Danny Dorling's Blog, page 35

What geography can teach us about inequality

Geography is the subject that shows you how everything is connected to everything else.

Royal Geographical Society Lecture, given by Danny Dorling at the University of Portsmouth, UK, February 22nd 2017

This talk begins by showing some new maps of the world stretched to include all of humanity with equal prominence. It then zooms into Europe and considers issues such as population mobility (often called migration in the UK). Where across Europe do you think the most people have settled who have moved from one European country to live in another? The map might surprise you. The bulk of the lecture considers the UK and asks what we and the rest of the world can learn from us being unusual among European countries.

Proportion of international migrants in each region of Europe in 2014, cartogram by Ben Hennig

American political scientist Benjamin Radcliff recently used statistics to show that: ‘The differences in your feeling of well-being living in a Scandinavian country (where welfare programs are large) versus the US are going to be larger than the individual factors in your life. The political differences trump all the individual things you’re supposed to do to make yourself happier – to have fulfilling personal relationships, to have a job, to have more income. The political factors swamp all those individual factors. Countries with high levels of gross domestic product consumed by government have higher levels of personal satisfaction.’ Read more on a Better Politics: here.

It is not just political scientists that are beginning to come round to what most sociologists have presumed to be true for decades. Fewer economists (than used to be the case) now think that being taxed as little as possible results in people better enjoying ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Geographers can study the outcomes of natural experiment of low public spending in the UK and USA. But what can we do if we happen to live and work in the UK or USA in place of providing such good evidence and setting such a bad example?

The proportion of adults reporting poor health in the UK has more than doubled since 2010

There has been a rapid deterioration in self-reported health in recent years with a doubling of the proportion of the population aged 16 years or over that were ‘mostly dissatisfied’ with their health since 2010.

Self-reported health has continued to decline since the statistics used in this commentary were released in March 2015. Only one aggregate figure was released in early 2016. It combined three of the categories. Just one mention of this was made in the most recent 2016 Office for National Statistics (ONS) ‘measuring the quality of life’ report. The 2017 report has yet to be released.

As the table below shows, the latest (2013–2014) statistic is worse than any recorded since 2002 and lies well outside the range of confidence limits last published by the ONS in their 2015 release (58.8–59.8%). Self-reported health in the UK is deteriorating at an alarming rate with acceleration in that deterioration in the year 2011. In “A Better Politics: How Government can make us happier” I used statistics collected by the British Household Panel Survey in the 1990s to show that health is overwhelmingly the most important short-term determinant of wellbeing. People can and do adapt to a deterioration in their health, but not when how they are having to live is making them, and especially those around them, ill.

Read more in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society

Trends in UK self-reported health

Excess deaths in 2015 may be linked to failures in health and social care

Excess deaths in 2015 may be linked to failures in health and social care

Martin McKee on Channel 4 news

Researchers exploring why there has been a substantial increase in mortality in England and Wales in 2015 have concluded that failures in the health and social care system linked to disinvestment are likely to be the main cause.

There were 30,000 excess deaths in 2015, representing the largest increase in deaths in the post-war period. The excess deaths, which included a large spike in January that year, were largely in the older population who are most dependent on health and social care. Reporting their analysis in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor Danny Dorling, and colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, tested four possible explanations for the January 2015 spike in mortality.

After ruling out data errors, cold weather and flu as main causes for the spike, the researchers found that NHS performance data revealed clear evidence of health system failures. Almost all targets were missed including ambulance call-out times and A&E waiting times, despite unexceptional A&E attendances compared to the same month in previous years. Staff absence rates rose and more posts remained empty as staff had not been appointed.

The researchers note the limitations of the study, stressing that it is an exploratory analysis attempting to address a complex phenomenon, and have called for further investigation.

More information

The Geography of a rapid rise in elderly mortality in England and Wales, 2014-15

Since at least the early 1900s almost all affluent nations in the world have continually experienced improvements in human longevity. Using ONS mid-year population and deaths estimates for Local Authorities for England and Wales, in a new paper published Today in “Health and Place” we show that these improvements have recently reversed. We estimate that in England and Wales there were 39,074 more deaths in the year to July 2015 as compared to the year to July 2014 (32,208 of these were of individuals aged 80+). We demonstrate that these increases occurred almost everywhere geographically; in poor and affluent areas, in rural and urban areas. The implications of our findings are profound given what has come before them, combined with the current political climate of austerity.

This new paper looks in detail at the geography of the rises in mortality in the year to July 2015 and suggests that mortality has risen almost everywhere. As yet there is no evidence that these elevated mortality rates haven fallen during 2016 or in early 2017: read more

The image below is from an earlier paper which illustrated the rising reporting of poor health in the UK up until 2014.

Trends in UK self-reported health

The Geography of a rapid rise in elderly mortality in England and Wales, 2014-15

<< previous publication

Green, M., Dorling, D., and Minton, J. (2017)

The Geography of a rapid rise in elderly mortality

in England and Wales, 2014-15

Heath and Place, 44, pp.77-85

Download PDF (1.3 MB)

Online

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Annual Politics Lecture: Leeds Beckett University

I am always surprised that more people in the UK do not know that we now have the greatest economic inequality of any large country in Europe (if the share of the best-off 10% or 1% is used to rank countries). Many people do not know that we have chosen to tax and spend far less than almost any other country in Europe, apart from Ireland. I am surprised people do not know that we fund our National Health Service at half the rate that the Swiss fund their public health services per head, or that their 1% take half as much as our 1%.

