Danny Dorling's Blog, page 11

Public spending in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, 1980-2026

For many years the UK, and almost all other states in the world, have been reporting both the amount they spend on public services, and what they expect to spend in future, to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The three graphs in this article report those figures, first for the UK alone, then for the UK and the four other most populous European countries, and finally for another ten affluent Western European countries. This is to provide a much wider comparison. But first consider the UK alone:

 

Data Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2021, variable GGX_NGDP: General government total expenditure as a proportion of GDP.

 

Over time public spending in the UK appears to have been rising, and this is true; but it is only true more recently because of two great economic shocks: the banking crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. Bailing out the banks, increasing and servicing public borrowing, and paying for a huge “moon-shot” track-and-trace system all count as public spending, as well as furlough payments and so much more. Public spending includes the NHS, state education, state pensions, and local government, but also the armed forces and many other outgoings often not thought of as public spending. For example, the rise in the early 2000s in the graph shown here was partly military spending in the UK to pay for the Iraq war.

Public spending in the early 1980s rose as unemployment rose in the great recession of those years when three million people were out of work. Most had to rely almost entirely on state benefits. Spending then fell for the rest of the 1980s as the Conservative government of that decade made cut after cut to health and education spending and tried to privatize as much as it could. Public spending rose in the early 1990s when there was another, smaller, recession, and again a rise in unemployment. It then rose during the “New Labour” years partly as spending on health was improved, but also because of war. However, it was cut extremely deeply after 2010 by a series of Coalition and Conservative governments, who claimed that there was no alternative to deep austerity – until the pandemic hit. Finally, UK public spending is now forecast to be cut at its sharpest level yet in the years to come; and to only remain above 40% by 2026 because of public spending on servicing the increase in public debt. Once that part is taken into account, austerity in the UK is planned to be as great as before the pandemic – according to the figures the government submitted to the IMF – but is now to be enacted in a much shorter time frame: with a cut of more than six percentage points of UK GDP planned for the three years between 2021 and 2024. In contrast, the cut that took place over ten years from 2009 to 2019 was less than six percentage points in total.

What of the rest of Europe? First, consider the other four largest European economies. Apart from when Spain was still emerging from dictatorship and just becoming a democracy, all four have always chosen to spend a higher proportion of their GDP for the public good, on education, housing, health, pensions, welfare and so on (if not quite so much on their militaries). The second graph below shows how the UK’s track record looks in compassion – it is the most miserly and is set to remain so.

 

Data Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2021, variable GGX_NGDP: General government total expenditure as a proportion of GDP.

 

There was a period in the mid to late 2000s, and especially when Gordon Brown was Chancellor (and then became Prime Minister) when public spending in the UK was almost as high as Spain’s. In 2019 the Labour Party manifesto made spending promises that would have increased public spending to just below German levels, had all those promises been honoured by the end of five years in government. In the event, the Conservative government elected in 2019 was forced to increase public spending levels in the UK to far above the amount Germany had been spending in 2019; but not on things such as improving funding for British state schools to German state school funding levels, or funding the normal activity of the NHS at the level of German public health spending (which is roughly a billion more euros being spent on health each week). Note how all the large European countries increased their public spending as a share of GDP by a remarkably similar amount in 2020; but how they all project slightly different falling trajectories in the projection up to 2026, with the UK sloping steepest downwards.

Finally, is the UK still an outlier when smaller European countries are also included? The last graph of the three shown here adds another ten European countries, also drawn from more affluent Western Europe but not including some of the smallest countries in this region. It is again clear from this graph that the UK has been an outlier, an exception in Europe for many decades. Public spending in the UK has been so low for so long that it is only comparable to Spain’s when it was emerging from dictatorship and just becoming democratic; and to public spending in Greece, but again only as it was becoming a democratic country following the military dictatorship there of 1967-1974. In some of its features the UK has behaved economically like a state that has been largely ruled for the past fifty years by a kind of non-democratic junta that sees public spending on services as something to be suppressed.

 

Data Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2021, variable GGX_NGDP: General government total expenditure as a proportion of GDP.

 

The final graph above shows that France is not an outlier: Belgium and Finland spend just as much. Similarly Italy is not profligate – it now spends in the same ball-park as Norway, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and Greece. What the graph above also shows is that Germany is, nowadays, a little miserly. However, it is similar to the Netherlands. And Spain, which in most years spends a little less on its public services than Germany, is not dissimilar to its neighbour Portugal. All larger affluent countries in Western Europe have been, and will be spending relatively more on the common good than the United Kingdom.

Public spending levels tend to track taxation. Internationally, those states that tax less, spend less. The majority of the population have poorer quality healthcare, schools and housing. Their universities, railways and water supplies are more often privatized. And their citizens suffer by being less well educated, living with poorer health, and being more often looked down on by those in control. Until the UK is a more democratic state with, for instance, a voting system with proportional representation that truly reflects the will of the people, it is likely that it will remain at the foot of these graphs. However, as that transition to a fuller and more just democracy has eventually happened for every other state shown in the final graph above; it might well be too pessimistic to think that it will never happen in the UK, and in all its regions.

 

Data Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2021, variable GGX_NGDP: General government total expenditure as a proportion of GDP. Note that Switzerland was not included in the comparison because it has an unusually high GDP to public spending ratio due to some global companies being nominally based there / profit repatriated there. It’s public spending on health is amongst the very highest in Europe and yet its overall public spending as a proportion of GDP looks low. There are similar issues in the case sin Ireland, Luxembourg and San Marino.

 

For a PDF of this article and its original publication on-line click here.

Grim fall in life expectancy exposes UK government’s ‘levelling up’ lies

For a few hours on Wednesday 30 June 2021, a report released by University College London’s Institute of Health Equity hit the headlines. “‘Jaw-dropping’ fall in life expectancy in poor areas of England,” reported The Guardian.

The key statistic in the UCL report was that deaths involving COVID-19 had resulted in life expectancy in the north-west region of England falling by 1.6 years for men and 1.2 years for women. This is around 25% worse than for England as a whole, where life expectancy had fallen by 1.3 years and 0.9 years, for men and women respectively.

Paraphrasing the report’s author, leading public health expert Professor Marmot, the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership, which commissioned the report, said: “If the government is serious about levelling up health inequities, equity of health and wellbeing must be at the heart of government and business strategy rather than narrow economic goals.”

But that “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Marmot’s report is especially sceptical of the government’s “levelling up agenda”, highlighting the need for social investment in prevention, health, and care, particularly in poorer areas, and not just a few infrastructure projects.

If you want to see how serious the government is about “levelling up”, just look at how little money it has committed to investing in the ‘Levelling Up Fund’ – and the geographical areas it has picked to benefit. The fund is only £4.6bn, or on average £37m for each local authority targeted to receive it.

It seems obvious that such a scheme should be targeted at the poorest parts of the UK, which also happen to be those worse affected by the pandemic. But instead, one of the criteria that determines if an area is to be awarded money through the Levelling Up Fund is how geographically remote it is. Geographically remote areas can be more affluent areas, and are very often precisely those areas least affected by the pandemic.

 

A man wears a face mask as he makes his way through Oldham, when the town faced a local lockdown in July 2020 [Phil Noble/Reuters/Alamy]

The Westminster government is talking the talk, but not walking the walk, on levelling up. The figures in Marmot’s latest report – and the personal tragedies behind each one – are terrible. But as Marmot has said before, it’s the longer-term, deeply worrying trends in life expectancy – especially for the poorest – that should demand our attention. These already required drastically different strategies from the government even before COVID hit.

COVID’s impact on life expectancy will not be permanent. Pandemics of this kind always end within a few years, and this one is likely to end a little faster, thanks to the rapid development of vaccines. And it will end first in affluent places such as the UK, where at least nine out of ten adults have some degree of immunity to the disease due to having been vaccinated or having caught the disease, or both.

But before the pandemic hit, as a February 2020 report by Marmot explained, the UK was already experiencing the first falls in life expectancy for 100 years – and these falls were not temporary. In fact, by 2058, one million people will have died earlier than they otherwise would have done, according to research my colleague Stuart Gietel-Basten and I published in 2017 using Office of National Statistics projections. We argued then that these falls were due to the austerity policies pursued after 2010, and the lowering of living standards that accompanied them.

To prevent this far more permanent impact on British life expectancy, we need action to turn the current social, economic and health direction of travel – action that starts now and continues over many years to come.

And as the short-term effects of COVID-19 on mortality rates – hopefully – recede, it’s also worth thinking about how any supposed ‘bouncing back’ in life expectancy might be reported.

In the 16 weeks to 18 June 2021, 5,979 people who died in England and Wales had COVID-19 mentioned on their death certificate. But despite that, overall mortality figures are in fact currently remarkably low: in those 16 weeks in England and Wales, some 9,790 fewer people died of any cause than the average for the same period in 2015-2019.

Writing in The Guardian, Professor David Spiegelhalter and his colleague Anthony Masters explained: “Of the deaths that we are not seeing, many are the shadows of those who were taken early.”

If the current trend within the UK of having both a low COVID death rate and a very low death rate from other causes continues, we may well soon see reports that life expectancy has suddenly ‘shot up’.

