Ichiro
Kawachi, a Harvard University professor and expert on income inequality and
health disparities, will speak at Duke University on Tuesday, April 5.
Kawachi's talk, "Income Inequality and Population Health: Dispatches from a
Contested Field of Research," is free and open to the public. The event will
take place from 3-4:30 p.m. in Rhodes Conference Room at the Sanford School of
Public Policy, 201 Science Drive, on Duke's West Campus. A reception will
follow.
For more information or to register, call (919) 613-9350, email ehlayko@duke.edu or visit www.childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu.
Kawachi is a professor of social epidemiology and chair of the Department of
Society, Human Development and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
He is also the director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health.
During his talk, Kawachi will survey three competing theories linking the
distribution of income in society to the quality of people's health:
- the
association between income inequality and health is a statistical artifact
of the relationship between individual income and individual health; - income
inequality erodes social cohesion and leads to under-investment in public
goods (which in turn, harms health); - as
the rich pull away from the rest of society, the gap in wealth increases
invidious social comparisons, resulting in stress.
The
lecture is part of Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy's Sulzberger
Distinguished Lecture Series. The Center for Child and Family Policy sponsors
the series to enhance the intellectual community not only among its own
faculty, research scientists and staff, but across Duke and the Triangle region.
All of the speakers have demonstrated excellence in behavioral science and theory,
as well as in science-to-policy applications.
The Sulzberger
Distinguished Lecture Series, begun in 2006, is endowed by the Arthur
Sulzberger Family.