Wonkblog

‘Everybody outside of the top is suffering’: How stress is harming America’s health
By Ana Swanson December 13

(Washington Post illustration; iStock)
The stresses of poverty in the United States have grown so intense that they are harming the health of lower-income Americans — even prematurely leading to their death.

A report published Monday by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution finds that stress levels have greatly increased for Americans at all income levels since the 1970s, but especially for low-income groups, as the chart below shows.

The report doesn’t measure stress as we typically think about it in daily life. Instead, the researchers track “stress load,” an index of certain biological markers such as blood pressure, cholesterol level, and kidney and liver function, that they say are “associated with long-term physiological strain.” These metrics are strong indicators of a person’s health and mortality, according to the report.

“The poor have seen really striking increases in the stress load index,” said Diane Schanzenbach, one of the report’s authors and the director of the Hamilton Project.

Can you swallow a tablet now?

No I only got as far as the phone.

Don’t tell me you have swallowed your phone

No I swallowed yours

.Give it back to me at once

How can I do that when it’s inside me? .

Doctor this man believes he has swallowed my phone.

That’s an unusual delusion

But who is deluded?

I’m just pulling your head

Well go and pull  a bird

Don’t be so rude

It’s just that I dont know what’s going on in this place

Don’t worry about that nobody could understand it.

But if you know that nobody could understand it in some sense you must understand it to be able to make that kind of judgment

I see what you mean. We make judgments using some other facility than logic

but we don’t know what we are doing

So it’s not necessary to understand what we’re doing in order for it to be correct

Oh well the human mind has got powers far beyond the computer 

As humans  can only make something which relative to themselves is partial because it was very hard to believe that we could make something more complex than themselves..

Perhaps we’re using the wrong language 

I don’t know what that means actually

I don’t either but can you

get some kind of partial comprehension of what i’m hinting at?

I think so because not everything can be described in simple clear terms

Let’s go out for a drink

Well shall we go?

What about the Swallow and Horseshoe?

I thought you were going to say let’s swallow an horse shoe.

I’m not going down that path again

I just can’t swallow your claim

Digest it