But comparing the worst months of a pandemic with the period immediately afterwards is clearly misleading. When life expectancy across the UK is reported to have risen in 2022, or possibly even in the latter half of 2021, the government will try to claim credit. At that point it will be crucial to compare life-expectancy statistics in the UK with that of other European countries and ask – why is ours still so low? And, why has life expectancy in the UK risen so very slowly since its 2014 peak in comparison to everywhere else in Europe?

The inequities and health effects that Professor Marmot has described are largely the product of a ‘devil take the hindmost’ political attitude, which has pervaded the Conservative Party since the 1980s. Many current government ministers, and the prime minister himself, have been – at best – relaxed about inequality since their teenage years in that decade. But it was, of course, the steep rise in inequality in the 1980s, and its persistently high levels ever since, that got us to where we are today – with poorer people and poorer regions so brutally exposed to both this virus and most other causes of preventable death.

Turning the trends around will require real, not fake, commitment, as well as huge effort and probably a great deal of time. I hope I see it happen in my lifetime. I do not expect to see it happen under the current administration.

 

For the original online version of this article, or a PDF of it, click here.

Happiness is a place between too little and too much

School meals are never termed “free” in Finland; they are simply called “lunch”. Alongside Sweden; Finland is one of the very few countries in the world to provide free school meals to all school students from the very beginning of their childhood education until they leave school. Provision to do this was written into Finnish law in 1943 and fully implemented by 1948.

Finland in the 1940s was one of the poorest countries in Europe and had been poor for centuries; but it was by then on a path towards growing social solidarity and the feeding of its children was a part of that. The school meals provision has remained universal ever since. It is hardly remarked upon now – because it is simply sensible. But this is just one of many ways in which this small European country is now considered to excel.

In Finland, just as pupils expect to be provided with a chair and a table to work at, so they and their parents expect there to be food at school as well. It is, of course, almost always more efficient to provide food communally; and not just in term-time.

During the summer holidays, play-schemes in Helsinki provide free noon-time meals for all children under the age of 16. This ensures that none go hungry and also that children can eat together and be treated similarly. Why would you want to stigmatize some children, singling them out to receive food for free? This particular Finnish tradition stretches back to what were originally called playground meals. And they date back to 1942 when wartime food shortages affected the majority of inhabitants of the nation’s capital.

 

A photograph of Helsinki from above

 

What began out of necessity slowly became embedded as the norm. Now that three or four generations of Finns have always been fed well at school, it would be unimaginable to take this provision away. In other countries in Europe the argument against providing free school meals for all is the apparent cost to the ‘tax-payer’. The argument against providing meals paid for by the state is often part of a wider argument that the better-off in society need to or deserve to pay less tax.

It is true that some other countries in Europe began to provide free meals for some children earlier than 1942; but almost all these countries still fail to do so universally today. In the UK it is only universal for children in ‘reception’ and school years 1 and 2. Only about half of the children living in relative poverty are so poor that they are also eligible for free school meals in the UK. They are provided to 17% of pupils in England and Scotland, 20% in Wales and 28% in Northern Ireland; those from the lowest-income of all families. In the UK children whose parents receive what is called ‘universal credit’ (welfare benefits) are not eligible for free school meals unless their annual post-tax non-benefit income is also less than £7,500, except in Northern Ireland where the cap is £14,000. This included not being eligible for food vouchers provided by the state when schools were shut during the pandemic of 2020, or in school holidays.

Children in Finland in 2020 will neither go hungry nor feel stigmatized because of the low pay of their parents. The same cannot be said in many others parts of Europe, which is still the world’s richest continent. However, attitudes across Europe are slowly changing towards better appreciating what Finland has achieved, and this is not just when it comes to school meals but in many areas of life.

 

School breakfast in an elementary school, under the former Finnish educational system. Photograph taken by Hugo Sundström in 1949 or 1950. Used with permission of Helsinki City Museum

 

The experience of the pandemic might well lead to more change across Europe in some of the directions which Finland embarked on decades ago, but there is opposition to this. There are still a few on the right-wing of politics who at times appear to verge towards the old adage – that hunger is more effective than the overseer’s whip – with the unspoken threat to the less well-off of their or their children’s hunger or homelessness to try to ensure that they take any inadequately paid job on offer; or do work they hate because the consequences for their children are too hard to bare.

An examination of the labour market in Finland reveals that it has the most family friendly arrangements in Europe for flexible working hours. This applies not simply to those who have the most qualification, but also to Finns who leave school with the least qualifications. Comparing the least-skilled, lowest-paid in every country in Europe, the Finns have the most flexibility in when they are required to work. Everyone has greater freedom in Finland.

Finland provides lessons not just for other countries in Europe but also for elsewhere in the world, especially in the affluent world where resources are often greater than in Finland. In the USA, means-tested free school lunches are available to a third of 5–17 year-olds, those who come from families living at or below 130% of the American poverty line. The poverty line is set so low in the USA, many children above it would still be malnourished if they were not fed at school, hence the considerably higher cap. A child whose family have an income a quarter above the official poverty line still qualifies. In addition, a fifth of children in the US also receive a free breakfast at school.

Within the USA policies between different states vary, and New York City public schools have provided free lunch since 2017 for all children, 75% of whom would in any case have qualified because of the very high rates of child poverty in New York. Thus New York in 2017 has achieved what Finland achieved 74 years earlier; what Finland achieved in wartime was similarly achieved at a time of desperation in New York due to the extent of child poverty there. When New York closed it schools in the autumn of 2020 during the pandemic children were at an increased risk of going hungry.

In countries that have not achieved universal provision of goods such as school meals, health care or education, it is often suggested that a combination of private provision and the means-testing of benefits achieves the most efficient allocation of resources. The strongest counter argument to this is that the overall outcome of providing universal services is so good, and has so many wider benefits, that it is foolish not to follow the route taken by Finland given the long term results.

In health Finland now has one of the lowest infant and child mortality rates in the world. This is not because of feeding children for free at school today, but is the aggregate effect of all Finish social policies over many decades, of which school meals are just one tiny element.

In education Finland ranks very highly for how well its children learn at school, for how happy they are, for how skilled they are, for how unlikely they are to later engage in crime and end up in prison and how likely they are to make positive contributions to their society and the world compared to the average European child.

In housing Finland is well known for having the lowest rates of homelessness in Europe. All is not a utopia in Finland and there are increasing complaints over some of the costs of housing, especially in Helsinki. Nevertheless, many Finns also have access to a second home (free-time residence) in the countryside which they can go to during the summer (most are not suitable to live in during the Finnish winter). In much of Europe this would be viewed as a luxury only the wealthy could afford.

Given the overall success of Finland we should not be surprised when Finland repeatedly ranks the highest in the world for happiness. There is an old Finnish proverb – Onnelllisuus on se paikka puuttuvaisuuden ja yltäkylläisyyden välillä – ‘Happiness is a place between too little and too much’. This goes some way to explaining both why people are more content with what they have in Finland than elsewhere and how the Finns went about achieving what they have achieved.

People are happier in Finland as compared to those living in other countries due to a myriad of small differences. Each difference on its own may not appear hugely significant, or only significant at a time when a particular policy is making the headlines, but taken overall these differences, and the effect they have on people, has now resulted in that country ranking first in the world happiness estimates three years in a row.

 

Table: People who said they were happy most of the time in Europe, 2018

 

Finland has achieved one of the highest levels of income equality ever measured in the world and Finns are constantly wary of threats to that practically unparalleled gain in equality and the human rights that it enhances. That high level of equality means that schools with tuition fees are exceptionally rare. The few that do exist are often partly state-subsidized, and not educationally superior. The highest performing schools are all free. Regional differences in the quality of schools are very small.

The success of Finland’s education system followed the Basic Education Act passed in 1968. This overhauled a system in which grammar schools, most of which were privately owned and charged fees, were the only route to higher academic education. Arguments in favour of competition and selectivity in education were vociferous, but the reform was passed in parliament with 123 votes for and 68 votes against.

Many European countries became more equal in the 1950s and 1960s. Where Finland differs most is that its people managed to not only hold on to the gains they made then, but have also strengthened many of them since. Its small population and the need for economic growth facilitated reforms and made it harder to accept systems that perpetuated inequality and inefficiency in employment, consumption, and productivity.

It has only been within the last decade that Finns have come to appreciate just what they have achieved, mainly through the increased release of comparative social statistics. For instance, in 2013 a report issued by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicated that differences among schools in Finland accounted for only 7.7 per cent of variation in student performance, against an OECD average of 42 per cent.

Given how Finland now scores so highly, and that this is becoming more widely known, what is life in Finland like for an immigrant you might ask? Surely more and more people will want to travel to live in such a country as the message is spread? However, few immigrants to Finland will, for instance, speak, read, or write the language before arriving, which can be an impediment in educational and career opportunities as well is in social situations – despite so many Finns being multilingual. While it is true that some Finns are not especially welcoming to immigrants, when the UN measured the happiness of immigrants for the first time in a 2018 report, Finland scored the highest of any country being compared. However, immigrants in Finland were not as happy as the Finns themselves.

