52 ms·

I read a paper in 2016 that was attempting to understand if there was a human cost to Austerity. They succeeded in finding a causal link between austerity meas

by dijit 4y ago

I read a paper in 2016 that was attempting to understand if there was a human cost to Austerity. They succeeded in finding a causal link between austerity measures and increased mortality. At the end of the paper they estimated that 120,000+ people have died as a result. Additionally: that the the rate of excess deaths was increasing year on year. There is an issue with highlighting this; For starters, many people are very likely to bury their heads in the sand: * "How do you know that it's related to Austerity" (not reading the paper) * "They would have died anyway" * "The world is different from the time period it is modelled from" (it corrects for this by comparing also to other roughly equivalent economies) * "The UK is different than other advanced economies!" The other issue is that it sounds so insane and conspiratorial. 120,000 is a large number. It's approximately the size of Stratford upon Avon. A follow up study puts the number now closer to 330,000, around the population of Coventry. Somehow people will blame the NHS for not being efficient, though evidence to the contrary exists throughout its history, often being one of the most cost effective healthcare systems in operation; or that COVID is a contributing cause to these figures. People are unwilling to hear this: This was a problem well before the pandemic. Source (2017): https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722 Source (2022): https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_885099_en.html https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_885099_en.html

BlueTemplar 4y ago
120k is "meaningless" if you do not mention how large of a population and how long of a duration - and the comparison that you do use is basically "clickbait". And if you do not compare it with other causes of death, someone that doesn't deal routinely with these numbers (so, most people) still has no idea how much of a problem it is. (For instance I've been comparing war deaths in Ukraine to roadkills in Ukraine to gauge this.)
- dijit 4y ago
  In percentages it's an excess mortality of approximately 7%. As in "7% of people who died, have died in excess of what we expect". It should be noted that in the years prior to this, excess deaths were falling precipitously. (10-20%) Eitherway, it's well documented in the studies.
em1sar 4y ago
[dead]
samwillis 4y ago
Both underfunding and overfunding can cause inefficiencies, there is a sweet spot in the middle where an organisation would be at its most efficient. It's quite clear that the NHS has been underfunded, and under resourced, for the last decade. However the government still try to argue that the inefficiencies are a organisational problem rather than a funding problem. Which is still laughable when they have presided over it during the whole time period in question.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  And to be clear if you have an overfunded health system then you are providing good medical treatment to your population in a timely manner. You're just spending more money doing it than you might otherwise do so. So someone with ethics might argue that if you are in an uncertain area between over and underfunding then it will kill fewer people to err on overfunding.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    Overfunding doesn't always result in effective or good service/products. If management doesn't flow the extra funding to front line staff or resources, it can easily be wasted for zero added value.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      Which is exactly how the semi-privatised NHS operates. Agencies have been encouraged to set up as independent service providers who can profiteer by price gouging the NHS while paying nurses and doctors pocket money. Renationalising the NHS and limiting the private sector to those few expensive services that are essential would fix this. But both political parties are working for the people who profit from this situation.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    They would be better off addressing the root causes that are sending more and more people to the NHS in the first place. Healthy food needs to be cheaper than unhealthy food, physical exercise needs to be encouraged at a grass roots level, working conditions need a massive overhaul, education needs to improve, salaries need to rise and/or rents need to fall, and housing needs to be of better quality, particularly around insulation. At the minute we’re treating the symptoms and not the cause of the disease.
