Thank you very much, everybody can hear me OK?

Good? All right.

So I really appreciate everybody being here.

Thank you Gilbert for all the hard work. None of this is easy to do.

Thanks to the Greek chapter and of course

all the International folks that have come both to speak

and all of you that have come here in the audience. Very appreciated.

The title of this talk is 'Where we go from here'

and it is not a transition lecture, even though it may sound like it.

Rather it's an homage to the American civil rights activist

Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, and his final book

'Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?'

In this work he extends the civil rights context

that's very important to American culture and American history -

unique to it of course -

from trying to alleviate the mess colonial slavery

had done to race relations in America,

drawing attention to the structure that created that slavery:

capitalism itself.

And while he discusses how the market structure distorts culture,

erodes moral integrity,

is foundationally antisocial and unsustainable,

as many people here have talked about thus,

the main theme of the work was the abolition of poverty,

and this builds a little bit on what Rich had to say earlier,

which I'm really glad that he covered certain aspects already.

And I'd like to expand upon this particular theme in this talk,

specifically in regard to public health and social stability.

Of course while King certainly was not the first to criticize capitalism

for its perpetuation of inequality,

he brings the issue into a more palpable context as far as I'm concerned.

With tremendous victory behind him in the late 1960's, gaining stature,

global respect winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and so forth,

for him to take this position at that time was quite powerful and radical,

given the extremely antisocialist climate of the period.

Unlike more heady, broad anti-market theorists of the past,

from Karl Marx to Thorstein Veblen

to the 1930's US organization Technocracy,

which still exists in certain areas of Europe,

King kept it simple and focused,

specifically seeing the resolution of poverty as not a utopian ideal

but a rational and logical issue of civil or human rights.

And he even did so transcending the issue of race itself

against many other in the community at that time,

in part recognizing that the poor white masses in America

were also victims of the same broad forces,

that being a social system based upon elitism, exploitation,

scarcity and dominance, a system of favoring a small wealthy elite,

while everyone else just fights amongst themselves.

Here are some notable quotes.

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society

to a person-oriented society. When machines,

profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,

the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,

and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

“And one day we must ask the question,

'Why are there forty million poor people in America?'

(in 1967) And when you begin to ask that question,

you are raising questions about the economic system,

about a broader distribution of wealth.

When you ask that question, you begin to question

the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more,

we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”

And as proposed in this book, he saw the

implementation of a universal guaranteed income as the first step

(as was talked about earlier and excellently so),

to put it in this process of a reconstruction of the entire society.

“I am now convinced that

the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -

the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly

by the now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed Income.”

Sadly upon his death, these newly sought economic rights,

along with his anti-poverty movement and general, basically evaporated,

sort of dissipated. Even his most

devoted followers just seemed to give up on it

and sort of satisfied with this sort of political success they have

through voting rights and the like. Today, 50 years later,

it is great to see the conversation return to such things as

UBI - universal basic income -

and it's a very important step towards improving public health

and social stability specifically.

It may not address the root problem inherent -

the social structure that we all know about -

but it hones in on its most central flaw:

the grand misallocation of wealth and the creation

of caustic inequality.

So, what I'd like to do here today is to explore this logic more deeply,

considering what it means for public health, social stability,

to remove, or come as close to removing, socioeconomic inequality.

To clarify the term, socioeconomic means how economic activity affects

and is shaped by social processes.

I specifically use it to refer to economically-linked chain reactions,

such as how the economy links to personal, social, political,

and legal consequences, and health consequences as well.

So socioeconomic inequality

isn't just about imbalance in wealth and income alone,

but the vast range of effects they create:

the various forms of social inequality that can be linked back

to economic influences.

However, before we delve into that,

I want to step back and think about the framework of thought here,

something that we could generally term: Structuralism.

I first heard the term used by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung,

who is also famous for coining the term, as Rich presented earlier,

structural violence,

which I have also talked about a great deal before.

While there are many forms of structural violence,

poverty is clearly the most obvious and most notable,

since there is little question of its negative effects overall.

Structuralism simply means we're accounting for larger order relationships

when thinking about social affairs;

generally defined as “the methodology

that elements of human culture must be understood

in terms of their relationship to a larger,

overarching system or structure.”

We are looking for relationships, such as

preconditions to use a medical term,

and these preconditions, when recognized,

predictably manifest certain outcomes.