In affluent countries, immigrants usually tend to be more optimistic than the locals of their new country. But in Nordic countries, where people’s well-being is generally so high, immigrants are relatively less happy. Whether in Finland this is because immigrants find it harder to fit into in a society that is so socially cohesive, or just in comparison to the happiness particularly of poorer Finns, is not yet known. Finland accepted 40% of asylum seekers applying to live there over the past 10 years. The current government pursues a pro-immigration policy with many practical measures because of the positive impact of immigration on Finland’s economy. And, of course, any EU citizen has the right to live, work and study in Finland.

Finland is not Utopia and its people are well aware that there is much that could still be better. There is increasing activism and research on racism in Finland and on discrimination that is perpetuated through institutions and policies. A recent Non-Discrimination Ombudsman’s report concerning people of African descent in Finland documented racialized guidance disproportionately encouraging girls to pursue careers in care services and an unnecessary concentration of particular ethnicities in classes for Finnish as a second language.

Overall, people in Finland also know that they live under a flexible system in a pragmatic country that will permit better ways to be found and further improvements to be made. Knowing that things are likely to get better, especially for the less well-off, is often more important than how the situation is today.

People will always worry, but we also need to be able to hope. Finland’s recent history can give us all hope. On 20 March 2020 it was announced – for the third year in succession – that Finland was once again the happiest country in the world. The world happiness report in which this was declared included a chapter dedicated to the Nordic countries which concluded: “…there seems to be no secret sauce specific to Nordic happiness that is unavailable to others. There is rather a more general recipe for creating highly satisfied citizens: Ensure that state institutions are of high quality, non-corrupt, able to deliver what they promise, and generous in taking care of citizens in various adversities”.

As we have tried to hint at in this article, Finland excels at much more than just happiness;, the Nordic and in particular the Finnish model works well in practice across the board. It urgently needs to be made more widely available; but it is a recipe that requires slow cooking. Finland introduced school meals for all and food in holiday times a human lifetime ago; it was only much later that it reaped the multiple rewards of its approach.

 

 

This article is based on the book ‘Finntopia – what we can learn from the world’s happiest country.

For a link to the original posting of this article (by Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen) and a PDF click here.

© EBR Media Ltd, 2021. The definitive, and edited version of this article is published in The World Financial Review March/April 2021 www.worldfinancialreview.com

 

The Income Shock of 2020

The pandemic had an almost immediate and massive detrimental economic effect on the lives of the already worst-off in the UK, especially for younger adults in precarious employment and, also disproportionately people of black and minority ethnicity had to more often borrow money to get by. However what was of overwhelming importance in determining who was most badly hit economically was whether a person already lived in a household that was rich, average, or poor.

A study published in January 2021 spelt out what had occurred in detail using figures of income carefully adjusted for the size of each household and the number of children in it, after taxes and including benefits. It showed that the average income of people living in the poorest fifth of households (lowest quintile) in the UK fell from £287 a week in February 2020 to £228 a week by May 2020. This fall, of over twenty percent, was larger than for any other quintile group and resulted in a huge and sudden widening of the gap between the best-off and worse-off quintile (fifth), which has probably not narrowed since then.

In contrast to what people in the poorest fifth of households, the best-off fifth received on average £765 a week in May 2020. However, the best-off had still seen an average fall of 11% in their income since February. Although only half the percentage fall of the poorest households – it will still have often felt like a great fall in income to them.

Each income quintile became less well off, but the gap between the haves and have-nots widened and this widening occurred despite a slight increase in welfare benefits for the poorest. The same study which revealed this huge and sudden increase in the already wide gulf between the best- and worst-off also revealed particularly acutely affected groups.

Within the poorest quintile of the population, roughly 13 million people, the quarter who had fared worst had lost 60% or more of their income in these two months, that was 3.3 million people in UK households which lost at least £172 a week. In contrast, the very best-off quarter of the already best-off quintile had seen their income actually rise by 8% or more over the same period; at least £69 more a week for the economically most fortunate 3.3 million people in the UK. The few economic winners from the pandemic were almost all people who were already very well-off.

At the most extreme, a tiny number became dramatically richer in 2020 by wining government contracts that were not properly put out to tender. As the BBC reported, among many other scandals: ‘The government has also been accused of favouring firms with political connections to the Conservative Party with a “high-priority lane”.’ However, most winners will have just been already well-off people who were able to take advantage of some aspect of the crisis. What matters is that it was mostly only a few people, from among the best-off fifth, who were best-placed to do this.

Other inequalities may have narrowed as the class gap widened. Men earned 9% more than women in February 2020, that gap fell to only 5% by May as more men saw bigger pay cuts, partly due to being furloughed more often. People who were of black and minority ethnicity were, on average, 27% less well off than those that were white in February – but that gap had also fallen, to 25%, by May 2020.

By May 2020 there was a 5% gap between the incomes of men and women and 25% between white and BAME groups. However, the income gap between the lowest income fifth and the highest income fifth by households was much higher: 235%, up from 200% in February. This is the social class gap.

Your fortunes depend most on your social class, what kind of job you have or whether you do not have a job. Whether you are male of female has an impact, but it is small compared to class and it shrank as the crisis unfolded, despite the fact that women are more likely to be in jobs that are lowly paid, or not in work if a single parent of a young child. In May 2020 men in the UK were receiving on average £490 a week and women £467; but two months earlier those numbers had been £573 and £526 respectively.

The fact that the gender pay gap narrowed while the social class gap widened is because more men could be sacked or furloughed on 80% of their normal pay. This was slightly less likely for women because more women were doing work that had to continue. One very obvious example was working in health and care services, where women dominate.

The same pattern seen for women was also seen for individuals of black and minority ethnicity: their incomes were lower before the crisis began, fell during the crisis, but did not fall as much as for others. By May 2020 social class was 9.4 times more important than ethnicity in influencing income (235/25); before the crisis that difference had been nearer 7.4 times (200/37). Part of the reason was that people from ethnicity minorities, as with women, are more likely to be key workers.

 

Source: Table 4 and supplementary material from: Thomas Crossley, Paul Fisher, and Hamish Low (2021)

 

None of this should be that surprising. Within any ethnic minority group, just as among women, there is huge variation in incomes – whereas within occupation groups or social classes there is much less variation in income. However, what was perhaps unexpected was that the crisis should see the income gaps between men and women and ethnic groups narrow despite the income gaps widening overall.

Despite the overall narrowing of gender inequalities, lone parents – the large majority of whom are women – were especially badly hit. Their average household income was similar to the poorest quintile group. Most lone parents are in this income group, but they are often poorer than the group as a whole. Four out of ten lone-parents had to rely on gifts or loans from relatives at this time; and one in eight on a foodbank (compared to one in twelve for the poorest quintile).

Some 82% of the adults who went to food banks in April or May 2020 were women. Among couples it was almost always the woman who went to the food bank. Some 85% of people who went to food banks were white, a fraction less than the 90% of adults in the UK who are. Two thirds of foodbank users were in the very poorest quintile of income. Virtually none, were from the best-off 40% of households.

 

 

Sources

BBC (2021) Timeline: Covid contracts and accusations of ‘chumocracy, March 15th.

Table 4 and supplementary material from: Thomas Crossley, Paul Fisher, and Hamish Low (2021) The heterogeneous and regressive consequences of COVID-19: Evidence from high quality panel data, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 193, January 2021, 104334,

 

For a PDF of this article and a link to the original publication click here.

The City of Oxford and the Pandemic of 2020/21

Within the boundaries of the city of Oxford, for all of 2020, only 95 deaths were registered with COVID-19 being mentioned on the death certificate. It is possible that very early on in the pandemic a few Oxford residents will have died because of the disease, but that was not recognised at the time. However, a possibly similar and also small number of people probably did not die mainly due to the disease despite having it, and it being mentioned on their death certificate. These two sources of error in the official statistics tend to cancel each other out nationally.

Of the 95 residents of the city of Oxford who died directly because of the pandemic in 2020, 46 died in hospital, 30 in care homes, 10 at home and 3 in another communal establishment. In that same year 1,005 people died in total in the city; so 90.5% of the people who died in Oxford city in 2020 did not die because of the pandemic; but from another cause of death. That proportion, of just over nine out of ten deaths in Oxford, compares to 86.8% for England and Wales as a whole, so Oxford experienced a below average pandemic mortality rate in 2020, despite being so close to the epicentre of the pandemic in the UK, and the place which saw the worse rates of all: London. However, the second wave was worse for Oxford than the first.

For residents of the city of Oxford, more died directly due to the pandemic in the first 10 weeks of 2021 than in all of 2020. The number dying then was 102 people (in total) in those first ten weeks of 2021: 65 in hospital, 28 in care homes and 9 at home. As I write (on the last day of March 2021) that number has dropped to zero in week 11. In those first ten weeks of 2021 38.8% of all deaths of Oxford city residents involved COVID-19; this was now above the national proportion at that time which was 34.6%. Oxford suffered similarly to England and Wales overall; but only because wave 2 was worse than wave 1for the city. Wave 2 ended far more abruptly than wave 1, due to vaccination.

If you had been working in a hospital in the city you may think these numbers look low; that was because more died within the city of Oxford, in its hospitals, who were resident elsewhere in the county of Oxfordshire or even further away – so their deaths are not recorded within the statistics for the city. And it may also be because so many people have been ill for each person who has died, some extremely ill. It is data on where most people within Oxford were ill at the height of wave 2 in January 2021 that tells us who was most affected in the city. At that point in time the cases, and hence the deaths, were hugely concentrated among people normally resident in the poorer parts of the city.

