Is Neoliberalism Killing Us? A Cross Sectional Study of the Impact of Neoliberal Beliefs on Health and Social Wellbeing in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neoliberal ideology is linked to poorer collective health and well-being. At the individual level, however, neoliberal beliefs may actually promote self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-reliance. We examined the effects of three beliefs underlying neoliberalism—( a) Personal Wherewithal, ( b) Natural Competition, and ( c) Anti-Government Interference—to understand the unique pathways by which neoliberalism affects health and well-being at the individual level. Participants were recruited using paid advertisements on social media in May/June 2020. Multivariable regression identified associations between each of the three identified neoliberal beliefs and participants’ ( a) self-rated physical health, ( b) number of health diagnoses, ( c) life satisfaction, ( d) loneliness, and ( e) social trust of family, close friends/partners, coworkers, neighbors, and strangers. Among 2632 respondents, personal wherewithal was associated with better health, life satisfaction, and social well-being (perhaps by promoting self-efficacy and self-reliance to undertake healthy behaviors), while anti-government beliefs were associated with worse life satisfaction and social well-being (perhaps by reducing benefits inherent in collective action and social connection). Those hoping to reduce the negative effects of neoliberalism on collective well-being must contend with the reinforcing effect that personal wherewithal might have in shaping the perceived benefits of neoliberalism among those with these beliefs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".