Julia Lynch

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Health inequality has reached a crisis point. Your income or hometown can have a devastating impact on how well and how long you live. This injustice, exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, continues as the cost of living rises and other sources of inequity grow. What can be done to make things better? This book, written by the authors behind the award-winning The Unequal Pandemic, explores successful international case studies of governments reducing health inequalities – from the USA and Brazil to Germany and England – stretching over fifty years from the 1960s to the 2000s. Essential reading for students and scholars of public health and the social sciences, and for health and social care professionals and policy makers, this book demonstrates that reducing health inequalities is possible and provides a roadmap for today’s governments to follow.

One of the most important political and economic challenges facing Europe and elsewhere is the ageing of societies. Must ageing populations create conflict between generations and crisis for health systems? Our answer is no. The problem is not so much demographic change as the political and policy challenge of creating fair, sustainable and effective policies for people of all ages. This book, based on a large European Observatory study, uses new evidence to challenge some of the myths surrounding ageing and its effects on economies and health systems. Cataclysmic views of population ageing are often based on stereotypes and anecdotes unsupported by evidence. How we address ageing societies is a choice. Societies can choose policies that benefit people of all ages, promoting equity both within and between generations, and political coalitions can be built to support such policies. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Since the 1990s, mainstream political parties have failed to address the problem of growing inequality, resulting in political backlash and the transformation of European party systems. Most attempts to explain the rise of inequality in political science take a far too narrow approach, considering only economic inequality and failing to recognize how multiple manifestations of inequality combine to reinforce each other and the underlying political features of advanced welfare states. Combining training in public health with a background in political science, Julia Lynch brings a unique perspective to debates about inequality in political science and to public health thinking about the causes of and remedies for health inequalities. Based on case studies of efforts to reduce health inequalities in England, France and Finland, Lynch argues that inequality persists because political leaders chose to frame the issue of inequality in ways that made it harder to solve.

Rated as a top 10 book about the COVID-19 pandemic by New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2021/07/best-books-about-covid-19-pandemic EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC- ND It has been claimed that we are ‘all in it together’ and that the COVID-19 virus ‘does not discriminate’. This accessible, yet authoritative book dispels this myth of COVID-19 as an ‘equal opportunity’ disease, by showing how the pandemic is a syndemic of disease and inequality. Drawing on international data and accounts, it argues that the pandemic is unequal in three ways: it has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally. These inequalities are a political choice: with governments effectively choosing who lives and who dies, we need to learn from COVID-19 quickly to prevent growing inequality and to reduce health inequalities in the future. COVID-19 is an unequal pandemic.

Since the 1990s, mainstream political parties have failed to address the problem of growing inequality, resulting in political backlash and the transformation of European party systems. Most attempts to explain the rise of inequality in political science take a far too narrow approach, considering only economic inequality and failing to recognize how multiple manifestations of inequality combine to reinforce each other and the underlying political features of advanced welfare states. Combining training in public health with a background in political science, Julia Lynch brings a unique perspective to debates about inequality in political science and to public health thinking about the causes of and remedies for health inequalities. Based on case studies of efforts to reduce health inequalities in England, France and Finland, Lynch argues that inequality persists because political leaders chose to frame the issue of inequality in ways that made it harder to solve.

This book asks why some countries devote the lion's share of their social policy resources to the elderly, while others have a more balanced repertoire of social spending. Far from being the outcome of demands for welfare spending by powerful age-based groups in society, the 'age' of welfare is an unintended consequence of the way that social programs are set up. The way that politicians use welfare state spending to compete for votes, along either programmatic or particularistic lines, locks these early institutional choices into place. So while society is changing - aging, divorcing, moving in and out of the labor force over the life course in new ways - social policies do not evolve to catch up. The result, in occupational welfare states like Italy, the United States, and Japan, is social spending that favors the elderly and leaves working-aged adults and children largely to fend for themselves.