Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

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http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

I saw this a couple of months ago, interesting talk. Apparantly it doesn't matter whether the equality came about naturally (Japan) or through government intervention (Denmark) if I recall correctly.
One thing that I think wasn't mentioned is how hard it is for a country to have an equal society. A small country or a homogenous country would find this easier to achieve. In the Netherlands almost everyone lives within commuting distance from a large city, this is not the case in very large countries such as Russia or China. You can't expect someone living in Siberia or the Gobi desert to have the same standard of living as people in Moscow or Bejing.
And the graph about prisons was horrifying.

The key is to decentralise such resources so that it isn't thousands of miles to the nearest workplace. Not everything needs to be in the city.

Also the current national borders aren't necessarily the best way of dividing land. It ought to be divided to allocate the resources of a specific land area to the amount of people necessary to sustain.

One thing I find funny about liberals is that they never talk about the gold standard and the correlation with the US declining in economic metrics. I am all for lowering the wealth disparity, but that won't happen until we have a gold standard

The gold standard's disadvantages massively outweigh its supposed benefits.

And correlation does not imply causation.