richliss 4y ago
I posted a years ago about how austerity was an outcome of the misuse of Excel for problems of scale that it wasn't designed for. Once some researchers figured out the problem with the spreadsheet that these governments were using, almost all stopped with austerity policies, but the UK didn't. I posted that there would likely be one of two outcomes - a lost decade, we'd be in a worse position and no one should ever again think that the Conservatives are economic masters compared to Labour again, or that George Osborne was a bona fide economic genius and the UK would come out of this extended austerity in a fitter and leaner state ready for the challenges ahead (ala early Thatcherism). The answer is the the first one - we had the lost decade, are looking at potential second lost decade and we're now equivalent to a central European country not France. The Conservatives deserve to die at the next general election for this and should be replaced by a completely new right of centre political party as the opposition.
- dijit 4y ago
  Unrelated to the main article, but I do find it quite upsetting that the Liberal Democrats have been absolutely crucified by both the Conservative party and the Media. I can't go very far in a discussion about the liberal democrats without hearing that they didn't follow through on a manifesto pledge. Which is wild because in a minority government, where you're given the option of electoral reform or sticking to another manifesto pledge; you have to pick one. You're a minority government! You can't do terribly much. Then the most recent leader of the lib dems being crucified publicly for being religious in some manner, (tbf: he said "I think Homosexuality is a sin but I support equal rights; and everyone should live free and with dignity") Yet, the Conservatives do much worse and face no indigence in votes. It's baffling. FD: I'm not terribly supportive of any particular political party, but Liberal Democrats is one of the "more supported" ones of mine, along with SNP and Greens. My main quarrel was hypocrisy.
  - rjsw 4y ago
    I don't care about the Liberal Democrats' manifesto pledges. I do care that they enabled the Conservatives to impose austerity.
  - 4y ago
badcppdev 4y ago
The NHS is just a government department run by the UK Health Minister. Always point the finger at the person holding the purse strings and the person controlling the laws and policies. The best time to start training more doctors and nurses is ten years ago. The second best time is today.
- aww_dang 4y ago
  If only there were a decentralized system where consumers and service providers could allocate resources according to their value preferences by providing voluntary incentives.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    You mean like in the US, where half a million people are bankrupted by health care costs every year?
    - aww_dang 4y ago
      >According to the World Health Organization, US per capita government spending on health care is the fourth highest in the world. https://fee.org/articles/the-idea-that-the-us-has-a-free-market-health-care-system-is-pure-fantasy/ https://fee.org/articles/the-idea-that-the-us-has-a-free-mar...
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      There's a lot of regulatory capture going on there. It's not exactly a free market.
      - gmac 4y ago
        You don't want it to be a free market. People who need urgent health interventions are not ordinary rational consumers. They may not even be conscious. Combine this with providers incentivised to provide as much healthcare as possible at the highest possible markup, and insurers incentivised to deny as much care as they can ... and you have what always looks (from the other side of the Atlantic) like a gigantic life-and-death financial nightmare.
icare_1er 4y ago
Wrong. This has nothing to do with NHS because a similar surge of mortality has been seen in other countries. Surprising the BBC journaliste didn't think of checking this out. Example with France: https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/mortalite-autant-voire-plus-de-deces-en-2022-quen-2020-ou-2021-comment-lexpliquer-09-01-2023-NQVDCYFINNHNPAWYTB4HV4ZGCM.php https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/mortalite-autant-voire-plu... It's a bit late, though, to complain about a consequence of lockdown now.
- gquiniou 4y ago
  there is a health crisis in France too with underfunded and understaffed public hospitals (lots of healthcare workers resigned after covid)
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Do you have peer reviewed evidence that lockdown is responsible for the excess deaths and not - for example - a deadly virus that happens to have been ripping through the population?
