4: 'Deaths of despair': A tale of two countries – with Professor Sir Angus Deaton and Sarah O'Connor

The Health Foundation podcast

Life expectancy is a key indicator of our health and wellbeing. Across most OECD countries in the last ten years, life expectancy has been stalling – and stalling most in the US and the UK.
Last March, Professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two distinguished economists from Princeton University, published what became the must-read book of the year. That book was called Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. It showed that health has deteriorated fastest in middle-aged white Americans, and that in this population, death rates from all causes are actually rising. The biggest increases were in deaths from suicide, drugs and alcohol driven by a lack of opportunity, growing inequalities, and bleak social and economic outlook. The so-called ‘deaths of despair’.
In the meantime, here in the UK, The Marmot Review: 10 Years On was published last February looking at national health trends in England. The review revealed stalling growth in life expectancy nationally – and a reversal among people living in the poorer areas of England, in particular women.
Is this due to the public spending cuts of recent years, or a long-term structural trend? What needs to be done? And might the pandemic accelerate solutions?
In this episode, our Chief Executive Dr Jennifer Dixon is joined by two expert guests:

• Professor Sir Angus Deaton, co-author of Deaths of Despair, and Emeritus Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Professor Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2015.
• Sarah O’Connor, Employment Columnist for the Financial Times.

Useful links:

• The Health Foundation's COVID-19 impact inquiry
• Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
• Jennifer's book review of Deaths of Despair for Political Quarterly
• The Marmot Review: 10 Years On
• Left behind: can anyone save the towns the economy forgot?
• Find out more about the Health Foundation podcast

Recommended reading:

• White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
• Janesville: An American story
• The Tyranny of Merit
• American Overdose. The opioid tragedy in three acts
• The Road to Somewhere. The New Tribes Shaping British Politics