I'm currently watching the last few minutes of "Is Inequality Making Us Sick?" on PBS. The documentary examines evidence that unemployment causes health problems resulting from increased levels of cortisol. But though they're apparently deeply concerned with medical evidence, they make leaps utterly unwarranted by sound economic evidence: that "free markets" result in higher levels of unemployment than government-run economies.

In fact the shows whole premise is faulty: the evidence they present indicates that unemployment is bad for people, but the show's title claims that "inequality" makes people sick. So if a wealthy person moves into a house two blocks away from you, you'll suddenly get sicker! I guess people must have been very, very healthy in the Soviet Union, given that they had far less inequality than the West. And East Germany must have been much healthier than West Germany by the same token.

(I also have some beachfront property in Nevada for you, if you buy that.)

Sweden is presented (of course) as a utopian paradise: the average Swede lives three years longer than the average American. The only suggested reason is Sweden's massive socialist infrastructure. The reader is not told that different ethnic groups have different life expectancies, and that Sweden has a vastly different ethnic mix than the US. Nor is the reader told about Sweden's unemployment rate, which is officially given as just slightly higher than the US, but which many critics estimate to be two to five times the US rate. (More here.) So people will suffer fewer ill health effects from unemployment as long as the government fudges the numbers? They seemed quite focused on finding everything wrong with the US they could, but seemed utterly disinterested in probing too deeply into any Swedish social problems. Nor do they look at the UK, France, Italy, or other socialist European nations with a demographic profile more similar to ours, and admittedly much higher rates of unemployment.

I've been reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics; this program comes off as a textbook demonstration of each fallacy and economic mistake he describes. There's the fallacy of composition, where you focus only on, say "manufacturing job" (which are declining) and don't look at average wages or rates of employment across the economy. Vaguely that people are earning less than ever, but don't talk about their actual purchasing power. Use a few sad anecdotal stories (an unemployed family on lakefront property, whose taxes are thus going up -- poor dears, I could never afford to live on a lake) but don't present the overall statistical picture. (Nor do they mention that their burdensome taxes would inevitably be higher, not lower, with more government programs to feed.)

And of course, they're careful to trot out a few Christians, screened to tell the "red-staters" that "individualism" is the opposite of the gospel of Christ. (Jesus died primarily in order to compel Caesar to appoint large and wasteful bureaucracies, you know.)

The saddest part: if the show's key piece of evidence is true -- that unemployment causes ill health -- then following the show's advice has every prospect of producing far more of the "excess deaths" they say they lament.