  - naasking 4y ago
    > Do you have peer reviewed evidence that lockdown is responsible for the excess deaths and not - for example - a deadly virus that happens to have been ripping through the population? The article literally talks about this, and it doesn't seem directly related to COVID. Part of it is no doubt delayed diagnoses which led to terminal cases, inability to get care for mental health, and overtaxed and underfunded health systems.
  - icare_1er 4y ago
    I don't need a "peer-review scientific study" or "50year-long statistical study on 10,000 people", and then a peer-review to review the peer-review, to know that if you can't go to hospitals for 2 years, you'll be more ill as a result.
formerly_proven 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg
_benedict 4y ago
Literally right now it’s being reported that 300-500 people are dying weekly just because of extreme delays to emergency medicine. It doesn’t take many years to rack up 120k deaths at that rate (though I recognise the study was prior to this collapse and references primarily more diffuse causes)
luckylion 4y ago
> 120,000 is a large number. It's approximately half of the entire city of Aarhus (Denmarks second largest city). That's a terrible comparison though. In the US, about 3.3m people die each year. That's almost 60% of the total population of Denmark. A Denmark dies in the US every 18 months. But that's just what you get when you compare a city with the population of a country that is a hundred times its size.
- dijit 4y ago
  It's hard to actually visualise large numbers; a common problem actually Tom Scott has a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg EDIT: Decide to swap the examples to British cities, inkeeping with what you said about apples/oranges; which people may be less familiar with; but hopefully it gives the sense of scale.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean the comparison to be a problem because Brits aren't familiar with Aarhus, but because I doubt the usefulness of this type of comparison. "It's a large number" isn't useful when it's a percentage of an even larger number. ~1% of people die each year. Larger cities or nations will obviously have higher absolute numbers -- but what does that tell us besides that more people live there? If you can't visualize 120,000, can you visualize 67,000,000? Would "We'd losing a population the size of Aarhus if our population was the size of 100 Aarhuses" really make things clearer than saying "about 1% of the population dies in any given year"?
    - dijit 4y ago
      How would you communicate such figures. There are a total number of people who have died who wouldn't have otherwise. It's not about "what is the delta" it's about imagining a literal city full of people who have died prematurely. In terms of absolute numbers, "7%" is high, but not enough to really evoke any emotion in the reader. How would you prefer to convey emotion to the fact that people's family members are no longer with us because of an economic policy which doesn't actually save the country money and has more in common with religion than economic science.
Jemm 4y ago
> People are unwilling to hear this: This was a problem well before the pandemic This is likely the biggest problem we face right now. People don't care or don't want to hear anything "negative". We call it toxic positivity.
- cf141q5325 4y ago
  >toxic positivity I dont know how big of a driver this is tbh. It seems more that a lot of people committed (publicly) to opinions and are unwilling to even consider to have incomplete, or even wrong views. While in practice the overlap to toxic positivity is likely large, i think it misses that the cause is likely emotional/ego driven. So that people arent so much attached to positive narratives but their narratives? Or what do you think the causes are? edit: Never mind, should have just googled for toxic positivity. Thanks for the term!
bko 4y ago
Important to note when people talk about "austerity" they don't mean cuts, but cuts in the future proposed spending increases. Public spending rarely goes down in absolute terms. Even as a percentage of GDP it doesn't really go down and certainly not since COVID https://www.statista.com/statistics/298465/government-spending-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298465/government-spendi... https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-spending-to-gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-spend...
afandian 4y ago
Lots of people voted for it. They believe they are good people. Of course they won’t believe facts that challenge that.

