It's pretty clear there is going to be a "war on guns", just like there has been a "war on drugs", and it is going to have the same effects: lots of legitimate and useful activities that used to be legal will become illegal, lots of harmless people will end up in prison, lots of illegal dealers will make tons more money, and nobody will be any safer as a result. It seems we already have a "gun czar".
For geeks, a really serious consequence of the war on drugs has been that doing chemistry at home is largely dead. Unless you're part of an established corporation or a university, buying glassware or chemicals is going to cast suspicion on you. Medical drug regulation has also been closely linked with this, in the name of safety, creating the "orphan drug problem" (drugs that are so cheap and easy to make that nobody wants to spend the money getting them "approved") and attacking other cheap drugs.
With the war on guns, it's going to be worse, because the ability to manufacture any kind of metal or plastic parts will be considered suspicious; they could be gun parts after all. At the very least, having these things around will be used to justify searches and enhance penalties if prosecutors can construct any tenuous link to a crime. We have seen a bit of this already with electronics and wires being regularly considered "bomb making materials".
Corporations will fall in behind this "war on guns", not out of a grand or deliberate conspiracy, but because it serves their interests; they really don't want you to manufacture anything at home; you are supposed to buy their sh*t and service, not make and repair things yourself. They can appear to be progressive and pro-safety while at the same time supporting making illegal something that is primarily against their business interests.
It's ironic that this fundamental erosion of liberties comes from people calling themselves "liberals", people who keep railing against the great evils of corporations and who keep telling us that we should reuse and our kids should become more educated and more skilled in science and engineering, yet keep taking away the liberty to do so through more and more laws ostensibly meant to protect us from ourselves.
(In case you're wondering, I don't own guns and I never did. I don't like them and wouldn't want to have one in the house. But I don't want the right to own one to be restricted. I had a large chemistry set. I have a metal working shop, I build electronics, and I have a 3D printer.)
All this posturing and the regulations of "clips" and "assault weapons" are security theater; they don't result in any increase in safety or reduction in violence.
My guess is that most refereed articles are funded by public funds. Why shouldn't they at least be available for free on the Internet?
They should be, no argument from me about that. We definitely need big changes for the way research articles are published. People are investing a lot of effort in making that happen.
But legacy articles are just a big problem because publishers do hold valid copyrights, and a lot of that content was not publicly funded. Downloading and distributing that content accomplishes nothing because no institution, library, or archive can actually legally use it. Efforts like JSTOR are the best way anybody has been able to come up with to digitize, provide cheap access to it, archive it, and ensure that it will eventually be liberated.
Unlike PACER, where mass downloading and distribution made sense, it wouldn't have solved anything for legacy academic papers on JSTOR at this point. Swartz's partial download of JSTOR wasn't some heroic effort to liberate data, it was a stupid publicity stunt that likely would have backfired.
You get these kinds of problems with criminal copyright infringement charges from the federal government: they are subject to political pressures by various powerful industry groups, they have extremely high costs for the targets even if unsuccessful, but the people responsible can't be held accountable. Criminal penalties for copyright infringement should just be abolished; they serve no useful purpose.
JSTOR doesn't own the content, the publishers do. JSTOR has been pushing publishers to open up for years and greatly improved access to scholarly journals, and they provide free access to anything that's out of copyright. JSTOR is probably the best that can be accomplished for old articles within the limitations of copyright law (for new articles, the solution is journals like PLoS). You can't blame JSTOR for the fact that this content isn't free, and Swartz would have done nothing to improve the situation.
I find it fascinating that someone who sells fonts at $100 a pop would so casually suggest effectively abolishing copyright for someone else. Are you against copyright in general? Or just copyright for scientific publishers, or what? I mean, I dislike scientific publishers as much as the next guy, but I don't see why I should like font designers any better.
JSTOR is not a business, it's a non profit that has been trying to make it easier for people to access scholarly literature. They never were the enemy, which makes the whole thing so senseless. They were an easy target precisely because they had worked hard to make it easy to access this data.
Why didn't he target Elsevier or one of the other commercial publishers instead?
