Accounting for Death: Economising (the End of) Life

Death is a highly and increasingly economised process in which individual, family, institutional and state finances play important, but often opaque, roles in shaping the contours of dying. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with people who are dying, their family and their healthcare providers, this article explores how economic rationalities profoundly shape almost every dimension of their experiences of the end of life. Circulating within this context are notions of scarcity, the spectre of rationing, personal financial in/security and intergenerational wealth transfers as ‘gifts of care’. Fostering ‘good (enough) deaths’, including for those who are less financially privileged, will require fully comprehending and ultimately addressing the pervasive reach of economisation into dying and care in ways that are, paradoxically, quite ‘costly’. The sociology of dying, in turn, must more deeply engage with the full effects of economisation across systems and contexts, including their enmeshment with other structural inequities.