Some changes are underway. Disastrous government polices such as “help to buy” were scrapped in December 2016 (apart from new build help to buy). The policy of “pay to stay” in social housing policy was abandoned in November 2016. And this is just in housing. However we have a huge way to go if we are to even try to even begin to move towards emulating the living standards of an average Western European country. First we need to know how much worse we do in education, health and housing as compared to most other Europeans, and that none of these problems are a result of immigration.

Without continued immigration it will become much harder to staff our schools, hospitals and care homes and to build those homes that we do need. A great deal needs to change. It will most probably change slowly, one policy at a time, many things will get worse; but when it comes to economic inequality they can only get better – because it is not possible to do worse than be the most economically unequal country in Europe.

The Annual Lecture, with slides, can be listened to here

It is based on the book, A Better Politics, free PDF here

A Better Politics

Reducing Inequality: Reasons for Hope for 2017

If high and growing inequality is benefitting fewer and fewer people in the UK and the USA we should be glad that more people now recognise this and not be surprised that when offered a binary choice between business as usual and change a large number will vote for change, almost irrespective of the nature of that single alternative option that is offered to them.

In the USA ‘The life expectancy at 40 years of age in the top income percentile of the United States is better than the mean in any other country for life expectancy at 40 years of age. However, not by a lot, and likely not better than the top percentile in Sweden or the Netherlands. In contrast, the life expectancy at 40 years of age in the bottom income percentile of the United States is located between the mean for Pakistan and Sudan for life expectancy at 40 years of age.’

In the UK in 2016 an annual survey of wellbeing for young people aged 16 to 25 recorded its worse results since it had first been taken in 2009. It found that more than a quarter no longer felt in control of their lives. A third said they expected to have a worse standard of living than their parents. More than a third did not feel in control of their job prospects. A fifth said they did not have the ability to change their circumstances. A sixth said that they thought their life would amount to nothing, no matter how hard they try. And fully 42% said that traditional goals like owning a house or getting a steady job are unrealistic.

Equality in Europe, the landscape, battle and war

Equality in Europe, the landscape, battle and war, public lecture by Danny Dorling, St Cross College, Oxford, January 24th.

At the moment the most interesting question is this – how on earth have we got to where we are, and then what might happen next. I’ve divided this talk into three parts, the landscape, the battle and the war. The landscape is my take on the history of how we got to where we are. The middle part of the talk, the battle, is about the Brexit referendum. And the war is where we currently are. I think it is a war about equality and inequality.

Theresa May’s Industrial Strategy must work for Sheffield, the city of low pay

The Prime Minister has launched her much-vaunted industrial strategy. The measure of its success has to be whether it works for cities like Sheffield and the rest of the North.

The Resolution Foundation released a report last week which found that incomes in Sheffield have not recovered, and nor grown, nine years on from the financial crash. Sheffield is now the lowest paid city in the UK.

But there is stark inequality within and not just between our great cities. Eight years ago, A Tale of Two Cities was released which shone a light on that inequality. You can track the route of the 83 bus from one of the seven hills that Sheffield sits on through the city centre to one of the poorest wards. In just 40 minutes life expectancy falls by 10 years.

But similar bus routes which match inequality can be found all over the country. These journeys highlight how Britain has divided over the last three decades. If you ride these routes you see the signs of an economic model which has unquestionably failed us all. Many people at the wealthier end of the routes are now no longer doing well. In particular, affluent elderly residents also suffer when health and social care fails. The young are reporting lost hope in our future with 2017 revealing the worse ever outcomes reported in an annual survey of their prospects.

Read more in the Yorkshire Post

Illustration by Joseph P Kelly

Housing crisis grows – first fall in home movers for five years

On January 20th 2017 the BBC announced the first fall in the numbers of people moving home in the last five years. The reason was the growing housing crisis.

Last year I gave a talk in Manchester about the housing crisis and how and why I thought it was growing in importance then. Because of the location of building in which the talk was held, it began with a historical diversion: “160 years ago, that’s only your great great great grand parents’ time ago, this city of Manchester had a housing crisis.

On this exact spot – or more likely a floor below us – people were living in jerry built housing that was so bad that life expectancy fell below 25 years. The reason for this crisis was immigration. So yes immigration can cause a housing crisis; although not the one that we have at present.

In the 1840s Manchester was sucking people into its mills, many fleeing from famine in Ireland. Combine this with badly built housing and you have a housing crisis, the same kind of crisis that is happening in slums and shanty towns around the poor world now. Manchester did this first. But our current housing crisis has nothing to do with immigration”

read more from that ‘Housing Crisis’ talk;

… or listen to a recent interview that took place on BBC Radio 2:

…or see here for a book published a couple of years ago on why the crisis was coming and what could be done when it hits.