The UK Government dashboard produced a map of cases of the disease per 100,000 people living in each area. An inset of that map is shown here, a snapshot taken in January 2021 at the height of wave 2. At that time, three areas of Oxford reported known minimal rates of over 800 per 100,000. The real rates of infection will have been at least three or four times greater than that. The actual rates of disease will have been higher than those reported because only a minority of people ever come forward to be tested – those with bad symptoms or additional worries.

 

The proportion of people tested positive for COVID19 in each neighbourhood of Oxford in January 2021

 

As the map shows the areas with the highest number of cases were centred on Barton, Donnington, and a large area stretching from Rose Hill to Greater Leys – all containing parts of the city which have been the poorest in recent decades, parts where overcrowding is highest and where most people have no choice but to work, and work at jobs which cannot be done at home (there is very little unemployment in Oxford). In contrast, in the wealthier enclaves of the city between Jericho and Summertown between 4 and 10+ times fewer people had the disease at this time; and here it was generally far easier to work from home, if not mandated to work at home by many of these peoples’ employers.

Oxford City: people testing positive for COVID19 by age and week 2020/21

One question people may ask is whether there is any evidence that having a large group of students in residence at the two universities in Oxford had an influence. The heat diagrams shown below are probably the best evidence we have to suggest they did not. So although there was a rise in cases among the student-aged population in October and November 2020 it did not spread into older groups then. Similarly in Cambridge; but the pattern for Milton Keynes, an urban centre of similar size and distance from London but without a large student population, is very different.

Cambridge City: people testing positive for COVID19 by age and week 2020/21

In Milton Keynes rates rose slowly in late September and October among young adults and that increase slowly spread to older and older groups in the population. When the new “Kent” variant arrived in December 2020, there was a sudden and accelerated increase. Much the same happened in Oxford and Cambridge at the very same time, but earlier – in late November and early December there were very low cases in the two ancient university cities. Whatever risk students returning to the city in October may have brought with them had largely dissipated.

Milton Keynes: people testing positive for COVID19 by age and week 2020/21

It looks as if there was very little connection between infections among students, which rose in the autumn and then fell in early winter, and cases among locals – which rose later. For once, the invisible but very real wall between town and gown may have been beneficial. It is a form of quarantine. If we were in any way a normal university town where more students lived at home with their parents, and far more lived out in the community, then the city of Oxford may have suffered a higher mortality rate. This is not a general argument for the benefits of cloistered, anachronistic and bizarre traditions and social divisions – merely an observation that very occasionally, as in autumn 2020, it is actually possible to point out a positive aspect to the caste/class system of this city.

 

For a PDF of this article and a link to where it was first published click here.

Census 2021 will reveal how a year of lockdowns and furlough has transformed the UK

Census 2021 will reveal how a year of lockdowns and furlough has transformed the UK

The 2021 census will help show the changes wrought by a year of COVID-19.
K303/Shutterstock

Danny Dorling, University of Oxford

Many people may feel unsure as to whether the English, Welsh and Northern Irish census of 2021 should be going ahead, given that it’s occurring during a pandemic when many aspects of our lives are far from normal. The census has actually been postponed by a year in Scotland due to these concerns.

Census timing has appeared unfortunate before. The 2001 census took place during the peak of the foot and mouth disease outbreak, amid concerns that census officials might spread the disease between farms.

Because most people will fill in their 2021 census form online, disease transmission is less of a concern this year. But there’s another criticism levelled at censuses: that they only ever deliver a snapshot of a population at a specific time, no matter how unusual or temporary the circumstances within a household may be.

There are worries that the 2021 census will capture a particularly distorted snapshot of a country transformed by the pandemic. It’ll capture young adults temporarily ensconced in parents’ homes, thousands of mainland Europeans who had planned to leave but are temporarily trapped in the UK by lockdown rules, and millions of furloughed workers counted as employed despite the real possibility that they’re soon to lose their jobs.

However, there’s a strong argument in favour of holding the census now – precisely because so much has changed. The 2021 census won’t just capture a unique time in our history; it’s also the best way to show which areas and demographics have been newly disadvantaged by the pandemic, helping direct public funds and services to where they’re needed the most.

 

Why hold a census?

Without the census, held every ten years in the UK, local government would know very little about the composition of the population it currently serves. Officials wouldn’t know which areas were falling behind others, which homes were lying empty, or which families were living in cramped and unsafe conditions.

Census data like these underpin the fair allocation of public finances, revealing the areas and even the postcodes most in need of support. Plus, the census saves the taxpayer money: even the crudest estimate of the value of the census shows that running one every ten years saves £500 million annually in administrative costs.

Previous censuses have been instrumental in improving lives across the country. As Britain built back from 1950s austerity, an extra 1966 census was squeezed between those taken in 1961 and 1971 to help guide the urgent investments of the government of the day.

Censuses also expose hidden inequalities. The 2001 census was the last to ask which floor of a block of flats families lived on, revealing that most children living above the fifth floor in England weren’t white. That fact meant a great deal more after the 2017 Grenfell tragedy.

 

[image error]Census 2021 comes at a unique time for the UK – which is what makes it so important.
Ink Drop/ShutterstockCensus 2021

The 2021 census is not an ambitious census. The number of rooms (other than bedrooms) in a home is no longer asked, as it has been since 1911 (when questions about being deaf and dumb, blind, a lunatic, or an imbecile were dropped). That means we’ll no longer know how overcrowded the worst-housed tenth of the population of England and Wales are when compared to the best-off tenth – who had five times as many rooms per person in 2011.

The 2021 census will only ask one new question: whether someone has ever served in the UK armed forces. This could be useful in understanding the links between ex-service people and homelessness. The only other change is that sexual orientation and gender identity have been assigned more categories.

But this census will nonetheless bestow much-needed clarity on a society buffeted by the pandemic. Uncertainty about how many people are actually living in the UK right now – let alone where exactly they live – is higher this year than it has been for many decades. It’s thought that over a million people left the country in 2020 who would not normally have left, but we don’t know how many really did and if they left for good. This has serious implications for the allocation of funding across regions.

More importantly still, the 2021 census will provide a clearer picture of the inequalities that have come to light since the beginning of the pandemic. The isolation of the elderly, the suffering in old industrial wards, and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BAME communities will all be better illustrated and contextualised by this census.

In February 2020, just weeks before the start of the pandemic, the BBC ran a story suggesting that the 2021 census could be the last census. In hindsight, that seems ludicrous: now more than ever, we need the census to tell us even the most basic of facts about our society. Perhaps the pandemic will bring us to our senses when it comes to the value of a census.

I’d argue we go even further, adding an extra census in 2026 which will adequately reflect the damage done by the pandemic, and how equitable the UK’s recovery will look a half-decade hence. The pandemic has forced people online, making a largely online census, held every five years, far more feasible and less expensive. Perhaps we should even start to ask household income in our censuses, as they do in the US, to further enrich our data on inequality across the country.

Official statistics like the census are not just for governments but for all of us. Crucially, census data helps us to assess the performance of government. As the UK looks to “build back better” after the pandemic, we’ll be able to look to the 2021 census to judge whether new policies tackle inequalities in the regions that need the most help.

Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For a PDF of this article and link to the original posting click here.

If Boris Johnson is serious about levelling up, he would plan for a 2026 census now

An extra population survey, on top of next week’s, would provide information the country really needs.

The 2021 census logo

without information about people’s lives, how can we know their needs?

First posted Sun 14 Mar 2021 09.30 GMT

The 2021 census is being held on Sunday 21 March – online. You may have already received your code through the post. You may have completed your census return, as you can do that early. You may have requested a paper form. Or you may have put it all aside.

Don’t worry about people not filling in the census form: 30,000 field officers will start knocking on the doors of those who have missed the count in April. On top of that, a census coverage survey of 350,000 households is planned. The methodology for this is a refined version of the “capture-recapture” technique for estimating the number of whales in the ocean.

A more serious concern is that the outsourcing of part of the census operation to a private company will cause problems. Sadly, we are stuck with a government that mandates the involvement of the private sector where it is not beneficial. However, knocking on doors (and stepping back 2 metres) in the weeks after 21 March is not going to be the hardest thing in the world to get right. It is not hard to enumerate a population still mostly locked down.

The most serious concern will be that it will be a snapshot of a strange, unrepresentative time, an image of pandemic Britain where young adults have temporarily moved in with their parents. It will record a place with low street homelessness, at the tail end of the “Everyone In” campaign. It will miss Scotland, as the census is being taken in a year’s time there. It will include hundreds of thousands of people just waiting to travel back to mainland Europe (for good), prevented by travel restrictions but ready to join the million who (we think) left in 2020. And it will count as employed those currently furloughed, but who will not be returning to work.

 

It will be a snapshot of a strange, unrepresentative time, an image of pandemic Britain.