To say that he had legal access to the articles is a stretch. He wasn't at MIT, he was a guest at Harvard.
Worse though, he physically broke into a network closet and concealed a computer there, connected it to the network and had it download this data. He tried to hide his face when accessing the closet and ran away from police, so he knew that what he was doing was wrong.
I think physical break in, concealment, and wire tapping at a university where he wasn't even a student go a bit beyond "downloading articles he had legal access to."
I don't want to "call" it anything, I just trust a judge and jury to make that decision, and I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the DA wasn't doing their job.
You seem to think that special rules should apply to wealthy and photogenic Internet activists, where they don't even have to go before a court of law to defend themselves. And you are being a jerk about it too.
The downloading of the articles and violating JSTOR's TOS shouldn't have been a crime. But Swartz broke into an MIT wiring closet and attached hardware to the network to do it, and that is quite serious. People routinely get prison time for that kind of behavior.
Yes, because it is better than the alternative. I don't think it is unreasonable to hope that even a prosecutor has normal human emotions and doesn't want to destroy a young man's life for such petty reasons
I disagree. The alternative to having prosecutors prosecute most crimes is a justice system in which tough laws are on the book, lots of people break them, and it is at the arbitrary discretion of prosecutors to decide who to charge and who not to charge. In fact, that's the system we have. It's the system that terrorized Swartz. And instead of ending it, you want to continue it.
Do we really want a world in which prosecutors arbitrarily drop charges because they like the reasons the defendant violated the law? I think that's the wrong way to go about it. Our laws on felony copyright infringement and the Computer Fraud act are bad laws. We shouldn't blame the prosecutors for that, we should blame Congress.
Congress and the public don't notice if cases are quietly dropped, they notice if cases go to trial and are talked about. I think that if this case had gone to trial, it would have been one of the best ways of forcing Congress to address these bad laws.
"But, in fact, we are sicker because we're wealthier and spend more on medicine." No question. And where does that "more" that we spend on medicine go? It's not evenly distributed across the economy. It goes to the 1%.
I'm sorry, but are you serious? Not only is that statement factually wrong, it wouldn't even make sense. If anybody in "the 1%" really wants to consume excessive amounts of medical services, they'd have to pay either out of pocket or have a private medical plan with premiums to match. It doesn't affect your medical benefits or insurance at all.
But what do you think "the 1%" spend all this money on anyway? Elective brain surgery? Cosmetic heart-lung transplants? There is simply no way in which "the 1%" could even be a large chunk of our total medical expenses because, unlike big homes or airplanes, there is only so much medicine any individual can buy or even has time for.
No, the answer is much simpler. Two thirds of US medical expenses are already paid through the government services, primarily to seniors, and they don't give special deals to "the 1%". And where the excess money goes is clear: expensive prescription drugs, unnecessary tests and procedures, and excessive and useless end-of-life procedures, all things people choose precisely because they already have socialized medicine and they don't even see the costs.
That supports my argument that it's tied to wealth inequality. Who benefits most from a hyper-expensive health system? Clearly not most of us.
Medically, nobody benefits from it. In terms of life expectancy or health, it makes very little difference whether you spend $20000 on your lifetime medical care or $2 million.
The Cuban example shows you clearly that you don't need more than a few hundred dollars a year in medical care (and personally I don't spend more).
"And nations like Cuba show that you need to spend very little money in order to have US or German levels of life expectancy" Absolutely. The question is, "Why do we spend so much more?". The answer is, "Because it benefits a very few very rich people".
The answer is: because we have a group of greedy people who steal from the rest of us. But that wouldn't be "the 1%" (they don't have any need to steal from me or anybody, they are rich), it would be people like you. Bill Gates isn't responsible for my skyrocketing insurance premiums, people like you are. You are determined to get your unnecessary half million dollars in lifetime medical expenses paid for, and you want to force me and others to pay for it.
You want to know what the problem with our medical system, with costs, and with the uninsured is? Look in the mirror.
I think the survey of research I read confined itself to developed, nations with somewhat stable governments ("1st World" if you will).
Doesn't matter. There is no statistically significant correlation for HDI > 0.9 either, or any other subset of the data.
