Graphs at a glance: Impact of occupation, unemployment, and geography on death rates in Britain

Public policy is a classic instance of the tail wagging the dog. For a tail to wag a dog it is not necessary for the dog to be in cahoots with its tail. It is enough that the dog doesn't resist its nether extremity. 

Most people pay little attention to things that don't affect them directly and immediately. Even when those things inevitably will in the future, or inescapably did in the past, they are likely to swallow any lazy assertion. The unemployed are portrayed as living high on the hog with their overly generous benefits. A lack of interest in whether this is true or not allows public policy to be driven by the prejudices and interests of whichever cabal is wagging the government.

The Marmot Report of 2010 showed statistics from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) comparing the death rates per 100,000 of two cohorts in the period between 1981 and 1992. The first cohort was made up of people who had a job in 1981. The second cohort was made up of people who were unemployed in 1981.

The impact on mortality of being unemployed is clear, and provides no evidence of the unemployed having it easy. The "lower orders" have a higher death rate within both cohorts. However it is also evident that being unemployed has the greatest impact on the highest Class I, where the unemployed in that group had a 65% higher death rate than their employed peers. A matter that should be of interest to the highest as well as the lowest in the land. 


Social Class, defined by your occupation, has a strong impact on your mortality rate. But so does where in Britain you live. The impact particularly on 'routine' workers of living in the North East rather than the South West is apparently pretty deadly:

The definitions of the social classes above are as follows:

I            Professional etc occupations

II            Managerial and Technical occupations

III        Skilled occupations

(N) non-manual

(M) manual

IV        Partly-skilled occupations

V            Unskilled occupations

Standardised Mortatlity: "A standardized death rate is a crude death rate that has been adjusted for differences in age composition between the region under study and a standard population. Standardization allows for comparisons when the population structures differ and is key in assessing the potential influence of environmental or cultural factors on death rates in a region."