 

What can be done to fix this? In the early 1960s, it was decided that an extra 1966 census was needed for the planning required to “build back better” from 1950s austerity. It was the precursor to the most comprehensive census of all time, held in 1971. This census told us who had hot running water in their kitchen sink and where housing need was most acute. Since those times, censuses have been cut back in scope. The 2001 census was the last one to ask what floor level a family lived on in a block of flats, allowing us to know that the majority of children in England above the fifth floor were not white, a fact that meant a great deal more after the Grenfell tragedy than before it.

A 2026 census could be used to ascertain if any local levelling up has occurred overall. To date, we have seen levelling down, because of the way the government has dealt with the pandemic. A 2026 census could assess how much we have recovered – or not – in the five years from March 2021. It would fill the gaps in the record. A government that was serious about levelling up, as the 1960s governments were, would plan for a 2026 census now.

 

For a PDF of this article and a link to where it was first published click here.

Why has the UK’s COVID death toll been so high? Inequality may have played a role

The first death to be publicly attributed to coronavirus in the UK was of a woman in her seventies on March 5 2020. The same day, a spokesperson for the prime minister, Boris Johnson, warned the virus could spread in “a significant way” in the UK.

 

March 4th, 2021, published in ‘The Conversation’

On March 16 2020, a group of 30 scientists concluded: “In an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths.” At the time, this prediction was greeted with some incredulity. In hindsight, more than 120,000 deaths later, it appears less outlandish, although we will never know what would have happened in an unmitigated scenario because the UK did act to control the epidemic.

Internationally, mitigation measures have ranged from social distancing and isolating, to the most extreme of lockdowns. The debate about which measures of protection have been most effective, and which may cause more harm than good, has often been acrimonious.

Acrimony has often occurred when a relatively new disease arrives in the UK. As one of the founders of epidemiology, John Snow, said in 1853 during the middle of the 19th-century cholera epidemics:

 

The question of contagion in various diseases has often been discussed with a degree of acrimony that is unusual in medical or other scientific inquiries. The cause of the warmth of feeling that has been displayed has, in most cases, probably been unknown to the disputants. It is the great pecuniary interests involved in the question, on account of its connection with quarantine.

 

Looking back, we can now see that the pecuniary interests in 2020 were the interests of businesses that were shut down during lockdown, the interests of the government in maintaining an economy of the type they favoured, and the interests of the many individuals who personally suffered financially.

These individuals included 4 million people who lost income, but for various reasons were excluded from any of the government income support schemes. Since the beginning of the pandemic, some 1.8 million UK adults lost at least a third of their income with no resort to benefits or help of any kind. Many in this group now struggle to pay for food and everyday essentials – some will be starving.

We need to now start admitting and correcting some of the worst mistakes made. Too many people were unprotected not just from the disease, but also from the policies implemented to contain it.

 

Our World in Data, CC BY

 

Long-term consequences

 

A year on from the first officially recorded death with COVID-19, we know the current death toll, but we have little idea what the long-term health consequences will be.

However, some things are becoming more clear. One summary of the past year published in the BMJ is particularly damning. It explains that many of the policies that had been adopted in the UK – not least the closure of schools for the majority of children for so many months – has meant that, “This pandemic has seen an unprecedented intergenerational transfer of harm and costs from elderly socioeconomically privileged people to disadvantaged children.”

The protection of elderly people (in the way that we chose to do it) was also more effective in protecting those who are more affluent and was often done at the expense of poorer families, and their children, who were both far less protected from the disease and far more hurt financially.

Others may say that the countries of the UK had little option but to close schools for so long to try to control the disease. But the UK still reported the worst pandemic outcome of any large country in the world over a year on. Of all the countries with more than 12 million people, the UK had the highest crude pandemic mortality rate by the start of March 2021: 18 people had died of the disease for every 10,000 alive at the start of the year.

Why was the UK death toll so high? Ironically, it might have been much higher had austerity not stalled improvements to public health, which researchers have estimated led to 131,000 preventable deaths, again largely of the elderly, but between 2012 and 2019.

One reason the 2020 toll was still so high is that the disease was able to spread across the whole of the UK before it was widely realised it had. We now know that there had been many deaths within the UK attributable to the disease before March 2020 and that it had been spreading across the four countries of the UK for many weeks before that first recorded death. On January 30 2020, a man in his eighties in Kent died of COVID-19 exactly five weeks earlier than the woman in her seventies mentioned at the very start of this article.

A second possible reason as to why the death toll was so high is that the UK has become one of the most economically unequal countries in Europe by income.

Another early epidemiologist, William Budd, who was working alongside John Snow in the middle of the 19th century understood the role epidemics played in exacerbating inequality.

In 1849, Budd explained:

 

How important it is – even in regard to their own interests – for the Rich to attend to the physical wants of the Poor. To do this is one of our first and plainest duties. The duty itself we may evade, but we cannot evade the sure penalties of its neglect. By reason of our common humanity, we are all more nearly related here than we are apt to think. The members of the great human family are, in fact, bound together by a thousand secret ties, of whose existence the world in general little dreams. And he that was never yet connected with his poorer neighbour by deeds of Charity or Love, may one day find, when it is too late, that he is connected with him by a bond which may bring them both, at once, to a common grave.

 

Vaccines are being rolled out, deaths are falling, but enormous damage has been done. A year on we still do not have a good test, trace and isolate programme – at a time when many cannot afford to isolate.

The UK’s approach was not, in hindsight, the right response. Ranking so badly internationally tells us that. But it does not tell us the extent to which our prior circumstances were so bad in the UK that we were doomed to have a poor outcome – or to what degree we made an already bad situation worse.

 

Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

for a PDF of this article click here.

Who should be vaccinated before others?

In late January 2021, when I wrote these words, a debate was raging as to whether people working in particular occupations should receive COVID-19 vaccines before people working in other jobs, and possibly even before some much older people. That debate may still be raging when this piece is published.

On the 25th of January 2021 the Office for National Statistics produced a report entitled ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by occupation, England and Wales: deaths registered between 9 March and 28 December 2020’. The report began by explaining that COVID-19 had contributed to 7,961 deaths of people aged 20-64 during this whole period, an average of 27 deaths a day.

COVID-19 had contributed to the deaths of almost ten times as many people over the age of 64 in that same ten month period. COVID-19 is a disease that is fatal mainly in older people. Many people, most especially older people, who recover also suffer long term illness from it. On that same 25th January day, one sufferer from the disease, Paul Garner, (Professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Director of the Centre for Evidence Synthesis in Global Health and Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group) wrote in the British Medical Journal: ‘I write this to my fellow COVID-19 long haulers whose tissues have healed. I have recovered. I did this by listening to people that have recovered from CFS/ME, not people that are still unwell; and by understanding that our unconscious normal thoughts and feelings influence the symptoms we experience.’ He was explaining that even those, like him, who had been badly affected but were not very old often recover. He was doing this because the fear of the disease was so great at this time.

COVID-19 is a terrible disease, but it affects some people much more badly than others. Just as ten times as many people had died of the disease aged 65 and over, as compared to those of working age in 2020, so dramatically fewer aged under 20 had died partly (or mainly) due to COVID-19 in the same ten months being compared – just some 21 people in England and Wales, mostly young children. In contrast, almost 4000 children had died of other causes in 2020.

Some 99.5% of the people aged under 20 who died in England and Wales in 2020 did not have COVID-19. Some 90.5% of all the people aged 20-64 who died in 2020 did not die due to COVID-19. One occupation where the risk of mortality was almost identical to the national average was teaching. Among people working as teaching and educational professionals, 89% of the deaths that occurred in 2020 had nothing to do with COVID-19. However, many people of working age certainly feared this disease above anything else that year. Only one third of those aged 20-64 who did die of COVID-19 were aged 20-54; and only one third were women.

By occupation it was men who worked in the very lowest paid occupations, classified as elementary jobs, such as cleaning, who had the highest rate of deaths (699 deaths) and next those men working in caring, leisure and other service occupations. Women in those occupations also had some of the highest rates for women, but faced roughly half the risk men faced.

We do not yet know why men of any given age and job were twice as likely to die as women. In some occupations where there are many more women working than men, the mortality rate is higher for men, but more women die overall. For example, as ONS succinctly put it: “Men (79.0 deaths per 100,000 males; 150 deaths) and women (35.9 deaths per 100,000 females; 319 deaths) who worked in social care occupations had statistically significantly higher rates of death involving COVID-19 when compared with rates of death involving COVID-19 in the population among those of the same age and sex.” And we do know that “Rates of death involving COVID-19 in men and women who worked as teaching and educational professionals, such as secondary school teachers, were not statistically significantly raised when compared with the rates seen in the population among those of the same age and sex.” That last finding provoked much anger, but not a great deal of reflection.

 

ONS report on mortality by occupation for men

 

A website, The SKWAWKBOX, claimed that the ONS figures were misleading because they did not include people whose occupation was teaching but were aged over 64. Perhaps their reporter did not know that death certificates record last known occupation, but don’t actually record whether someone was working recently or was long since retired when they died? That website went on to explain that: “…the National Education Union (NEU) revealed that Department for Education data showed that rates of infection among education staff is between twice as high and seven times as high as in the wider population.” Given all this it was hardly surprising that many teachers were in such fear. However the ONS figures are the only ones that are comparable with other occupations and which are actually about people at work (not adding in also those who are retired) – and they very clearly explain that working teachers had average chances.

