Social Justice Activism

Social goods: British researchers Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have
found lower rates of social goods (life expectancy by country, educational
performance, trust among strangers, women's status, social mobility, even
numbers of patents issued) in countries and states with higher inequality.
Social cohesion: Research has shown an inverse link between income
inequality and social cohesion. In more equal societies, people are much more
likely to trust each other, measures of social capital (the benefits of goodwill,
fellowship, mutual sympathy and social connectedness among groups who make
up a social units) suggest greater community involvement.
Crime: In more equal societies homicide rates are consistently lower. A 2016
study finds that interregional inequality increases terrorism.
Welfare: Studies have found evidence that in societies where inequality is lower,
population-wide satisfaction and happiness tend to be higher.
Debt: Income inequality has been the driving factor in the growing household
debt, as high earners bid up the price of real estate and middle income earners
go deeper into debt trying to maintain what once was a middle class lifestyle.
Economic growth: A 2016 meta-analysis found that "the effect of inequality on
growth is negative and more pronounced in less developed countries than in rich
countries". The study also found that wealth inequality is more pernicious to
growth than income inequality.
Civic participation: Higher income inequality led to less of all forms of social,
cultural, and civic participation among the less wealthy.
Political instability: One study finds that income inequality increases political
instability: "more unequal societies are more politically unstable".
Perspectives
Fairness vs. Equality
According to Christina Starmans et al. (Nature Hum. Beh., 2017), the research literature
contains no evidence on people having an aversion on inequality. In all studies
analyzed, the subjects preferred fair distributions to equal distributions, in both
laboratory and real-world situations. In public, researchers may loosely speak of
equality instead of fairness, when referring to studies where fairness happens to
coincide with equality, but in many studies fairness is carefully separated from equality
and the results are univocal. Already very young children seem to prefer fairness over
equality.
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