We really must praise Willy Hutton for this

Willy’s managed to reference a specific report and entirely ignore the findings of the report. Which is pretty good going even for Mr. Hutton. The complaint is about the interaction of economic and health inequality. Hutton is insistent that it’s the former that leads to the latter. It’s that life is so unfair in Britain which leads to the illness. In this Willy is entirely in line with current bien pensant thinking of course.

This is also entirely the opposite of what the report he references actually says on the point.

It is their birth weight (heavier babies fare best), what they then got to eat, the strength of family ties and parenting, their access to great early years education, as a telling report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies on health inequalities released on Friday confirmed.

Well, no, the report actually says:

Reverse causation argues that the poor health of a group with some characteristic – low social

status – is because poor health causes that characteristic, at least in part. That healthier people

make better marriages, for example, is institutionalised in many societies. More relevant today

are the effects of health on education and on earnings. Poor health in childhood and in young

adulthood limits educational opportunities, though once educational qualifications have been

earned they are largely impervious to illness. That is not so with earnings or income, which are

often severely affected by sickness or approaching death. It is unclear to us why this channel

should be controversial, often denounced by those who work on the health gradient. Of course, it

does not preclude income causing health, though it is surely not a good idea to rely solely on one

mechanism and ignore others.

As we’ve been saying for a long time now, health inequality will cause economic inequality. And at least some health inequality is just inevitable, that moving finger of fate having written and all that. It simply is not true that health inequality is purely an outcome of economic inequality. It could be, partly, we can see mechanisms by which it might be, but it is also absolutely true that some of the causation will work in that reverse manner.

It is also not true - or at least not obviously so - that austerity contributed to the slowdown in improving lifespans:

However, it is far from clear that austerity bears primary responsibility for the slowdown in

mortality progress. After the financial crisis in 2008, different European countries had different

experiences of austerity – some with a great deal, some with none – and there is no systematic

negative relationship between the degree of austerity experienced and subsequent health

outcomes among wealthy countries.

Finally, there’s one more point the report makes, one that we’ve been shouting about. Which is that for much of this we simply do not know.

Until we are able to merge death records into the census

What is meant here is that we simply do not know what the connection is between childhood conditions - economic, social and so on - and lifespan. Because we measure lifespan by age and place of death. We do not - and we’ve checked this ourselves, both with a Registrar and with ONS - have any statistical linkage between place of birth, place or conditions of upbringing, and place of death. That’s on the long form death certificate which is not an input into any of the currently used statistics. It is possible to get some sort of proxy by linking in, as there, the census, but this has not been done.

International migration is such that some 14% of the UK is currently foreign born. Whatever those childhood influences for them are, they’ll be the ones of their source country, not this one. Internal migration rates are obviously vastly higher than this. And when we get to the most detailed level of statistics - the sort that say this council ward in Glasgow has life expectancy 11 years lower than this other ward in Kensington and Chelsea - then migration rates are such that we’ve really no useful information at all about that link between childhood and age of death. Simply because the portion of the population that dies in the same 3,000 or so household unit it was born into is tiny.

The IFS is doing good work here really looking into the subject. Will Hutton takes it as supporting his preconceived ideas. It really would help if he actually read - understanding it is perhaps too much to ask - the report.

This is also true of all those others wailing over the same points and subject. Current bien pensant thinking on the subject is wrong. Partly because we’ve simply not the statistical base to make the conclusions some do and further, the logic used over causality is incorrect as well.