Wealth and Health

I think the health of a community can be measured pretty well by the wealth of it. If there is a lot of poverty, not only do you instinctually view the community as a "worse" community, but there is some quantitative reasoning behind that too. Firstly, wealth within a community yields a good economy and standard of living is automatically higher because there is more competition in the market and more availability of higher priced items. It naturally follows that then the house prices are higher, so the people living there tend to have a better income and aren't going to become robbers or steal anything.

In poorer neighbourhoods, there is much more want of things that tend to be lacking in a community, leading to more theft and an overall lower standard of living.

I despise that this is the reality of it, but it's true. Wealthier communities are healthier, moreover they are safer.

The question that stems from this question, is to do with how you interpret healthiness within a community. Is it literal health (obviously no), healthy relationships formed between members of the community? If it is this, then no, there is absolutely no indication of this type of health in relation to wealth. People can be bad or good, and that has no correlation to how much money they have: there are bad eggs in every the socioeconomic class.

If people have good relationships with each other, like neighbourhood watch programs, that's definitely a way in which the society is healthy.

Does healthy mean safety? That's how I interpreted it, indirectly. As I explained, having a good economy and wealth drives up the standard of living which allows people to live well.

I think that healthy as taken to mean safe makes a little more sense than my "healthy relationships speculation" just because you can have a very tightly nit neighbourhood that still is unsafe, just because of its surrounding area or people who infiltrate their little world.

As cyncial as all this sounds, you still got to remember, and I think Miranda at the least agrees with this too: it's supposed to be something we can draw knowledge from and apply it to our lives in order to make it better. Whether that eliminates looking at the health of a community or not is not the point; it's that we realize what we value in society to better know ourselves....