 

ONS report on mortality by occupation for women

 

It is not hard to see why the ONS statistics were so contested. For someone who was a teacher, the fact that they were a teacher did not significantly increase their chance of dying of this disease compared to anyone else (although most did not feel this). Logically, if they were near retirement age it is that risk they should have been worrying about far more; twice as much if they were male. After that, they should probably have worried about whether they lived in a big city, in an overcrowded household and/or in a poorer area (where rates of the disease have tended to be much higher). In hindsight, given the statistics released in 2021, they should have worried if they already had (or were at risk of developing) diseases affecting the lungs, heart, kidney, liver, brain, nervous or immune systems, or had diabetes or were very obese; and actually worry more about all the other risks of those conditions and less about the increased risk if they caught COVID-19.

The geographical and occupation patterns largely explain why people of Black or South Asian ethnicity were more likely to be at risk of the disease. For people of working age, dying of COVID-19 in 2020, once age, sex and geography had been accounted for – was mainly a question of social class – and this was as true among the public sector workforce as among the private sector. The more posh your job, the less likely you were to catch the disease, or possibly fall ill from the disease if you did catch it, or die of the disease if you did fall ill. The two graphs below illustrate this very clearly. They show how, all else being equal, that the man who cleans an office was four times as likely to die of this disease in 2020 than the professional who decided when the office was cleaned. And the woman who worked on a production line in 2020 was more than four times as likely to die from the disease than a woman working in an associate professional or technical occupation (such as teaching).

If COVID-19 is still rampant when you read this, take a look at the map of your area on the government’s dashboard. I have included an example for Oxford here. Had there been space I could have included a map of deprivation in Oxford, but I really don’t need to as this map of the disease is almost identical.

Finally, who should be vaccinated before others, after the older priority groups? Clearly the occupations that are poorly paid are most at risk – but they have few in the public eye to argue their case, or political parties that are bothered about their votes, as opposed to the votes of those much less likely to die, and always more likely to live for longer.

 

Figure 3: rates of infection from COVID-19 in and around Oxford in late January 2021.
Source: Government dashboard.

 

Currently the plan is that everyone over 18 should be offered the vaccine and hopefully most will accept it. The quicker that is achieved, the better. But we cannot condone the 48-year-old doctor in Texas who stole nine doses of COVID-19 vaccine to give to his friends and family first. In the UK the current government has been much criticised for getting its priorities wrong, for being keener to benefit its friends and associates than openness, transparency and the greater good. It will be interesting to see what decisions they make after the oldest and most at risk groups have all been vaccinated.

The poorest in our society do not grieve less when a close friend dies. If they do not die, but suffer from long-term disability due to COVID-19, they cannot retire on medical grounds and get a pension, but are at the mercy of our mean social security system.

We are all fearful of the pandemic, but need to consider the whole of society, not just ourselves. It is very unlikely that COVID-19 will be eliminated in the foreseeable future or even very long term future. Once all adults have been offered an initial vaccination, we will probably vaccinate everyone on leaving school, and older age-groups periodically. The risks are so low for school children that we may never vaccinate them (and no current vaccine is licensed for use with children).

For a PDF of this article and a link to the original source click here.

Finntopia: A Long Read

Finland is rarely mentioned as an example by leftists and Greens who want to build a better future. Yet this little-noticed country is one of the most equal, peaceful and happiest on the planet. Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen explain how Finland came to demonstrate the benefits of investing in people – and suggest what its model might have to offer the rest of the world.

For the third year in a row, Finland topped the UN’s World Happiness Report in 2020. Credit: Kostiolavi/Pixabay

Finland has become the ‘by way of contrast’ country, as the British Medical Journal described it in 2018. Finland is the one place that shows that something much better is possible than the status quo. That is a weighty responsibility. Of course, Finland is not Utopia, but today it offers one of the closest approximations.

In 2018, when Finland first achieved its top placing in the UN’s World Happiness Report, a UK newspaper reported the news with the caveat: ‘… even though its GDP is below that of the US and Germany’. When Finland overtook Norway to take first place in the World Happiness Report, it did so with a GDP per capita that was more than a third lower than that of Norway; and it then went on to hold that top-ranked position in both 2019 and 2020.

The World Happiness Report ranks countries according to GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption levels in each country to evaluate the quality of their current lives on a ladder scale ranging from 0 for the worst possible life to 10 for the best possible life.

Finland is the country that most clearly shows how it is possible for world-beating happiness to be achievable without becoming ever richer, and while having living standards in terms of material wealth that are below those in the most affluent parts of the world, including its more affluent Scandinavian neighbours.

Recent research conducted in Finland has established that ‘well-being is to a significant extent conditioned by the position one occupies in the social structure and by the welfare regime one lives in’. However, that research also found that Finland is unusual in one other way, namely when it comes to the thoughts and feelings of recent migrants to the country.

Finland is the country that most clearly shows how it is possible for world-beating happiness to be achievable without becoming ever richer

In affluent countries, immigrants usually tend to be more optimistic than the natives of their new country. When the UN measured the happiness of immigrants for the first time in their 2018 report, Finland scored the highest of any country being compared. However, in general in Nordic countries, including Finland, where people’s well-being is generally so high, being of an immigrant background is an adverse factor, when all else is taken into account. It is possible that it is very hard for outsiders to fit into a society that is already so equal and cohesive.

If you turn up in London or New York as an immigrant, you are just one of many similar others in cities full of immigrants. What is more, you have just arrived in a society that is deeply divided. The rich do not trust the poor, and the poor have good reason not to trust the rich. Almost everyone is an outsider in one way or another. Many, if not most, people you meet will be migrants like you, or their parents were. The same cannot be said of Finland or of other countries that top the list of most happy or most politically stable places.

The Fragile State Index (previously the ‘Failed State Index’) has been published annually since 2005. It ranks 178 countries across 12 indicators that attempt to summarize the key risks and vulnerabilities faced by individual nations. Currently, Finland ranks highest overall in this index, as the least fragile state in the world. It also ranks highest on many components of the index, including on low group grievance, on high (as well as socially even) economic development, on good public services, and on low demographic pressures – all as compared with the other countries in the top ten shown in the table.

At first it appears quite remarkable that as well as performing very strongly on so many other international rankings, Finland ranks highest of all 178 countries for political stability. However, international rankings are very positively correlated with each other. It is easier for your people to be happy if your state is not fragile, your press is free and responsible, your schools are cohesive, the health of your infants is good and the health of the population as a whole is improving rapidly from what used to be quite a poor record.

The happiest countries in the world and the fragile state index

 

Finland today is one of the few environments on earth that replicates most closely the situation in which we are most content: when we are caring for each other and not competing; where we are each valued very similarly, and where no one is greatly elevated or diminished. In another affluent country that is in many ways Finland’s opposite, in today’s UK, 1 in every 200 people are homeless. In Finland the proportion is at least four times lower and almost no people are to be found actually sleeping on the streets.

Countries that care less count less carefully. Crude estimates by the UK government show that the number of people who were street homeless rose by 169 per cent between 2009 and 2018 in England. In Finland over the same time period, much more precise estimates revealed that long-term homelessness fell by 35 per cent, and rough sleeping was all but eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter now remains. In recent years, every week on the streets of England, three people die because they have nowhere safe to sleep. The BBC recently reported that Finland was ‘the only EU state not suffering from a housing crisis which is the result of Finland’s Housing First initiative which started in 2008… in Finland housing is seen as a right, not as a reward, as it often is in other EU countries. The Finnish system is financed by public funds and Finnish slot machines’, and the Finnish government is considering using new (including online) gambling taxes and licences as well. Finland is abandoning transitional and temporary housing for the homeless. Instead, they are given a normal apartment, immediately.

However, as news spreads of Finland’s success across so many areas of public life, there is a risk of success fatigue setting in, of Finns resting on their laurels, and of people who would like lower taxes proclaiming that enough has already been achieved. On the other hand, success also encourages success, and Finland has a reputation to maintain.
As a small nation, Finland inevitably pays a lot of attention to its high ranking on many international indices. The general population is aware of the country’s prominent position in such measures, and the Foreign Ministry shares news of its success frequently via social media.

Finland’s high rankings appear to help draw attention to the value of Finnish institutions. The current government tends to speak of restoring honour to the Finnish education system (by investing once again, rather than cutting). In a more theoretical sense, happiness or achievement is always relative; you value good times more when you’ve had bad times. In one of his best-known works, Eino Leino, a pioneer of Finnish poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century, wrote ‘he who has happiness, should hide it’. Jukka Ukkola, whose columns in the weekly newspaper Suomen Kuvalehti are typically satirical, quoted this line when Finland was first proclaimed the world’s happiest country, and joked that because Finns can no longer hide their happiness, they should learn to market it. As with the PISA educational rankings, he suggested, perhaps researchers will soon start arriving to ask how Finland has become so happy.

 

The leaders of Finland’s five coalition parties in power in December 2019.

