You , your children and your grandchildren are going to live a lot less than you should have done. That’s the stark message from Andrew Gregory of the Guardian,[1] who has been busy reviewing a major study of life expectancies across 20 European nations. It’s a topic which has concerned us before here(LSS 21 12 21) and not only is it not going away but we think it is a sign of something deeply general going wrong.
The first signs that the old Soviet Union was in real trouble came in the 1970s when astute researches suddenly realised they weren’t returning their annual health figures to the WHO and other bodies. Their economy was no longer delivering, people were going hungry: and you just can’t spin health statistics over the long term. Within a few years the system had fallen in on itself. According to a study by the University of East Anglia the long rise in life expectancy which we have taken for granted for centuries has now stalled. Worried? You should be.
Greece(lashed by cataclysmic economic woes 15 years ago) is second worse. But it is the countries of the UK, one of the most unequal societies in the western world, which are doing worst of all. And we think we know why. Our old friends Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett [2] long pointed to inequality as the root causes of many evils such as obesity poor health bad diets over work and chronic illness[2] And -surprise, surprise! These are exactly the factors which the authors cite to be dragging UK statistics so drastically backwards. But can you forgive us one more observation, gentle readers? One country bucking the trend is Norway. Which some readers will recall set up a sovereign wealth fund with their share of North Sea Oil back in the 1980s of the last century.(LSS 6 7 20) While the British in the same years splurged theirs on new cars, shopping, time share villas and an utterly botched programme of de-industrialisation. Here are the consequences.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/european-countries-experience-life-expectancy-slowdown-research-shows
[2] R Wilkinson K Pickett The Spirit Level Penguin 2010
#inequality #life expectancy #sovereign wealth fund #public health
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