by dijit 4y ago

BlueTemplar 4y ago

120k is "meaningless" if you do not mention how large of a population and how long of a duration - and the comparison that you do use is basically "clickbait". And if you do not compare it with other causes of death, someone that doesn't deal routinely with these numbers (so, most people) still has no idea how much of a problem it is. (For instance I've been comparing war deaths in Ukraine to roadkills in Ukraine to gauge this.)

dijit 4y ago
In percentages it's an excess mortality of approximately 7%. As in "7% of people who died, have died in excess of what we expect". It should be noted that in the years prior to this, excess deaths were falling precipitously. (10-20%) Eitherway, it's well documented in the studies.

em1sar 4y ago

[dead]

samwillis 4y ago

Both underfunding and overfunding can cause inefficiencies, there is a sweet spot in the middle where an organisation would be at its most efficient. It's quite clear that the NHS has been underfunded, and under resourced, for the last decade. However the government still try to argue that the inefficiencies are a organisational problem rather than a funding problem. Which is still laughable when they have presided over it during the whole time period in question.

badcppdev 4y ago
And to be clear if you have an overfunded health system then you are providing good medical treatment to your population in a timely manner. You're just spending more money doing it than you might otherwise do so. So someone with ethics might argue that if you are in an uncertain area between over and underfunding then it will kill fewer people to err on overfunding.
- newsclues 4y ago
  Overfunding doesn't always result in effective or good service/products. If management doesn't flow the extra funding to front line staff or resources, it can easily be wasted for zero added value.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Which is exactly how the semi-privatised NHS operates. Agencies have been encouraged to set up as independent service providers who can profiteer by price gouging the NHS while paying nurses and doctors pocket money. Renationalising the NHS and limiting the private sector to those few expensive services that are essential would fix this. But both political parties are working for the people who profit from this situation.
- rcarr 4y ago
  They would be better off addressing the root causes that are sending more and more people to the NHS in the first place. Healthy food needs to be cheaper than unhealthy food, physical exercise needs to be encouraged at a grass roots level, working conditions need a massive overhaul, education needs to improve, salaries need to rise and/or rents need to fall, and housing needs to be of better quality, particularly around insulation. At the minute we’re treating the symptoms and not the cause of the disease.

richliss 4y ago

I posted a years ago about how austerity was an outcome of the misuse of Excel for problems of scale that it wasn't designed for. Once some researchers figured out the problem with the spreadsheet that these governments were using, almost all stopped with austerity policies, but the UK didn't. I posted that there would likely be one of two outcomes - a lost decade, we'd be in a worse position and no one should ever again think that the Conservatives are economic masters compared to Labour again, or that George Osborne was a bona fide economic genius and the UK would come out of this extended austerity in a fitter and leaner state ready for the challenges ahead (ala early Thatcherism). The answer is the the first one - we had the lost decade, are looking at potential second lost decade and we're now equivalent to a central European country not France. The Conservatives deserve to die at the next general election for this and should be replaced by a completely new right of centre political party as the opposition.

dijit 4y ago
Unrelated to the main article, but I do find it quite upsetting that the Liberal Democrats have been absolutely crucified by both the Conservative party and the Media. I can't go very far in a discussion about the liberal democrats without hearing that they didn't follow through on a manifesto pledge. Which is wild because in a minority government, where you're given the option of electoral reform or sticking to another manifesto pledge; you have to pick one. You're a minority government! You can't do terribly much. Then the most recent leader of the lib dems being crucified publicly for being religious in some manner, (tbf: he said "I think Homosexuality is a sin but I support equal rights; and everyone should live free and with dignity") Yet, the Conservatives do much worse and face no indigence in votes. It's baffling. FD: I'm not terribly supportive of any particular political party, but Liberal Democrats is one of the "more supported" ones of mine, along with SNP and Greens. My main quarrel was hypocrisy.
- rjsw 4y ago
  I don't care about the Liberal Democrats' manifesto pledges. I do care that they enabled the Conservatives to impose austerity.
- 4y ago

badcppdev 4y ago

The NHS is just a government department run by the UK Health Minister. Always point the finger at the person holding the purse strings and the person controlling the laws and policies. The best time to start training more doctors and nurses is ten years ago. The second best time is today.

aww_dang 4y ago
If only there were a decentralized system where consumers and service providers could allocate resources according to their value preferences by providing voluntary incentives.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  You mean like in the US, where half a million people are bankrupted by health care costs every year?
  - aww_dang 4y ago
    >According to the World Health Organization, US per capita government spending on health care is the fourth highest in the world. https://fee.org/articles/the-idea-that-the-us-has-a-free-market-health-care-system-is-pure-fantasy/ https://fee.org/articles/the-idea-that-the-us-has-a-free-mar...
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    There's a lot of regulatory capture going on there. It's not exactly a free market.
    - gmac 4y ago
      You don't want it to be a free market. People who need urgent health interventions are not ordinary rational consumers. They may not even be conscious. Combine this with providers incentivised to provide as much healthcare as possible at the highest possible markup, and insurers incentivised to deny as much care as they can ... and you have what always looks (from the other side of the Atlantic) like a gigantic life-and-death financial nightmare.

icare_1er 4y ago

Wrong. This has nothing to do with NHS because a similar surge of mortality has been seen in other countries. Surprising the BBC journaliste didn't think of checking this out. Example with France: https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/mortalite-autant-voire-plus-de-deces-en-2022-quen-2020-ou-2021-comment-lexpliquer-09-01-2023-NQVDCYFINNHNPAWYTB4HV4ZGCM.php https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/mortalite-autant-voire-plu... It's a bit late, though, to complain about a consequence of lockdown now.

