Uwe Reinhardt, perhaps America's funniest economist, spoke some years ago of what might happen as spending on health care ate up ever larger chunks of gross domestic product. Coast to coast America would become one enormous hospital, with everyone either working in health care or being ill (or both). Reinhardt might therefore appreciate this issue on medicalisation —which discusses much the same problem but from a doctor's eye view, rather than an economist's.

Not that economists don't get a look in. Amartya Sen, an even more distinguished economist, discusses the paradox that people in America feel much less well than those …