Instead of referring to vague "surveys" and reading people's biased conclusions, why don't you just look at the data yourself?
However, life expectancy is a tricky one.
There's nothing "tricky" about it. US life expectancy is not very different from that of other industrialized nations. "Near bottom" means we have about the same life expectancy as Luxembourg and Denmark, and about a year less than Germany. And that small difference is more than explained through individual lifestyle choices and risk taking (obesity, HIV/AIDS, gun ownership, etc.), all choices that citizens of a wealthy and liberal nation should be free to make.
At the same time, people who retire are sicker than they were in 1960. Even after adjusting for access to health care, people from 65 to 80 have more illness, more serious illness, and longer illnesses than their counterparts in 1960.
This surprises you? My great-grandparents and grandparents died very quickly and cheaply when they got terminal diseases. There were few very sick people back then because they just didn't live. These days, they'd be kept alive for months with extra operations and drugs. Spending more on medicine doesn't increase life expectancy very much, but it does greatly increase the number of sick and very sick people in a population. And as technology progresses and medicine improves, we get more sick people for a lot more spending.
I believe the increase in sickness among retirees is related to increased income inequality. And the rising level of sickness among retirees seems to be pretty well distributed across income levels.
Well, you can believe whatever fairy tales you like. But, in fact, we are sicker because we're wealthier and spend more on medicine. And the reason people across all income levels get sicker is because people across all income levels have more access to expensive medical treatments at the end of life. "Inequality" has nothing to do with it.
And nations like Cuba show that you need to spend very little money in order to have US or German levels of life expectancy. Life expectancy is primarily related to public health and culture and both of those are cheap.
You can't do computations involving different sectors in PPP dollars because the point of PPP is precisely to give different scales to different sectors. In addition, these nations don't buy the same product; many spend less on education and end up with a less educated population. And the comparison assumes that a dollar of "national income" results in a dollar of benefit to the individual, but that is absolutely not true (even using PPP).
If you want to know whether people are better off, you need to look at what they actually end up with. A simple number is equivalized household income:
It's legitimate to worry about whether that's a true picture ("Isn't education free in Europe?" etc.). But if you look at more complex indicators, they generally give you similar rankings and ratios.
Interesting that in countries that have shrinking inequality that life expectancy and other measures of social health improve.
The US itself certainly has had rising life expectancy and other rising social indicators together with rising inequality for decades.
I was curious and plotted the data (it's on Wikipedia), and your statement is wrong in general as well. For countries with an HDI>0.7 (think Azerbaijan, Tunisia all the way up to the US and Norway), income growth, income, median family income, per capita GDP, and HDI growth correlate strongly with inequality (i.e., more inequality is generally better), and non-income HDI and life expectancy have no correlation.
For countries with an HDI0.7, there is generally no correlation (they usually have some kind of internal problem, massive corruption, dictatorships, etc.)
The US, with its vast natural advantages, [blah blah blah] than Europeans working at smaller companies with smaller markets.
The GP stated that Germans were more efficient than Americans. He provided no proof and it contradicts the usual measure of productivity. I'm sorry you don't like that measure of productivity, but there's still no evidence for the original statement.
And those GDP figures include non-productive economic activities like patent trolling, ambulance chasing and continually knocking down and rebuilding stadiums at public expense, all of which add to GDP but don't make the country better off.
They include that everywhere. If you have data showing that Europeans spend money "more productively" by some measure, I'd be curious.
Uh...got a citation for that? I can understand how some inequality can provide the incentive to achieve your true potential by rewarding such achievements appropriately, but increased inequality?
Inequality doesn't "provide" anything, it's just a numerical statement about an economy. Income inequality can be high for many different reasons, some good some bad. Income inequality in developing nations is often due to corruption, lack of education, etc. Income inequality in the US is high due to entrepreneurship and a larger number of professionals and knowledge workers.
For example, consider economies of scale. When inequality reaches a certain threshold, the middle class will be unable to purchase consumer goods, such as an HDTV.
