As Vandenbroucke'9 noted somewhat disapprovingly, social explanations for illness won't go away and are rediscovered with each new generation of epidemiologists. However, rather than ask, as Vandenbroucke does, why the population perspective keeps resurfacing, it is perhaps more useful to ask why it keeps sinking. Some of the reasons for the current lack of interest in the population perspective may lie in the personal and professional situations of epidemiologists. In most countries the main sources of funding are government or voluntary agencies that have little interest in, or sympathy for, studies of socioeconomic factors and health. In the last decade, Western countries, particularly anglophone countries, have increasingly placed emphasis on individual responsibility, typified by the famous statement by Margaret Thatcher that "there is no such thing as society, there are only families and individuals." Governments and funding agencies have been most supportive of studies that focus on individual lifestyle, and epidemiologists, either through choice or through necessity, have tended to go "where the money is."