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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The number of people permanently off work for "health reasons" has risen sharply in the last 5 years and affects relatively young people:

"Ministers have grown increasingly alarmed over a dramatic rise in the number of working-age adults falling out of the workforce due to health conditions over recent years, with young adults fuelling much of the increase.

As many as one in five working-age adults – more than 9 million in total – are now in a position termed by statisticians as “economically inactive”, where they are neither in a job nor looking for one. For almost 3 million, the main reason is long-term sickness – the highest level on record."

It's very odd to claim that the solution is for employers to somehow spend large sums to mollycoddle employees in order to lure young people back to work... Indeed, it seems unlikely that the underlying reason for the situation is really 'health'.

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It’s possible to be overly dismissive of mental health issues, and it’s possible to ignore the need for resilience. The report itself looks at exactly this, despite the focus of this headline. It argues employers, employees and government all have a role to play.

IMHO, for someone to be deemed unfit to work for mental health reasons their condition has to be quite serious and require professional help, which seems to be contradictory with the proposal (What can employers do?).

Not sure as well what exactly an employer-provided "workplace health scheme" might mean... Does the office shut off the lift and inspects people's lunches and snacks?

> Indeed, it seems unlikely that the underlying reason for the situation is really 'health'.

Why is that your conclusion based on nothing? In the last 5 years, is there any reason why population health might have declined? Does anything come to your mind at all?

Did you miss the whole COVID thing entirely? People did and still do get COVID, it's not (entirely) gone. And it does frequently have long-term health consequences.

Another likely causal factor is the decline in the NHS.

I think we are allowed to use common sense. I think it’s pretty safe to say that everyone has some kind of health condition, but there’s no way that one in five working adults has a health condition so bad that they cannot work.

If I truly could not work, I would want the slackers rooted out too, otherwise they will destroy supports for the people that actually need them.

> but there’s no way that one in five working adults has a health condition so bad that they cannot work.

I would go further, I would also say that there are no "working adults" who also "cannot work".

You don't see ill people walking around? Yes, that's how it works, it doesn't prove anything. We're not seeing what we don't see, and can't draw "common sense" inferences from that missing data. You need actual studies.

>I would go further, I would also say that there are no "working adults" who also "cannot work".

He probably meant "working age adults".

Sure, but the point remains - they say that know it's wrong because they see a representative sample of working age adults?

No, we actually don't: There is strong selection bias by definition of the difference between "of working age" and actually "working". The ones unable to work are less publicly visible.

Exactly.

Why are millions of young adults suddenly unable to work for health reasons?

Either there are real health issues and then this should be an emergency situation to find and address the causes, and this proposal is totally inadequate.

Or there are no serious health issues (which, indeed sounds more plausible) and this proposal misses the point and is a waste of money. Real underlying causes of the situation should be identified and addressed nevertheless. Cynically, we can notice that this keeps the official unemployment rate low since people "economically inactive" do not count, and we can wonder what would happen if those 3+ million were suddenly to look for work...

> Either there are real health issues and then this should be an emergency situation to find and address the causes

It's a mystery. We may never know what caused a steep and broad rise in ill health during the pandemic.

The pandemic was 5 years ago and Covid was and is very mild in younger people. So many younger people officially unfit to work is not due to Covid and I am very skeptical that this is really "health" as I explained. So do you have anything substantive to share on this instead of taking government statements at face value and snarks in replies?

> The pandemic was 5 years ago

1) it is absurd to consider the pandemic as a point in time in the past. It has abated, but there are still new cases today, and ongoing consequences of older cases. "it happened 5 years ago" is simplistic to the point of being nonsensical.

2) The report states "Today there are nearly 800,000 or 40% more people of working-age who are economically inactive for health reasons than there were in 2019."

So it's a change since in 2019. The time frame fits.

> is very mild in younger people

Always? Blanket statements like this are not accurate.

> So do you have anything substantive to share on this instead of taking statements at face value

I did not "accept it at face value". My point is: here is data in need of explanation. A possible explanation is that "is very mild in younger people" is not true often enough to matter.

I am amazed at people's ability to not even consider the obvious simple explanation - not accept it, but not even consider it or talk about it - and rather leap to ignoring the elephant in the room, and denying the validity of the data as first choice.

Correlation is not causation, but if it's not the cause then that should be conclusion reached only after investigating and ruling out the glaringly obvious.

> I am very skeptical that this is really "health"

That is a extra-ordinary statement, with zero evidence. If you can't provide that, we can dismiss it out of hand.

> taking government statements at face value

Please, no snark. The UK isn't the USA, statements from public health bodies can't be dismissed by using "government statements" as an implied slur. Your explanation "it's not health" is a political one, and so you imply that this does not come from you - that the number is itself pollical.

> A possible explanation is that "is very mild in younger people" is not true often enough to matter.

It is true enough to matter unless you can show otherwise... because, again, to be deemed unfit to work the health issue must be very serious.

And of course this is all political.

Those numbers, criteria, and decisions to deem people "economically inactive" and not to count them as unemployed are all based on policy. Again, cynically we need to keep in mind that this keeps unemployment numbers low when the economy is flat-lining (really the actual elephant in the room since 2019).

We can't ignore the state of the economy and the political aspect. This Keep Britain Working review is political (it is a government review) and the proposal that "firms were likely to face a cost of £5-15 per employee per month to provide improved levels of occupational health is farcical and suggests that real issues are avoided (c.f. previous paragraph).

The rise in economic inactivity also seems to be UK-specific, which also points to reasons beyond Covid and "health" [1]...

Anyway, can only lead a horse to water, so have a nice one...

[1] https://obr.uk/box/how-does-economic-inactivity-compare-acro...

> The rise in economic inactivity also seems to be UK-specific, which also points to reasons beyond Covid and "health"

Thanks for the link. It's good that it talks about things in context of the pandemic, since discussing public health without even mentioning it would be nonsensical. From there:

> And ill-health has consistently been a bigger factor behind inactivity in the UK than in most other advanced economies, with post-pandemic trends likely to have amplified these differences.

So, that supports the first part of your sentence - it seems to be UK-specific, but it directly contradicts the second. Which is still your own unsupported extraordinary conclusions that it's not health and unrelated to the pandemic.

If you truly could not work, you might not be so eager to jump to conclusions about who "actually needs" support.

I do also wonder about the negative effects of ubiquitous social media usage on health (mostly on mental health but that then impacts other areas). Of course, that's not something that is specific to the UK.

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