You're still thinking of a zero-sum game. Income inequality isn't high in the US because the rich take from the poor, income inequality is high because more people in the US figure out new ways of making money and getting rewarded for it. You know, like the founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc., and all the smart people that work for them. When Ives gets paid a bonus for designing the iPhone 6 and selling it to teenagers in Australia, income inequality in the US goes up, but nobody gets poorer.
The right answer is to reward the middle class for their reasonable contributions to society (teaching, fire fighting, policing, etc) by giving them a fair wage, and then allowing economies of scale to kick in and benefit the upper class. Call it "trickle up".
What makes you think the middle class isn't rewarded in the US? Median disposable income in the US is higher than in almost any other nation. US teacher, fire fighters, and police generally make more than in other industrialized nations (a lot more after taxes and insurance).
In fact, all the professions you list generally make nearly twice or more the median US salary, and IT professionals generally make three times the median salary (that's in addition to excellent benefits). If you wanted to reduce income inequality in the US, then the income of teachers, firefighters, policemen, and IT workers would have to go down, not up.
The differences in Gini index are significant, but your reasoning is still faulty. You're thinking of income inequality as redistributing a fixed pie, but that's not how things work.
The US has a higher Gini index, but disposable income is so much higher in the US across the board that even low and median income earners are better off in the US than low and median income earners in Europe.
Productivity doesn't "correlate" with numbers of hours worked, it is how much stuff you produce per hour worked, or per worker per year (depending on the number you look at). Americans are more productive per hour worked than Germans and they work more hours per year. And as a result, Americans are also considerably wealthier.
There's plenty of research, showing that high income inequality will lead to lower life expectancy, and not just among the poor.
"X leads to Y" is a statement about causation. Income inequality by itself is a population level economic measure; it doesn't "cause" anybody's death by itself. The best you can say is that high levels of inequality in a society are statistically associated with lower life expectancies. That is probably true if you simply forget about all the other variables, but that doesn't tell you anything about any kind of meaningful causal relationship between anything.
Even if there is some reasonable underlying causal relationship somewhere, it still doesn't mean that reducing inequality will improve life expectancy. For example, you could simply shoot everybody in the top 10% of income earners. That would certainly greatly reduce inequality in the US, but it wouldn't increase life expectancy. Or, less dramatically, we could probably achieve Japanese-level life expectancies if we changed our society to work more like Japanese society; but would you really want that? I've been to Japan many times, and I gladly trade a couple of years of life expectancy not to have to live like that or eat that food.
Yet another way of looking at it is that increased inequality comes with significant benefits for our society, and a small increase in life expectancy is not worth giving up those benefits for. If you want us to reduce inequality, you need to show that the costs of reducing inequality are more than made up for by the benefits.
Keep in mind that the differences in life expectancy are tiny. Overall life expectancy in France or Spain is about 81 years, it's about 80 years in the UK, 79.4 years in Germany, and 78.2 years in the US, and a big part of the 1-2 year difference between the US and Europe is due to causes that are understood and not related to economics, inequality, guns, or other favorite political hot potatoes.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty clear there is going to be a "war on guns", just like there has been a "war on drugs", and it is going to have the same effects: lots of legitimate and useful activities that used to be legal will become illegal, lots of harmless people will end up in prison, lots of illegal dealers will make tons more money, and nobody will be any safer as a result. It seems we already have a "gun czar".
For geeks, a really serious consequence of the war on drugs has been that doing chemistry at home is largely dead. Unless you're part of an established corporation or a university, buying glassware or chemicals is going to cast suspicion on you. Medical drug regulation has also been closely linked with this, in the name of safety, creating the "orphan drug problem" (drugs that are so cheap and easy to make that nobody wants to spend the money getting them "approved") and attacking other cheap drugs.
With the war on guns, it's going to be worse, because the ability to manufacture any kind of metal or plastic parts will be considered suspicious; they could be gun parts after all. At the very least, having these things around will be used to justify searches and enhance penalties if prosecutors can construct any tenuous link to a crime. We have seen a bit of this already with electronics and wires being regularly considered "bomb making materials".
