Economically Inactive

Number of economically inactive people due to long-term sickness in the United Kingdom from May 1993 to January 2024, from Statista based on UK Office for National Statistics data

In the UK, shame is supposed to be a powerful punishment and motivator.

Of course, anyone in a privileged position takes it for granted that they can shrug it off. At most, they may have to mumble a vague insincere apology and perhaps pay a token amount of money as compensation for whatever wrong they did. They are shocked if that isn’t enough.

But for most people, shame is supposed to be the ultimate tool for shaping behavior. For the most part, it seems to work. Listen to Britons talk about the importance of fitting in, especially in their school years. They say they were scarred by getting bullied about being different. To an American, bullying involves more than words. It includes intimidation and perhaps physical assault. What I hear Brits describe as bullying is more often about feeling shamed.

Maybe it doesn’t work this way in other parts of the UK, but out here in rural Shropshire, you can hit the shame button with as little as a disapproving look to activate that childhood conditioning. Imagine the power shaming words can wield.

Actually, we don’t need to imagine it. The government came up with a shaming label for people who are not holding down a job. They aren’t retired. They aren’t disabled. They aren’t too ill to work. They are economically inactive, and government says that is terrible.

That message is becoming an incessant drumbeat.

Look at this new shaming label more closely. Economically inactive. That can’t be what anyone really is, can it?

Retirees aren’t earning a wage and sending payroll taxes to the Treasury any more, but they still spend money. Whether they retired at the official pension age or retired early, they use their pensions and savings to pay Council tax, pay utility bills, buy food and clothing and whatnot. If the pension goes far enough, they may buy a membership in National Trust or English Heritage so they can visit interesting historical places. They buy tea and scones, or lunch, at cafes. They buy indulgences for grandchildren. They spend money. They are economically active in terms of what the words mean, yet not according to the government. If they retired early, the government sees that as shameful.

But retirees aren’t primary targets of the shaming label. The disabled and chronically ill are the main targets.

Whether they rely on the benefits system or a partner’s income or their savings, they pay Council tax (unless they are granted a waiver), pay utility bills, buy food and clothing and whatnot. They also need more medicines than most people. Prescription meds are only “free” for a subset of them rather than all of them, and they don’t get a price break on over the counter meds. They buy assistive devices (sometimes expensive ones such as a car with hand controls near us). Some of them need carers to come in and help on a regular basis. If their need for help goes beyond what family or friends are willing and able to do, they are part of the economic cycle for home help jobs.

It costs more to be disabled or chronically ill than it costs to be healthy. That’s a lot of economic activity, but not according to the government.

Because of past involvements such as the Chronic Illness Forum that I’ve mentioned before and other groups I haven’t mentioned, my wife and I count among our friends more than our share of people who have chronic illnesses or disabilities. They aren’t lazy. They do as much as they can and wish they could do more. It may be at home, volunteering, helping with charity fundraisers, whatever their health will allow whenever their health will allow it… but it often can’t be a conventional job with a steady schedule and limited latitude for coping when their bodies go into a downturn.

It can’t be a typical role generating profit for someone and payroll taxes for the Treasury. Their contributions to society have to flex as their health waxes and wanes.

Thanks to public health and governmental policy over the past four-plus years, more of our workforce slid into chronic illness and disability than would be the case at pre-pandemic rates… not just by a little, but by a rate that’s shooting through the roof.

There is no shortage of media coverage about how dramatically the incidence of long term sickness has escalated, how this is causing benefit budgets to swell and how it is causing labor shortages for business. Most of the articles speculate that this is happening because of lifestyle choices, poor eating habits, lockdowns (really?), multiple long-known diseases suddenly becoming worse and more prevalent at the same time... Once in a while an article mentions the elephant in the room.

Even Statista (the source of the graph shown with this post) parrots what is now the government’s official terminology, labeling the graph of people aged 16 to 64 who are unable to work due to long term illness as a graph of people economically inactive for that reason.

The government’s label is supposed to shame people who aren’t working into doing so. If they aren’t working, or aren’t working enough, because they are unable to, that shaming label is supposed to inspire them to magically overcome whatever has made them unable to work.

The way the benefits system has been chopped since I moved here, no one would choose to try to survive on it if they had any other option. It would be insane. The labor market is tight. If they could work, they would.

Shame isn’t going to fix this. The remedy for this surge in “economic inactivity” is to help those afflicted with long term illness get better. For that, we need the National Health Service to be no longer strangled and in tatters. We need a Department for Work and Pensions that is more about what is in its title and less about finding ways to persecute people who do such despicable things as provide home care for someone who can’t fully take care of themselves. Last but not least, bringing public health policy here into line with WHO recommendations (or even just bringing it into line with guidelines published but not enacted by the NHS) would slow the escalating rate at which people are being rendered “long term sick.”

There is shame to be allocated, but it doesn’t belong to the stricken.