Economic inequality — the uneven distribution of income, wealth, and opportunity — damages human health, mental wellbeing, and social cohesion through five interconnected pathways documented by current epidemiological and social science research. Drawing on the WHO World Report on Social Determinants of Health Equity (May 2025), the World Inequality Report 2026 (World Inequality Lab, prefaced by Jayati Ghosh and Joseph Stiglitz), The Spirit Level at 15 (Wilkinson and Pickett, July 2024), the Global Inequality Report 2025 (Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz), and NIH/PMC research on the HPA axis cortisol pathway, this article documents five specific mechanisms through which inequality produces measurable harm. Way 1 — Physical health: Children in low-income countries are 13 times more likely to die before age 5 than in high-income countries; 1.8 million children could be saved annually by eliminating wealth-related inequality within developing countries (WHO, 2025). The biological mechanism runs through chronic cortisol elevation via HPA axis activation — damaging bodies throughout the social distribution, not only at the poverty line. Way 2 — Mental health: A 0.2 point increase in the Gini coefficient produces approximately 8 additional schizophrenia cases per 100,000 people. More unequal societies have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse across all income groups. Way 3 — Social trust: Inequality intensifies status competition, erodes the sense of shared fate, and reduces social cohesion and collective action capacity across all income levels. Way 4 — Violence: More unequal societies are more violent through the status-anxiety mechanism — the combination of high status stakes and unequal access to legitimate means of status achievement. Way 5 — Educational opportunity and intergenerational mobility: The World Inequality Report 2026 confirms that India's income gap between the top 10% and bottom 50% remained stable between 2014 and 2024 despite high economic growth. Inequality reproduces itself across generations through the unequal conditions of early childhood development. The article integrates Chanakya's Arthashastra and the Vedic principles of Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah and Rajadharma as the ancient Indian framework that anticipated these findings by 2,300 years. India's specific inequality profile — top 1% holding 40% of national wealth, women earning 18% of labour income — is examined throughout. The Hunger, Fear and Imagination framework is presented as the complete psychological model of economic behaviour that ancient traditions modelled and modern economics has partially ignored.
Narayan Rout (Fri,) studied this question.