gquiniou 4y ago
there is a health crisis in France too with underfunded and understaffed public hospitals (lots of healthcare workers resigned after covid)
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Do you have peer reviewed evidence that lockdown is responsible for the excess deaths and not - for example - a deadly virus that happens to have been ripping through the population?
- naasking 4y ago
  > Do you have peer reviewed evidence that lockdown is responsible for the excess deaths and not - for example - a deadly virus that happens to have been ripping through the population? The article literally talks about this, and it doesn't seem directly related to COVID. Part of it is no doubt delayed diagnoses which led to terminal cases, inability to get care for mental health, and overtaxed and underfunded health systems.
- icare_1er 4y ago
  I don't need a "peer-review scientific study" or "50year-long statistical study on 10,000 people", and then a peer-review to review the peer-review, to know that if you can't go to hospitals for 2 years, you'll be more ill as a result.

formerly_proven 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

_benedict 4y ago

Literally right now it’s being reported that 300-500 people are dying weekly just because of extreme delays to emergency medicine. It doesn’t take many years to rack up 120k deaths at that rate (though I recognise the study was prior to this collapse and references primarily more diffuse causes)

luckylion 4y ago

> 120,000 is a large number. It's approximately half of the entire city of Aarhus (Denmarks second largest city). That's a terrible comparison though. In the US, about 3.3m people die each year. That's almost 60% of the total population of Denmark. A Denmark dies in the US every 18 months. But that's just what you get when you compare a city with the population of a country that is a hundred times its size.

dijit 4y ago
It's hard to actually visualise large numbers; a common problem actually Tom Scott has a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg EDIT: Decide to swap the examples to British cities, inkeeping with what you said about apples/oranges; which people may be less familiar with; but hopefully it gives the sense of scale.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean the comparison to be a problem because Brits aren't familiar with Aarhus, but because I doubt the usefulness of this type of comparison. "It's a large number" isn't useful when it's a percentage of an even larger number. ~1% of people die each year. Larger cities or nations will obviously have higher absolute numbers -- but what does that tell us besides that more people live there? If you can't visualize 120,000, can you visualize 67,000,000? Would "We'd losing a population the size of Aarhus if our population was the size of 100 Aarhuses" really make things clearer than saying "about 1% of the population dies in any given year"?
  - dijit 4y ago
    How would you communicate such figures. There are a total number of people who have died who wouldn't have otherwise. It's not about "what is the delta" it's about imagining a literal city full of people who have died prematurely. In terms of absolute numbers, "7%" is high, but not enough to really evoke any emotion in the reader. How would you prefer to convey emotion to the fact that people's family members are no longer with us because of an economic policy which doesn't actually save the country money and has more in common with religion than economic science.

Jemm 4y ago

> People are unwilling to hear this: This was a problem well before the pandemic This is likely the biggest problem we face right now. People don't care or don't want to hear anything "negative". We call it toxic positivity.

cf141q5325 4y ago
>toxic positivity I dont know how big of a driver this is tbh. It seems more that a lot of people committed (publicly) to opinions and are unwilling to even consider to have incomplete, or even wrong views. While in practice the overlap to toxic positivity is likely large, i think it misses that the cause is likely emotional/ego driven. So that people arent so much attached to positive narratives but their narratives? Or what do you think the causes are? edit: Never mind, should have just googled for toxic positivity. Thanks for the term!

bko 4y ago

Important to note when people talk about "austerity" they don't mean cuts, but cuts in the future proposed spending increases. Public spending rarely goes down in absolute terms. Even as a percentage of GDP it doesn't really go down and certainly not since COVID https://www.statista.com/statistics/298465/government-spending-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298465/government-spendi... https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-spending-to-gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-spend...

afandian 4y ago

Lots of people voted for it. They believe they are good people. Of course they won’t believe facts that challenge that.