Last month, the UK’s government announced a series of proposals to “get Britain working”, premised on the claim that the country is facing “spiralling economic inactivity”, with “2.8mn people locked out of work due to long-term sickness”.
Regular readers of this column may recognise these themes from a series of articles I wrote in 2022 arguing that Britain was facing a unique crisis among developed countries. An enduring post-pandemic contraction of the labour force had been caused by a rapid rise in chronic health problems in the working-age population — including a mental health crisis in young people. But with the aid of more and better data, I now think both parts of that narrative were wrong or at best overstated.
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