As I remember childhood, being given a spoonful of sugar with, or immediately after taking,
some particularly unpleasant medication was a common practice. Today’s health
experts probably wouldn’t approve of giving a child a spoonful of pure sugar in
any circumstances, but then medicines tend not to be so foul-tasting these days,
and have largely been replaced by bland taste-free pills of one sort or another
anyway. I’m aware of no circumstances, though, under which the spoonful of
sugar would have been given to a completely different child instead of the one
who was suffering from whatever disease was being treated.
But then I’m not
Chancellor of the Exchequer, so what would I know? According to modern economic
theory of the Reevesian
kind, spending £2 billion to build 18,000 affordable homes for one group of
people will sweeten the pill represented by the £5 billion in benefits being
removed from an entirely different and much larger group of people. It’s an ‘interesting’,
if somewhat unscientific, proposition, but it would never survive the sort of
thorough testing required for the acceptance of any new approach to medical treatment,
with its concomitant stress on empirical data. It also looks unlikely to
survive the rather less thorough (and completely untested) implementation which
is about to happen. It makes sense only as an exercise in dividing people into
groups and encouraging them to blame other groups for any problems they might
have.
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