What I mean by that

is when you see patterns occurring on the population level -

meaning statistically derived (has to be)

over time across numerous people -

when you see these repeated outcomes you're left to assume

of some kind of larger order structural influence occurring.

Of course there's nothing particularly sophisticated about this.

If anyone here has studied sociology, this is basically what it's about.

However, the importance of this approach

still isn't given hardly any weight in the world today,

if you think about it and pay attention.

And of course this kind of makes sense.

For has society really embraced

modern sociological understandings?

specifically what epidemiological or public health research

has been showing us over the past century?

The current economic framework would make absolutely no sense,

and be completely undefendable.

While people rightfully talk about social justice and fairness

as an argument for change today,

the greatest indictment of this system is actually coming from

the emerging field of social science

and objective measures of public health.

All of this challenges the social structure's integrity.

And it also challenges our sense of volition or identity.

When you see for example suicides increase across the world,

during periods of economic decline,

as has been noted here in Greece with its

massive austerity and all the problems that have been occurring,

those suicides can no longer be merely attributed

to singular human decision.

In the same way a certain percentage of cigarette smokers

will predictably get lung cancer, the effects of our economic system

show powerful population level outcomes.

This causality tree is a generalized attempt

to organize such negative health effects of the market economy,

specifically in terms of socioeconomic inequality.

At the top we have the raw structure itself,

born from mostly the geographical determinism from the Neolithic Revolution.

(I've talked about that before; you can

look into that if you'd like to know more of the origins.)

This economic foundation - based on property, exchange, labor for income,

competition - or competitive self-regulation I should say -

sets in motion this predictable array of outcomes at the start.

(By the way I apologize again if these terms-… if they're new.

There's a lot of background lectures; you can go back

and look at where all this stuff is defined.

And keep notes if you want to ask in the Q&A.)

The second tier down is Incentive.

This embraces the resulting social psychology

that supports and ultimately mirrors

the market structure.

This includes the pursuit of strategic advantage, self-maximization,

"in group" self preservation,

dominant psychology, and so on.

Then we have the institutions, third tier down.

These are the formal and conceptual institutions that surround us,

in our daily lives.

These include merchant institutions, such as good producing corporations,

financial institutions such as central banks through monetary policy,

ideological institutions such as neoliberalism or consumerism,

regulatory institutions meaning property, law, governments,

and legitimizing institutions,

which are biases, discourse of the intelligencia favoring the system,

general propaganda,

and even the industry of commercial advertising itself,

since it partly exists to promote positive values

towards cyclical consumption,

and the ethic of consumerism and vanity, and hence,

to go back to the structure, economic growth,

which the system demands.

And it is from these institutions that socioeconomic inequality

reaches the main population (4th tier down):

inequality and economic access, specifically material access,

along with consequential social/political inequality,

embraces this laundry list of injustices.

Of course, this is not a complete list;

I'm not gonna go through each one and there is great overlap.

But to highlight some things, on the left side

perhaps the most critical issues are the categories of

psychological and physiological disease;

these two issues resulting from socioeconomic inequality are engulfing

in what they actually embrace.

However, stress - psychosocial stress -

and addiction are also highly caustic as other examples.

On the right side, perhaps the most critical issues

are the categories of personal/group conflict,

and the negative externalities -

that's a very important word when you begin to look at the market system.

Poverty for example is a negative externality just as pollution is.

However, oppression and legal discrimination are also

quite relevant to that side as well.

In the end, all of these injustices and detrimental pressures

lead to the final stage manifestation of effectively, structural violence,

as expressed in the two resulting categories at the bottom:

reduced physical, mental health and life span,

and reduced social stability and increased violence.

Now, I'd like to

basically - and this is the point of this talk ultimately -

is to give some notable research examples

covering a range of issues from these two broad categories at the bottom.

I have chosen these because they're a little less talked about;

they're subtle and unique, showing again just how negative

public health relationships are,

as linked to poverty and socioeconomic inequality,

just the spectrum of disorder is so much more daunting

than we've come to realize in its nuance.

A 2015 Columbia University study

has found that cognitive impairment correlates

to poverty in the form of brain damage.

It found that the brain structure of children and teenagers in poverty

actually develop differently from those in affluent conditions.

That children in families earning less than $25,000 a year

had 6 percent less development

than those that earned $150,000 a year.

A similar study found that poverty overall correlates