Corporations will fall in behind this "war on guns", not out of a grand or deliberate conspiracy, but because it serves their interests; they really don't want you to manufacture anything at home; you are supposed to buy their sh*t and service, not make and repair things yourself. They can appear to be progressive and pro-safety while at the same time supporting making illegal something that is primarily against their business interests.
It's ironic that this fundamental erosion of liberties comes from people calling themselves "liberals", people who keep railing against the great evils of corporations and who keep telling us that we should reuse and our kids should become more educated and more skilled in science and engineering, yet keep taking away the liberty to do so through more and more laws ostensibly meant to protect us from ourselves.
(In case you're wondering, I don't own guns and I never did. I don't like them and wouldn't want to have one in the house. But I don't want the right to own one to be restricted. I had a large chemistry set. I have a metal working shop, I build electronics, and I have a 3D printer.)
<sarcasm>Yeah, and those laws work so well</sarcasm>
All this posturing and the regulations of "clips" and "assault weapons" are security theater; they don't result in any increase in safety or reduction in violence.
They should be, no argument from me about that. We definitely need big changes for the way research articles are published. People are investing a lot of effort in making that happen.
But legacy articles are just a big problem because publishers do hold valid copyrights, and a lot of that content was not publicly funded. Downloading and distributing that content accomplishes nothing because no institution, library, or archive can actually legally use it. Efforts like JSTOR are the best way anybody has been able to come up with to digitize, provide cheap access to it, archive it, and ensure that it will eventually be liberated.
Unlike PACER, where mass downloading and distribution made sense, it wouldn't have solved anything for legacy academic papers on JSTOR at this point. Swartz's partial download of JSTOR wasn't some heroic effort to liberate data, it was a stupid publicity stunt that likely would have backfired.
Maybe the real problem with Instagram was just that it wasn't particularly useful?
You get these kinds of problems with criminal copyright infringement charges from the federal government: they are subject to political pressures by various powerful industry groups, they have extremely high costs for the targets even if unsuccessful, but the people responsible can't be held accountable. Criminal penalties for copyright infringement should just be abolished; they serve no useful purpose.
No, he was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unauthorized access, and computer damage, with the terms that the law specifies for that.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
JSTOR doesn't own the content, the publishers do. JSTOR has been pushing publishers to open up for years and greatly improved access to scholarly journals, and they provide free access to anything that's out of copyright. JSTOR is probably the best that can be accomplished for old articles within the limitations of copyright law (for new articles, the solution is journals like PLoS). You can't blame JSTOR for the fact that this content isn't free, and Swartz would have done nothing to improve the situation.
I find it fascinating that someone who sells fonts at $100 a pop would so casually suggest effectively abolishing copyright for someone else. Are you against copyright in general? Or just copyright for scientific publishers, or what? I mean, I dislike scientific publishers as much as the next guy, but I don't see why I should like font designers any better.
JSTOR is not a business, it's a non profit that has been trying to make it easier for people to access scholarly literature. They never were the enemy, which makes the whole thing so senseless. They were an easy target precisely because they had worked hard to make it easy to access this data.
Why didn't he target Elsevier or one of the other commercial publishers instead?
To say that he had legal access to the articles is a stretch. He wasn't at MIT, he was a guest at Harvard.
Worse though, he physically broke into a network closet and concealed a computer there, connected it to the network and had it download this data. He tried to hide his face when accessing the closet and ran away from police, so he knew that what he was doing was wrong.
I think physical break in, concealment, and wire tapping at a university where he wasn't even a student go a bit beyond "downloading articles he had legal access to."
I don't want to "call" it anything, I just trust a judge and jury to make that decision, and I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the DA wasn't doing their job.
You seem to think that special rules should apply to wealthy and photogenic Internet activists, where they don't even have to go before a court of law to defend themselves. And you are being a jerk about it too.
Just nuke Java, and the gigantic towers where it lives, from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.
The downloading of the articles and violating JSTOR's TOS shouldn't have been a crime. But Swartz broke into an MIT wiring closet and attached hardware to the network to do it, and that is quite serious. People routinely get prison time for that kind of behavior.
