevalence, and the culturally specific ways in which back pain is experienced, suggest that back pain can be seen as a culture-bound syndrome – a disease recognized in one society but not others, such that people can experience the disease only if they inhabit a particular social milieu.”

Eating Disorders – Also A Culture-Bound Syndrome

“Eating disorders resemble other culture-bound syndromes in that they can ripple through a social network in waves, reflecting the possibility of person-to-person transmission of (admittedly severe) weight-loss behavior. High-school girls may compete with one another to lose weight and college dormmates can copy one another’s binge eating. In fact, these behaviors may affect a person’s network location, and in one study of sororities, women who were binge eaters actually became more popular and moved to the center of the social network, just as nonsmokers did in our study.”

Example Of Social Networks In The Economy

Economists Morgan Kelly and Cormac O’Grada studied two panics that were in the 1850s at a New York Bank (Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank), in which they observed how people’s interdependence affects their actions.

“Kelly and O’Grada found that social networks were the single most important factor in explaining the closure of accounts during both panics, even more so than the size of the accounts or the length of time they had been opened. Thus, financial panics may result from the spread of emotions or information from person to person.”

Example Of Social Networks In Politics

How did Obama succeed in his election campaign? He made people feel connected.

“Obama’s campaign was described as a perfectly run operation that made few, if any, mistakes. But how did he get people on board before the public perception that things were going well? How did he persuade so many previously uninvolved people to donate money to him and to vote for him, especially those who in the past believed their vote did not count? In no small measure, Obama succeeded because these ‘working men and women’ felt connected. Obama’s campaign was a historical milestone in all kinds of ways, but the most revolutionary may not have been its fund-raising. Many have commented on Obama’s remarkable ability to connect with voters, but even more impressive was his ability to connect voters to each other.”

The book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives is full of many more examples on how people are interconnected and thus are strongly influenced by the social network they are in.

Image: Connected: Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by zone41.

 

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Study Shows Equality Benefits Everyone, Rich And Poor

“The rich developed societies have reached a turning point in human history. Politics should now be about the quality of social relations and how we can develop harmonious and sustainable societies.” 

The Equality Trust, based on the work of Professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, reached this summary after analyzing data showing that societies with greater inequality between rich and poor are far more unhealthy than societies with a more equal income distribution.

More Unequal = More Problems

The study shows that:

  • More unequal societies have more problems with general health, mental illness, infant mortality, drug use, obesity, imprisonment rates, teenage pregnancies and homicides.
  • More equal societies have better education and general health, more innovation, higher social mobility and more trust.

The slides and their titles (some listed below) show in more detail how societies with bigger gaps between rich and poor are generally more unhealthy societies than more equal societies:

  • Health and social problems are worse in more unequal countries
  • Health and social problems are not related to income in rich countries
  • Health and social problems are worse in unequal US states
  • Health and social problems are only weakly related to average income in US states
  • Child well-being is better in more equal rich countries
  • Child well-being is unrelated to average incomes in rich countries
  • Levels of trust are higher in more equal rich countries
  • Levels of trust are higher in more equal US states
  • The prevalence of mental illness is higher in more unequal rich countries
  • Drug use is more common in more unequal countries
  • Life expectancy is longer in more equal rich countries
  • Infant mortality rates are higher in more unequal countries
  • More adults are obese in more unequal rich countries
  • Educational scores are higher in more equal rich countries
  • More children drop out of high school in more unequal US states
  • Teenage birth rates are higher in more unequal rich countries
  • Teen pregnancy rates are higher in more unequal US states
  • Homicide rates are higher in more unequal rich countries
  • Homicide rates are higher in more unequal US states
  • Children experience more conflict in more unequal societies
  • Rates of imprisonment are higher in more unequal countries
  • Rates of imprisonment are higher in more unequal US states
  • Social mobility is higher in more equal rich countries
  • Overdeveloped countries? High life expectancy can be achieved with low carbon dioxide emissions
  • More equal countries rank better on recycling

 

Unequal Societies = People Being More Self Interested, Less Public Spirited, Less Concerned With The Common Good

“Because inequality increases status competition, it also increases consumerism. People in more unequal societies work longer hours because money seems even more important.

Because inequality harms the quality of social relations (increasing violence, reducing trust, cohesion and involvement in community life), people become more self-interested, less public spirited, less concerned with the common good.”

Taken from the presentation to The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better For Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, p. 34

 

Equal Societies Benefit Everyone, Rich & Poor

“Almost everyone benefits from greater equality.

Usually the benefits are greatest among the poor but extend to the majority of the population.”

Taken from the presentation to The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better For Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, p. 23

 

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett: Why Greater Equality Makes Stronger Societies

Talk discussing the above data and arguments in more detail recorded January 8, 2010 at Hogness Auditorium, University of Washington, Seattle.

 

Richard Wilkinson: How Economic Inequality Harms Societies [TED Talk]

Professor Richard Wilkinson discussing the above study with an emphasis on the UK, one of the countries ranking high in inequality.

Further Reading:

Image: People at the Museum by ancawonka on Flickr