Neoliberal epidemics

Join us for a special webinar event with Ted Schrecker (Emeritus Professor of Global Health Policy, Newcastle University)

Moderated by Erica Di Ruggiero, with discussant Loreto Fernández-González

Title: “If livin’ were a thing that money could buy”: Perspectives on neoliberal epidemics

Abstract: In the original edition (2015) of the book How Politics Makes Us Sick, my colleague Clare Bambra and I described the consequences of more than three decades of neoliberal or market fundamentalist public policies as “neoliberal epidemics” and in the second, expanded edition (2025) we borrowed the concept of “necrostratification” from historian Salvador Regilme’s work on the COVID-19 pandemic to foreground the life-and-death consequences of neoliberalism’s social and economic impacts.

This presentation focuses on Canadian manifestations of key dynamics driven by normalization of neoliberal perspectives on life, work, and worthiness. Two themes cut across these bodies of evidence. First, as US Senator Elizabeth Warren has put it: ‘What we have today didn’t happen because of gravity. It happened because of a bunch of choices” that could have been made differently. Second, the choice of a standard of proof (how much evidence, and what kind of evidence, is enough to justify an intervention) is itself political.

The idea of necrostratification encapsulates the insight of a traditional folk song that: “If livin’ were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die.” It is, and they do. Clarity on this point is a core obligation of public health researchers, educators and practitioners.

Recommended reading:

Schrecker, T., & Bambra, C. (2025, 2nd ed.). How Politics Makes Us Sick: Neoliberal Epidemics. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-96127-6