Many activities that are not considered work, as such, still have real value because they improve the quality of our lives. Even sleep requires money, and not just to pay for a bed. It can be hard to sleep if you are worrying about money, have children going hungry and have not had a proper meal yourself. Sleep also requires time: if you are working two or more jobs just to pay the rent, then time to sleep may be something you don’t have. These sorts of issues are real, lived experiences for millions of families. In 2023, 18% of people in the UK were found to be living in conditions of absolute poverty, including a quarter of all children For children living in absolute poverty, see the news item here..

The availability of money, therefore, is of critical importance to people’s life outcomes, as this image shows. The two circles represent healthy life expectancy in Britain in 2018. Healthy life expectancy means the average number of years of life that people can expect to enjoy before they succumb to an incapacitating chronic or terminal illness.

The green circle shows the healthy life expectancy for a person living in the least deprived parts of Britain. The age it represents is 72 years. This is much the same for men and women. (The full life expectancy of this group is 83 years for men and 86 for women.)

The broken red circle represents the healthy life expectancy for a person living in the most deprived parts of Britain. The age it represents is only 52 years, also much the same for men and women. (The full life expectancy of this group is 74 years for men and 78 for women.)

In plain words, people in the most deprived parts of Britain enjoy 20 fewer years of healthy life than those in the areas that are least deprived. And although the deprivation index considers a range of factors, they mostly come down to the availability of money. In more deprived areas, individual families have less money on average and the public services on which they depend are under greater financial strain.

The number of years lived may not be a good measure for an individual life, but when a particular population group has a lower average life expectancy it means that people are dying early for reasons of social neglect. In the least deprived communities, money builds wealth and real value because more of it stays within the community. In deprived communities, money strips out value as it is sucked away in the form of rents, debts and corporate profits.

This is not a zero sum game. Building resilience in poorer communities reinforces the resilience of everyone else. To achieve this, however, economic policy-making needs to abandon “trickle down” and focus on building up. In other words, start at the bottom, not at the top.

Data sources:

The data for life expectancy in Britain comes from several sources, which are combined in a spreadsheet here. Links to the sources can be found in the top row of the spreadsheet. For children living in absolute poverty, see the news item here.