This image was widely circulated in a tweet that ‘went viral’ upon Sanna Marin becoming Prime Minister on 10 December 2019. People around the world immediately commented on all five being women and four being in their early thirties. Four remain in these positions but Katri Kulmuni resigned as Deputy Prime Minister in June 2020 and as Centre Party leader in September (replaced in the latter role by Annika Saarikko who is also female and in her thirties). Original collage: Tuomas Nisakangas

 

 

The good news for the rest of the world is that Finland will not always be at the top of the rankings, because its achievements are not an unobtainable extreme. In Finland, as elsewhere, there are always things that could be better. And Finland has only a fairly modest amount of natural resources, no unusual historical advantages, no innate national characteristic, no special trick or magic word to account for its current position.

To treat each other with respect is to be human; not to do so is inhumane. Regrettably, all of us are capable of both. By choosing the right path more often when there was an option, Finland has shown that any nation could do as well. And by doing so well it achieves so much else as a by-product of greater equality.

 

HOW FINLAND ESTABLISHED ITS MODEL –
AND THEN CHALLENGED IT

Progress, it is often said, is the battle to remember in a time of forgetting, including remembering some lessons learned over a century ago. Finland’s equality was not a gift given by the profits from natural resources, or the spoils of an empire. Finland does not have Sweden’s larger population and legacy of imperial wealth, nor does it have the petroleum riches of Norway. It cannot use geothermal activity to smelt aluminium as in Iceland, or use its proximity to the rest of Europe to its advantage, as Denmark does. Nor did Finland have equality imposed upon it, as was the case in Japan, and to a lesser extent in Germany, after 1945.

Many of the policies that are fundamental to Finland’s success have come out of compromise. One of the first major interventions by the state into social and health services was accomplished many decades ago in 1937 with the Maternity Grants Act by a government made up of the Social Democratic Party and Agrarian League (now the Centre Party) – the country’s first left-right coalition since the civil war (and dubbed a ‘red-mud coalition’). Even before this, land reforms passed into law in 1918 which enabled the rural proletariat to purchase small holdings of land immediately after the most bloody of civil wars, required the Social Democratic Party to approve private ownership which it had previously opposed, and the bourgeois parties to accept that parts of larger estates would have to be sold off.

By no means did Finns put acute civil-war tensions behind them quickly, but, as author Kjell Westö explains, Finns were pragmatic and worked together despite their history of both internal conflict and oppression from outside. Policies that emerge from compromise between parties of different ideological stripes can also become policies that are broader, more innovative and stronger than those forged by any single political party. Problematic elements of how a society is organized, such as maintaining segregation in education, can then be discarded later when empirical support emerges for action, as comprehensive education reform following the 1968 Basic Education Act illustrated.

People in Finland were no doubt influenced greatly by what was occurring elsewhere in the world, not least the radicalism of the 1960s in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK, France and Germany at that time. Finland’s most significant student protests in that era, which are not widely known outside of the country, occurred in 1968 when the Old Student House in Helsinki was occupied. While it may be overstating the case to suggest that Finland had a ‘summer of love’, nevertheless Finns travelled and brought home useful stories. From the 1960s onwards, a vision of what the greater welfare state could achieve became a widely shared dream. That dream became a reality through establishing common ground and common agendas between political left and right. This alliance helped all of Finnish politics to (in fits and starts) drift leftwards.

It was also during the 1960s that Finnish activists created the anti-authoritarian November Movement, which advocated for stigmatized peoples, among them the disabled, LGBTQI+ (referred to in Finland as ‘rainbow people’), prisoners, alcoholics, the mentally ill and the homeless. The movement’s goal was to reduce the pressure for uniformity in society.

When viewed from a British or American standpoint, a Finnish conservative today is likely to look very much like a socialist. Finland avoided the alternative that often arises when Social Democrats are dominant for a time and introduce a more wishy-washy welfare state, one that could have been more easily eroded. Instead, the left in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s managed to establish in the national mindset the idea of social investments and from there, the idea of investing in people entered the normal practice of the National Coalition Party, the country’s moderate right. In this sense, Finland’s practice of investing in universally good schooling, health insurance, and the only genuinely comprehensive safety-net housing system in Europe, were not conceived of as social transfers from rich to poor, but as sound macroeconomic policy. The Finns are, above all, pragmatic.

When viewed from a British or American standpoint, a Finnish conservative today is likely to look very much like a socialist

 

The Finnish welfare state developed through consensus politics in a parliamentary democracy; it has never been an idea owned by a single party. However, in the past few decades political parties on the right (by Finnish standards), such as the National Coalition Party, have advocated for greater outsourcing and privatization. They have called for greater choice and decision-making capabilities being given to citizens with regard to public services; this would represent an ever-so-small step towards the US model for healthcare and other services that is in marked contrast to the aims and norms of welfare-state provision.

Finland may be the pre-eminent model of the Nordic welfare state. But there are, of course, Finns who find fault with that model. They might well point out that, until very recently, Finland had been moving away from this model, and they might argue that this shift was for good reasons. The government in power in Finland until early 2019 had made changes reminiscent of the British, or in some cases the US, model. These changes included the attempts to further outsource healthcare services, and levying fees for university tuition for non-EU students, unlike say in Germany, where university education remains essentially free for all. However, Finland is still to a very large extent the exemplar Nordic welfare state, even if the foundations of those ideals have been under recent attack.

In the past couple of decades, like acid rain eroding the façade of a once-beautiful building, neoliberal arguments and reasoning have etched scars deep into the surface of the body politic of Finland. This would not have happened had all been well in paradise, or if those outside of Finland had not wanted to change the direction in which it was going. In recent years rightwing think tanks in the UK and US have been targeting Finland, as have far-right parties and politicians who hate and fear the Nordic model. Many of those think tanks are almost certainly largely funded by US businesses and billionaires but they claim to present independent research and their funders hide behind a dark veil of anonymity.

In the not-so distant past, and still occasionally today, some far-right and extreme-right groups have lauded Scandinavia as the home of the ‘white race’. The notion of the true Aryan home of the white master-race is an extreme fantasy that never quite goes away. Because eugenic practices, including the sterilization of those deemed unworthy to have children, were permitted in Sweden – right through to the 1970s – Scandinavians have partly lived up to their bit-part in this fantasy. Thankfully, however, Scandinavians and the Finns then looked out to the rest of the world. They saw the criticism of eugenics and reacted. Just as importantly, they saw how else society could be arranged, especially when children are not allocated to schools based on eugenic assumptions about inherent ability.

Due in part to recent policy proposals running counter to established Finnish practice, such as the previous government’s plans for privatization, the more leftwing parties now in power have become steadily more vocal in their opposition to conservative economic policies. Their positions are far more critical than those heard from, for example, today’s UK Labour Party, and are emphatically far to the left of the US Democratic Party. Today Finland is arguably the antithesis of what the world’s political right admires, and the government elected in 2019 is moving Finland again in the direction of greater equality.

A vintage poster aimed to attract tourists to Finland.

 

INEQUALITY AND TAX

Improving competitiveness in global markets is currently high on the Finnish political agenda, just as it was in the post-war reconstruction era. Finland is not just aiming for international competitiveness in economic terms, but achieving it with due concern for its social values and institutions.

With significantly higher taxes, but little wage stagnation and much lower income inequality than, say, the UK, Finnish political parties rarely emphasize social transfers from the rich to the poor as their fundamental aim. Instead, they focus on how health, housing, education, financial security are of benefit to the whole community, not just the present recipients. This is easier to achieve in a parliamentary democracy where compromise and consensus are essential and there is widespread use of public services, than it is in countries where two-party systems prevail. Ideas such as transfers from the rich to the poor being beneficial to all don’t necessarily sell as well abroad to a set of people who have yet to encounter the results of such choices.

Wealth inequality has been increasing in Finland and is higher than income inequality, which, despite a small increase since 2017, has remained relatively low and stable after a rise at the end of the 1990s. Wealth inequality is probably greater than official measurements indicate given the wealth that is hidden in tax havens, and it has become more difficult to measure accurately since the abolition of the wealth tax. But if inequality is considered from the perspective of post-tax national income, then the share of the richest one per cent decreased from the year 2002 (when it was 7.2%) to 2016 (6.1%).

Finland’s high levels of happiness and contentment can be understood partly in relation to the accepted social norms and expectations of what is possible in Finnish society. These norms are good due to excellent public services and low levels of inequality, particularly in comparison to the conditions prevailing today in all other countries, including most other affluent societies. We know that Finns are happy and contented with their lives, although they are often disinclined to show it. Public displays of emotion of any kind are rare. This may be part historical, reflecting the former dominance of Russia and Sweden, and has now become cultural. It is also possible that both Finns’ reserve and their contentment makes funding excellent public services easier, as higher taxes are more accepted.

Today employees in Finland still contribute some of the highest proportions of their personal income in tax. In 2016, when the take in income of Finland’s richest 1 per cent was less than 6 per cent of the country’s total (compared with 15 per cent in the UK and 22 per cent in the US), the tax collected from personal incomes in Finland made up 13 per cent of GDP. In Chile, one of the rich world’s most unequal countries, it amounts to just 1.8 per cent of GDP by OECD estimates. As the mass protests (and police repression) of late 2019 demonstrated to the rest of the world, the toll taken by Chile’s economic travails have for many years been falling most heavily on its badly paid, indebted and politically voiceless majority. When income is more evenly spread, overall taxation is far more effective, public services can be far better, and civil unrest is very rare.