I disagree. The alternative to having prosecutors prosecute most crimes is a justice system in which tough laws are on the book, lots of people break them, and it is at the arbitrary discretion of prosecutors to decide who to charge and who not to charge. In fact, that's the system we have. It's the system that terrorized Swartz. And instead of ending it, you want to continue it.
Do we really want a world in which prosecutors arbitrarily drop charges because they like the reasons the defendant violated the law? I think that's the wrong way to go about it. Our laws on felony copyright infringement and the Computer Fraud act are bad laws. We shouldn't blame the prosecutors for that, we should blame Congress.
Congress and the public don't notice if cases are quietly dropped, they notice if cases go to trial and are talked about. I think that if this case had gone to trial, it would have been one of the best ways of forcing Congress to address these bad laws.
I'm sorry, but are you serious? Not only is that statement factually wrong, it wouldn't even make sense. If anybody in "the 1%" really wants to consume excessive amounts of medical services, they'd have to pay either out of pocket or have a private medical plan with premiums to match. It doesn't affect your medical benefits or insurance at all.
But what do you think "the 1%" spend all this money on anyway? Elective brain surgery? Cosmetic heart-lung transplants? There is simply no way in which "the 1%" could even be a large chunk of our total medical expenses because, unlike big homes or airplanes, there is only so much medicine any individual can buy or even has time for.
No, the answer is much simpler. Two thirds of US medical expenses are already paid through the government services, primarily to seniors, and they don't give special deals to "the 1%". And where the excess money goes is clear: expensive prescription drugs, unnecessary tests and procedures, and excessive and useless end-of-life procedures, all things people choose precisely because they already have socialized medicine and they don't even see the costs.
Medically, nobody benefits from it. In terms of life expectancy or health, it makes very little difference whether you spend $20000 on your lifetime medical care or $2 million.
The Cuban example shows you clearly that you don't need more than a few hundred dollars a year in medical care (and personally I don't spend more).
The answer is: because we have a group of greedy people who steal from the rest of us. But that wouldn't be "the 1%" (they don't have any need to steal from me or anybody, they are rich), it would be people like you. Bill Gates isn't responsible for my skyrocketing insurance premiums, people like you are. You are determined to get your unnecessary half million dollars in lifetime medical expenses paid for, and you want to force me and others to pay for it.
You want to know what the problem with our medical system, with costs, and with the uninsured is? Look in the mirror.
Doesn't matter. There is no statistically significant correlation for HDI > 0.9 either, or any other subset of the data.
Instead of referring to vague "surveys" and reading people's biased conclusions, why don't you just look at the data yourself?
There's nothing "tricky" about it. US life expectancy is not very different from that of other industrialized nations. "Near bottom" means we have about the same life expectancy as Luxembourg and Denmark, and about a year less than Germany. And that small difference is more than explained through individual lifestyle choices and risk taking (obesity, HIV/AIDS, gun ownership, etc.), all choices that citizens of a wealthy and liberal nation should be free to make.
This surprises you? My great-grandparents and grandparents died very quickly and cheaply when they got terminal diseases. There were few very sick people back then because they just didn't live. These days, they'd be kept alive for months with extra operations and drugs. Spending more on medicine doesn't increase life expectancy very much, but it does greatly increase the number of sick and very sick people in a population. And as technology progresses and medicine improves, we get more sick people for a lot more spending.
Well, you can believe whatever fairy tales you like. But, in fact, we are sicker because we're wealthier and spend more on medicine. And the reason people across all income levels get sicker is because people across all income levels have more access to expensive medical treatments at the end of life. "Inequality" has nothing to do with it.
And nations like Cuba show that you need to spend very little money in order to have US or German levels of life expectancy. Life expectancy is primarily related to public health and culture and both of those are cheap.
You can't do computations involving different sectors in PPP dollars because the point of PPP is precisely to give different scales to different sectors. In addition, these nations don't buy the same product; many spend less on education and end up with a less educated population. And the comparison assumes that a dollar of "national income" results in a dollar of benefit to the individual, but that is absolutely not true (even using PPP).
If you want to know whether people are better off, you need to look at what they actually end up with. A simple number is equivalized household income:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
It's legitimate to worry about whether that's a true picture ("Isn't education free in Europe?" etc.). But if you look at more complex indicators, they generally give you similar rankings and ratios.
