Beyond property or beyond Piketty?

Capital and Ideology represents a significant further statement from Thomas Piketty. The arguments made by the "New Piketty" are largely compatible with those of his previous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but reflect broadening of scope and deepening of causal analysis, most markedly through the adoption of a world historical perspective. The result is a fuller offering for understanding inequality's pattern in the world, why it exists and how we can best respond to it. The book presents a wide range of arguments, which do not on first glance appear unified. This review essay distills these into six propositions, describes and evaluates each in turn, and identifies some threads that link them. In the process, it provides a critical assessment of Capital and Ideology.

Population health, economics and ethics in the age of COVID-19.

Are the steps that have been taken to arrest the spread of COVID-19 justifiable? Specifically, are they likely to have improved public health understood according to widely used aggregate population health measures, such as Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) as much or more than alternatives? This is a reasonable question, since such measures have been promoted extensively in global and national health policy by influential actors, and they have become almost synonymous with quantification of public health. If the steps taken against COVID-19 did not meet this test, then either the measures or the policies must be re-evaluated. There are indications that policies against COVID-19 may have been unbalanced and therefore not optimal. A balanced approach to protecting population health should be proportionate in its effects across distinct health concerns at a moment, across populations over time and across populations over space. These criteria provide a guide to designing and implementing policies that diminish harm from COVID-19 while also providing due attention to other threats to aggregate population health. They should shape future policies in response to this pandemic and others.

Death in China: market reforms and health.

Has China's remarkable reduction in income poverty since 1980 been accompanied by comparable progress in health? The author's findings are fourfold. First, province-level rates of improvement in life expectancy (LE) were higher in the 1990s than in the 1970s and 1980s, and were lowest in the 1980s. Second, even in the 1990s, when the province-level rates of improvement in LE were highest, they were lower than for many countries with similar initial LE level (although higher than the average for all such countries). Third, China's LE improvement between 1980 and 2000 was achieved much more quickly by almost all other countries considered, and in particular by most lower-middle-income countries that had similar LE improvements; similar conclusions are drawn from an analysis of China's LE improvements relative to two other sets of comparator countries--selected presently rich countries and high-growth East Asian countries. Finally, even those Chinese provinces that performed best over the period experienced rates of improvement significantly lower than for comparator countries. China's experience of reducing health deprivations has been notably less impressive than its record of income poverty reduction. There is a need for China to invest in the redevelopment of its public health infrastructure, which has withered during the period of market-oriented reforms.