A huge proportion of Finns, 79 per cent, say they are ‘happy to pay their taxes’. An astonishing 96 per cent, when asked, agree that ‘it’s important to collect tax to maintain the welfare state’. The tax bills of everyone in Finland are public documents, although individuals earning above €100,000 ($119,000) a year can, as of 2019, request to opt out of their tax information being released on the list of high-income earners provided to the media (4,400 such requests were successful in 2020). Individual tax records remain public and can be found, but this list facilitates the media’s commentary on income and wealth distribution. This publicity has made it harder to hide corruption and tax evasion. In an equitable country with well-run public services, tax avoidance is rightly seen as no different from shop-lifting.

A vintage poster carrying a satirical message.

 

TRUST IN JOURNALISM – AND CRITICAL THINKING

Part of how Finland avoids fatigue is the robustness of its press. Ed Miliband, a former leader of the Labour Party in the UK, has been a passionate and early campaigner on climate change and helped steer his political party to becoming both greener and more democratic, with every party member having the opportunity to vote for the next party leader. As a result, Britain now has a far more Finnish-style party in its Labour Party than it would have had if it were not for Ed; but Ed was often subjected to personal attacks in place of criticisms of his policies. His successor, Jeremy Corbyn, was attacked even more relentlessly, and in particular during the 2019 election, where he was misrepresented and demonized by both privately-owned media and the state-owned BBC.

It is true that the Labour Party has recently proposed some policies that would be too leftwing for Finland. For instance, in November 2019 the Labour Party proposed nationalizing the largest broadband company in the UK and providing free broadband for all. However, it is more often the case that Labour’s policies, including most of those when Corbyn was leader, are significantly to the right of Finnish public policy; in its 2019 election manifesto, the UK’s Labour Party proposed raising spending on public services, but only to German levels, rather than those of Finland. You would know little of this from reading the British press.

Recently featured on Ed Miliband’s podcast ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, Vesa Häkkinen, the director of current affairs communications at Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, spoke of the anti-disinformation campaign that was launched in Finland in 2014. The campaign encourages critical thinking and awareness to increase people’s ability to spot fake news, from training election officials to reforming the education curriculum. When Miliband asked at what age Finnish children were educated about identifying disinformation, Häkkinen mentioned seeing a children’s television show featuring a teddy-bear that was critical of the news during its adventures. To prevent cynicism rising, a good press and an aware citizenry are both vital.

According to Reporters Without Borders, Finland rose back up the global freedom of the press ranking from fourth place in 2018 to second place in 2019. Finns typically see press freedom and responsibility as a more serious matter than citizens of other states do. Finland is in the minority of countries where freedom of the press is characterized as good.

In 2018, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, arriving for a summit in Helsinki, were greeted with billboards and posters created by Finland’s highest-circulation daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, welcoming them to the ‘land of free press’.

Even in Finland, though, things could be better. A concern raised by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom’s annual Media Pluralism Monitor is the concentration of media ownership in Finland, and the lack of government regulation of that ownership. The centre’s 2017 report found that the four largest companies in Finland’s television-broadcasting sector together claimed a 92-per-cent audience share and 72 per cent of revenues; in radio the figures were 94 per cent and 87 per cent respectively, and in the newspaper market it was 55 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively. Another concern raised by the report is the lack of proportional access to airtime by Finland’s minorities. Media ownership became even more concentrated in February 2020 when media conglomerate Sanoma acquired another major media company, Alma Media. Although concerns were raised over the decreased media pluralism, the deal was not considered a significant risk to competition in the media market by the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority.

 

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

When we think of Finland as a role model for other countries, one initiative that comes up often is the idea of introducing a universal basic income (UBI). Universal basic income could represent a major shift in the current welfare state model of the West. Pilot experiments have recently been run in the city of Seattle and the Canadian province of Ontario, and in 2016 the Finnish government launched a basic-income experiment involving 2,000 participants. UBI is not the only proposal for reforming social security in Finland. Most of the country’s political parties have their own models, and the experiment itself was targeted rather than universal. Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman stated that universal basic income ‘is all about freedom’ at the 2019 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.

The first Finnish Basic Income trial, which ran from 2017 to 2018, was initiated in response to the changing nature of work and the fact that a greater proportion of the population are now employed in temporary and part-time jobs. The participants, who were unemployed when they began the trial, received a basic income of €560 ($665) every month for two years regardless of any other income and regardless of whether they were actively seeking work. The trial aimed to assess whether the existing social-security system could be simplified, and whether the alternative basic-income system encouraged employability, since currently benefits diminish on starting paid employment or on receipt of other sources of income. The theory was that because basic-income payments alone are not necessarily sufficient to cover all living costs in the long term (such as holidays), it therefore would not discourage recipients from finding work. One participant, journalist and writer Tuomas Muraja, responded to critics of the experiments saying:

Concerns have been voiced about the high cost of the basic income model. But free school meals, free basic education and universal basic healthcare are expensive too… The system requires more investment to boost the minimum income level, to improve the level of financial incentives and to simplify it. Critics fear that basic income will make people lazy. However, limited evidence from several basic-income trials from around the world prove that people use basic income to improve their quality of life and not as a license to do nothing.

The results published in 2019 showed that the intervention did not increase the number of people who found employment, but neither did it reduce it. Some attributed this to the design of the experiment; but even with these results, Rutger Bregman argued that other outcomes of the study warranted attention – namely, that participants reported higher levels of well-being, less stress, and greater overall happiness.

The experiment was criticized on the basis that in addition to including unemployed youth, the pool of participants was limited to primarily the long-term unemployed who would benefit more from services to help with health issues or outdated skills rather than from financial incentives. In addition, taxation was not taken into account, and halfway through the experiment the ‘activation model’ was introduced, which skewed comparisons with the control group – that is, everyone else who was unemployed.

Trust in Journalism in 2016

One thing worth bearing in mind about the early results of the trial is that increasing employment need not be a major aim of basic income. If people in Europe are to consume less, and pollute less, then they need to also produce less and learn to live on lower incomes than they currently do. A basic income makes it possible to live on a very low income and spend your time doing what you really want to do, including useful unpaid work. If you need a little more money, you can work, but it need not be high-paid work. If Finland is to remain one of the happiest countries in the world, it won’t be because everyone works for as many hours as they can, for as much money as they can get.

 

ONE DAY…

One day, a country will provide a universal basic income (UBI) to everyone. Finland may not be the first to do so, but it will experiment further and remains very open to similar new ideas. Many people say that UBI is unaffordable. But how much more unaffordable is it than the practice in the UK and especially the US of keeping large numbers of people in overcrowded prisons, with plans to build more prisons and calls for more and longer sentences? A universal basic income would not be compatible with wasting money on antisocial activities such as locking so many people up. It would, however, be compatible with massive reductions in carbon emissions, as those who chose to consume less would be able to. They would not have to drive to work if they chose not to work, and a basic income means exactly what it says – basic. A universal basic income is only unaffordable if you think it is necessary for some to go hungry, cold and homeless to keep many of the rest of us at the grindstone of paid employment, much of which is of little ultimate benefit to society.

One day, a country will have no need for prisons; and Finland already has very few prisoners. People find the idea of no prisons strange, because when it is suggested they think of a future society that is just like their current society, but without jails. However, as a journalist based in the Bronx in the United States, Alice Speri, explains: ‘in a society that is tackling things like white supremacy, economic deprivation, toxic masculinity, and that is providing connections between people, and where communities are responsible for each other, I actually don’t think it would be weird at all. You wouldn’t even need the things that we now think of as elemental parts of our society, like the local jail.’ One day, a country will have no homeless people. Finland is very nearly that country.

One day, no one will die prematurely. This utopian vision is at least two centuries old. In Western countries it is best remembered through the words of mill owner Robert Owen, and his address to the inhabitants of New Lanark in Scotland on New Year’s Day 1816: ‘What ideas individuals may attach to the term ‘Millennium’ I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.’

Finland is not Utopia and its people are well aware that there is much that could still be better. However, they also know that they live under a flexible system in a pragmatic country that will permit better ways to be found and further improvements to be made. Knowing that things are going to get better, especially for the less well-off, is often more important than how the situation is today. We will always worry, but we also need to be able to hope.
Finland’s recent history can give us all hope. On 20 March 2020 it was announced – for the third year in succession – that Finland was once again the happiest country in the world. The report in which this was declared included a chapter dedicated to the Nordic countries which concluded: ‘There seems to be no secret sauce specific to Nordic happiness that is unavailable to others. There is rather a more general recipe for creating highly satisfied citizens: ensure that state institutions are of high quality, non-corrupt, able to deliver what they promise, and generous in taking care of citizens in various adversities’.

Of course, Finland excels at much more than just happiness, and we should learn more about how and why the Finnish recipe works in practice – because it urgently needs to be made more widely available in the world.

Danny Dorling is Professor of Human Geography at Oxford University; Annika Koljonen is a recent Politics And International Relations graduate From the University Of Cambridge who Lives in Helsinki. This is an edited extract from their book Finntopia: What We Can Learn From The World’s Happiest Country (Agenda Publishing, 2020).

For a pdf of the full long read, and a link to where it was originally published, click here.