The US itself certainly has had rising life expectancy and other rising social indicators together with rising inequality for decades.
I was curious and plotted the data (it's on Wikipedia), and your statement is wrong in general as well. For countries with an HDI>0.7 (think Azerbaijan, Tunisia all the way up to the US and Norway), income growth, income, median family income, per capita GDP, and HDI growth correlate strongly with inequality (i.e., more inequality is generally better), and non-income HDI and life expectancy have no correlation.
For countries with an HDI0.7, there is generally no correlation (they usually have some kind of internal problem, massive corruption, dictatorships, etc.)
The GP stated that Germans were more efficient than Americans. He provided no proof and it contradicts the usual measure of productivity. I'm sorry you don't like that measure of productivity, but there's still no evidence for the original statement.
They include that everywhere. If you have data showing that Europeans spend money "more productively" by some measure, I'd be curious.
Inequality doesn't "provide" anything, it's just a numerical statement about an economy. Income inequality can be high for many different reasons, some good some bad. Income inequality in developing nations is often due to corruption, lack of education, etc. Income inequality in the US is high due to entrepreneurship and a larger number of professionals and knowledge workers.
You're still thinking of a zero-sum game. Income inequality isn't high in the US because the rich take from the poor, income inequality is high because more people in the US figure out new ways of making money and getting rewarded for it. You know, like the founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc., and all the smart people that work for them. When Ives gets paid a bonus for designing the iPhone 6 and selling it to teenagers in Australia, income inequality in the US goes up, but nobody gets poorer.
What makes you think the middle class isn't rewarded in the US? Median disposable income in the US is higher than in almost any other nation. US teacher, fire fighters, and police generally make more than in other industrialized nations (a lot more after taxes and insurance).
In fact, all the professions you list generally make nearly twice or more the median US salary, and IT professionals generally make three times the median salary (that's in addition to excellent benefits). If you wanted to reduce income inequality in the US, then the income of teachers, firefighters, policemen, and IT workers would have to go down, not up.
The differences in Gini index are significant, but your reasoning is still faulty. You're thinking of income inequality as redistributing a fixed pie, but that's not how things work.
The US has a higher Gini index, but disposable income is so much higher in the US across the board that even low and median income earners are better off in the US than low and median income earners in Europe.
Except that when you look at productivity (GDP per hour worked), Americans are more productive than Germans, and they work more hours too.
Productivity doesn't "correlate" with numbers of hours worked, it is how much stuff you produce per hour worked, or per worker per year (depending on the number you look at). Americans are more productive per hour worked than Germans and they work more hours per year. And as a result, Americans are also considerably wealthier.
"X leads to Y" is a statement about causation. Income inequality by itself is a population level economic measure; it doesn't "cause" anybody's death by itself. The best you can say is that high levels of inequality in a society are statistically associated with lower life expectancies. That is probably true if you simply forget about all the other variables, but that doesn't tell you anything about any kind of meaningful causal relationship between anything.
Even if there is some reasonable underlying causal relationship somewhere, it still doesn't mean that reducing inequality will improve life expectancy. For example, you could simply shoot everybody in the top 10% of income earners. That would certainly greatly reduce inequality in the US, but it wouldn't increase life expectancy. Or, less dramatically, we could probably achieve Japanese-level life expectancies if we changed our society to work more like Japanese society; but would you really want that? I've been to Japan many times, and I gladly trade a couple of years of life expectancy not to have to live like that or eat that food.
Yet another way of looking at it is that increased inequality comes with significant benefits for our society, and a small increase in life expectancy is not worth giving up those benefits for. If you want us to reduce inequality, you need to show that the costs of reducing inequality are more than made up for by the benefits.
Keep in mind that the differences in life expectancy are tiny. Overall life expectancy in France or Spain is about 81 years, it's about 80 years in the UK, 79.4 years in Germany, and 78.2 years in the US, and a big part of the 1-2 year difference between the US and Europe is due to causes that are understood and not related to economics, inequality, guns, or other favorite political hot potatoes.