Social impacts: health, housing and intergenerational mobility

The connections between inequality and social outcomes are complex; there may be several causal mechanisms and in some instances the causal link is in the reverse direction: This chapter focuses on reviewing the analytical evidence on the possible ways in which the impact of inequality is transmitted onto outcomes in health, housing and intergenerational mobility; things that principally characterise people’s well-being in the long term. The channels through which the impacts of inequality occur may be principally economic, or they may involve social and psychological effects. In all three areas the authors find evidence that inequality has a negative association at least in terms of cross-country variation. What remains is the more challenging task of identifying and quantifying a link between rising inequality and worsening outcomes.