Fixing Left-Leaning Campaigns

In 2016, my country started an eight-year political experiment in which we allowed children lead us. It did not go well. We had five Prime Ministers - four were ousted without an electoral process - the economy crashed twice, productivity growth flat-lined, and what was once the world's best healthcare system has been gutted (blood, sweat and tears - some of them mine - got us through the pandemic). We even saw a reduction in the average height of five-year-olds.

Maybe my career in healthcare has warped my view but I've realised the only meaningful measures of a society are health indicators - life expectancy (total and healthy), adult height and birth weight. It's not quite as simple as comparing the statistics for one country against another because ethnicity, geography and migration complicate things. Australia, for instance, is an oddly high performer, given that much of its Caucasian population lives under heavy ultraviolet radiation. And Japan's birth weight and height averages would lead one to wrongly suspect a nation in poor health. Alas, statistics are never trivial to interpret.

But there is something special about health indicators that set them apart from the most common economic indicators - health does not follow power laws. In the interest of avoiding mathematics, you can intuitively think of power laws as when a resource can be concentrated among a select few but the overall average is unchanged. Money works this way. If I set up two island nations, one populated by Jeff Bezos and ninety-nine homeless people, and the other by one hundred millionaires, then the first island would be considered richer by virtue of Bezos's prodigious wealth - he doesn't have to share it for his island to be the richest.

Health, however, is bound by laws of nature. Nobody can accumulate so much health that they alone dominate a society's averages. Taking the islands example again, if the first island is populated by Usain Bolt and ninety-nine alcoholics, while the other has one hundred park runners, then the park runner island will have much better health indicators. Not even the greatest living athlete can be healthy enough to make a society of sick people look good, which means for a society to have good health indicators, the majority of its people must be healthy, not just a privileged few.

I'm sending this article one day into America's Trump presidency, and just a fortnight after Trudeau's Canadian government fell. In Europe, Scholz's German government has gone, Italy is now Meloni’s, and Macron doesn't have long left in France. Lots of people are asking why liberal political messaging doesn't seem to work anymore. There are undoubtedly complex and multifaceted answers, but I'd like to suggest that at least part of the reason is liberal politicians assuming that being rich countries is the same thing as being countries full of rich people. This is absurd - the "rich world" is now almost a synonym for wealth concentration.

Nothing makes this clearer than the mismatch between America's wealth and health. The richest country on Earth is richer than ever, and it will probably get even richer as Trump prioritises resource exploitation. But, America ranks just 55th in life expectancy, and unlike peer nations, has failed to reverse the decline caused by the pandemic. Adult heights have stalled - white men (the tallest group) in particular are not seeing the same height increases as much of Northern Europe - and the proportion of babies with low birth weights is creeping upwards.

Those health indicators are all subject to argument - they have confounds, causes, explanations and amelioration (statistics is fun!) - but let me ask a simple question: if capitalism works, shouldn’t the richest country also expect to be among the healthiest? What's the point of money it can't buy everyone a longer life? But nobody asks that.

I am amazed at the almost complete absence of left-leaning political campaigns that say, "vote for us so that you and your children can live longer". Instead, leftist campaigns are typically built around economic growth, usually with the expectation that a few tax and policy tweaks will share wealth among the electorate. That just doesn't square with our recent histories of the rich getting so ostentatiously richer - under both left and right-leaning governments - that some of them have their own space programs. We've allowed one hell of a Jeff Bezos island to develop.

I want to be a park runner.

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