Social Evils - From Unemployment to Idleness to Prejudice. Some Suggestions for Mapping the Modern Equivalents of These Old Evils onto New Injustices

In the midst of World War II the economist William Beveridge christened five social evils, all to be eradicated in Britain: ignorance, want, idleness, disease and squalor. Although Britain took its lead from developments elsewhere, to an extent that would have been hard to imagine in the 1930s, the very worst manifestations of each of these five evils had been overcome by the 1970s. However, from then onwards each evil transformed its appearance. In this paper I briefly argue that the new form of the five had features respectively of revised elitism, exclusion, prejudice, despair and greed.Ignorance, Want, Idleness, Disease, Squalor, Elitism, Exclusion, Prejudice, Despair and Greed

Creating a more equal society will require understanding and generosity, hope, perseverance, but above all kindness

Drawing on multiple sources of evidence, Danny Dorling suggests causal links with depleting mental health in the young, the increased use of anti-depressent drugs, and high rates of infant deaths than in similar affluent countries, sketching a narrative of the insidious potential social consequences for our society in a hundred years’ time

Visualizing Europe's demographic scars with coplots and contour plots

We present two enhancements to existing methods for visualizing vital statistics data. Data from the Human Mortality Database were used and vital statistics from England and Wales are used for illustration. The simpler of these methods involves coplotting mean age of death with its variance, and the more complex of these methods is to present data as a contour plot. The coplot method shows the effect of the 20th century’s epidemiological transitions. The contour plot method allows more complex and subtle age, period and cohort effects to be seen.<p></p> The contour plot shows the effects of broad improvements in public health over the 20th century, including vast reductions in rates of childhood mortality, reduced baseline mortality risks during adulthood and the postponement of higher mortality risks to older ages. They also show the effects of the two world wars and the 1918 influenza pandemic on men of fighting age, women and children. The contour plots also show a cohort effect for people born around 1918, suggesting a possible epigenetic effect of parental exposure to the pandemic which shortened the cohort’s lifespan and which has so far received little attention.<p></p> Although this article focuses on data from England and Wales, the associated online appendices contain equivalent visualizations for almost 50 series of data available on the Human Mortality Database. We expect that further analyses of these visualizations will reveal further insights into global public health.<p></p&gt

The central government continues to believe that it, and not elected local authorities, knows best

George Jones and John Stewart describe the considerable freedom for action and initiatives by local authorities up to the Second World War. Central controls then began to escalate, culminating in the 1980s when their right to determine their own levels of expenditure when financed by their own taxation was ended. This trend has since continued. The 2011 Localism Act gives central government over one hundred powers to control local authorities, and expresses the underlying belief of central government that it rather than elected local authorities knows best

Social Evils – From Unemployment to Idleness to Prejudice. Some Suggestions for Mapping the Modern Equivalents of These Old Evils onto New Injustices

In the midst of World War II the economist William Beveridge christened five social evils, all to be eradicated in Britain: ignorance, want, idleness, disease and squalor. Although Britain took its lead from developments elsewhere, to an extent that would have been hard to imagine in the 1930s, the very worst manifestations of each of these five evils had been overcome by the 1970s. However, from then onwards each evil transformed its appearance. In this paper I briefly argue that the new form of the five had features respectively of revised elitism, exclusion, prejudice, despair and greed

Net Cohort Migration in England and Wales: How Past Birth Trends May Influence Net Migration

An established role for statistical social science is to try to uncover the extent to which aggregate behaviour is conditioned by context as exemplified by the work of Durkheim. A decade prior to Durkheim's seminal work, eleven 'laws' of human migratory behaviour were proposed by Ravenstein. In this paper we suggest an extension to this work, that: migration balances the relative worth of people to places over the course of human lifetimes; not in days, month or years: people follow the tides of life. We explore the concept of net cohort migration to demonstrate this for England and Wales, for which long-term quality datasets are available

Net Cohort Migration in England and Wales: How Past Birth Trends May Influence Net Migration

An established role for statistical social science is to try to uncover the extent to which aggregate behaviour is conditioned by context as exemplified by the work of Durkheim. A decade prior to Durkheim's seminal work, eleven 'laws' of human migratory behaviour were proposed by Ravenstein. In this paper we suggest an extension to this work, that: migration balances the relative worth of people to places over the course of human lifetimes; not in days, month or years: people follow the tides of life. We explore the concept of net cohort migration to demonstrate this for England and Wales, for which long-term quality datasets are available

Recession, Austerity and Life Expectancy

For many decades, in affluent countries life expectancies have been improving approximately 2 years every decade1. Life expectancies for females remain higher than for males, although explanations remain unresolved2,3. In the UK improvements in life expectancy at birth have slowed since 20104. Most recently, life expectancy in some areas of England has fallen by more than one year since 20115. This is an extraordinary reversal. There was a corresponding slowing in life expectancy remaining from age 65, from increasing 1 year every 6 years for women to 1 every 16 years, and for men from 1 year every 5 years down to 1 year for every 9 years4. In Ireland, life expectancy at 65 has continued to increase, but has slowed substantially from a gain of 3 years between 1995 and 2005 to 1.9 years between 2005 and 2015 (for men) and from 2.6 years down to 1.2 years for women6. Full European figures for life expectancy for 2016 are yet to be released. However, in the USA, life expectancy has now been falling for at least two years7. This short paper examines recent trajectories of life expectancies across Europe following the recent global recession, and through the implementation of greatly varying national ‘austerity’ policies, particularly where those cut public sector expenditure. Recession and austerity could be predicted to impact most heavily on the most vulnerable, particularly if health and/or social care budgets were affected (as in the UK). Socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in Europe8 suggested between-country variation was partly attributable to smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity and poverty. Ireland was not included in this study, but has relatively high rates of these risk factors9

The shape of the global causes of death

BACKGROUND: World maps can provide an instant visual overview of the distribution of diseases and deaths. RESULTS: There is a particular geography to each type of death: in some places many thousands of deaths are caused by a particular condition, whilst other equally populous areas have few to no deaths from the same cause. CONCLUSION: Physicians and other health professionals often specialise in the specifics of causes, symptoms and effects. For some practitioners gaining a worldview of disease burden complements smaller scale medical knowledge of where and how people are affected by each condition. Maps can make health related information much more accessible to planners and the general public than can tables, text, or even graphs. Ten cartograms based on World Health Organisation Burden of Disease data are introduced here; alongside seven based on data from other sources. The Burden of Disease cartograms are the latest in a much larger collection of social, economic and health world maps