No one would ever accuse us of blowing our own trumpet. Humility-intellectual, moral personal- is the name of our game. Most of the time. So when a writer whom we admire as much as Aditya Chakraborrty of the Guardian [1] picks up on a theme we’ve covered here before (twice) we won’t mention that at all. Well, not very often anyway. We won’t even mention the two main blogs(LSS 21 12 21; 19 2 25) we penned on the subject, nor any of the others. Instead we shall cut to Aditya’s excellent piece, for the benefit of newer readers to this blog. If that’s not modesty. well, we’re not sure what is.
Drawing on the work of some pretty learned experts Aditya points out that UK Life Expectancy has pretty much stalled for most people. In fact, it seems to be in decline for many. And all at a time of unprecedented increases in medical knowledge( we cover a lot of them here too) and general popular awareness of things like nutrition and wellness. And he links the poor performance to a whole slew of statistics on social inequality and policy choices made by various governments:
Yet in a society as unequal as the UK, how well or sick you are depends on how rich you are……..That is injustice. It could be improved, but British governments have made choices that mean poorer children get old sooner and die earlier than richer children.
He even points out the comparison with similar statistics from the old Soviet Union, which showed them to be in deep, deep trouble long before the whole system collapsed. Just as , ahem, did we. gentle readers
All of which leads us to a few simple conclusions. First if you want the good stories early, read this humble self effacing little blog. Secondly we believe Aditya, his experts, the ones we cited like Emmanuel Todd and a whole lot of other authors like Wilkinson and Pickett [2]and Thomas Picketty[3] who saw this utter disaster coming years ago. And not just in the UK. What depresses us is that we will never understand why people buy the newspapers and watch the TV channels that have made it all possible.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/06/uk-death-healthy-life-expectancy-decline-sta
[2]Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
[3]Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
#health #life expectancy #nutrition #inequality #economics
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