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

When we were young: inequality revisited, a commentary on Geoffrey Deverteuil's essay

Not very long ago, the world had a different shape. The cities were shaped differently too. Anglophone geographies brought into life theories about what all this meant. Global Urban Studies was a little prince world. A world in which each prince, each scholar, created their own theory. Theories were plentiful. In Le Petit Prince the Geographer is ‘…too important to go wandering about. He never leaves his Study.’ He believes that geography books are ‘…the finest books of all. They never go out of fashion.’ The geographical scholar (who Antione de Saint-Exupéry had brought to life) distained the ephemeral, that ‘which is threatened by imminent disappearance.’ That particular little prince world is no more. The 1990s theories turned out to be ephemeral. Geoffrey DeVerteuil's essay breathes a little life back into some of them, arguing for not forgetting – not becoming too distracted by the new, especially not by the more obviously ephemeral ideas that often dominate today

Fertility rates are falling in the rich world. But there are still plenty of people to go round

A slowdown in global birthrates is a problem for states such as South Korea, but not for humanity and especially wome

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