Is lack of causal evidence linking socioeconomic position with health an ‘inconvenient truth’?

Mackenbach provides a balance sheet for health inequalities research during the past decades, and suggests that our figures are in the red. Health inequalities are still present, and even growing, and even the most ambitious attempts to reduce inequalities appear to have given modest results.2 This development is not only due to counteracting factors in our societies, Mackenbach argues, but also attributable to the way in which mainstream thinking in the field have avoided to address and handle a set of ‘inconvenient truths’. I find this a very important discussion, and have elsewhere discussed a number of other issues that I think need reconsideration,3 but here I will focus on the alleged lack of evidence for a causal link between socioeconomic position (SEP) and health.