Author: David B. Nash
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538164264
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
Why America’s health care system failed so tragically during the Covid pandemic, and how the forces unleashed by the crisis could be just the medicine for its long-term cure. Covid patients overwhelmed American hospitals. The world’s most advanced and expensive health care system crumbled, short of supplies and personnel. The U.S. lost more patients than any other nation during the pandemic. How could this happen? And how could this disaster lead to a more resilient, rational and equitable health care system in the future? How Covid Crashed the System answers these questions with compelling stories and wide-angle analysis. Dr. David Nash, a founder of the discipline of population health, and Charles Wohlforth, an award-winning science writer, pick up the pieces of the Covid disaster like investigators of a crashed airliner, finding the root causes of America’s failure to cope, and delivering surprising answers that may reorient how you think about your own health. From the broadest, cultural flaws that disabled our health system to particular, institutional issues, America’s defenses fell due to racism and poverty, combined with a culture of misguided individualism that tore communities apart. We suffered from failed leadership and crippled public health agencies, and hospitals built to make money from services, not deliver health. But How Covid Crashed the System goes beyond analyzing those problems, providing hope for change and fundamental improvement in ways that will transform Americans’ health. Covid’s market disruption encouraged new technology that allows for remote health care. Integrated health organizations gained ground, working to manage clients’ total wellness from cradle to grave. Covid also accelerated changes in medical education, to make doctor training more equitable and better aligned to the skills we need. And Covid forced employers to accept responsibility for their workers’ health in a new way, making them partners in this new movement. Using systemic analysis of the Covid crash, the authors find reasons to hope. America’s health care establishment resisted reform for decades, mired in waste and avoidable errors. Now, the pandemic crisis has exposed its flaws for all to see, creating the opportunities for systemic changes. Even without new laws or government policies, America is moving toward a transformed health system responsible for our wellness. How Covid Crashed the System tells that story.
Author: Adam Tooze
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141995459
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022 THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021 'A complex story, which Tooze tells with clarity and verve... The world is unlikely to be treated to a better account of the economics of the pandemic' The Times From the author of Crashed comes a gripping short history of how Covid-19 ravaged the global economy, and where it leaves us now When the news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow in COVID-19's wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked, and even gold was sold. In a matter of weeks, the world's economy was brought to an abrupt halt by governments trying to contain a spiralling public health catastrophe. Flights were grounded; supply chains broken; industries from tourism to oil to hospitality collapsed overnight, leaving hundreds of millions of people unemployed. Central banks responded with unprecedented interventions, just to keep their economies on life-support. For the first time since the second world war, the entire global economic system contracted. This book tells the story of that shutdown. We do not yet know how this story ends, or what new world we will find on the other side. In this fast-paced, compelling and at times shocking analysis, Adam Tooze surveys the wreckage, and looks at where we might be headed next. 'A seriously impressive book, both endlessly quotable and rigorously analytical' Oliver Bullough, The Guardian
Author: Adam Tooze
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110357
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 722
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK "An intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it...One of the great strengths of Tooze's book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems."--The New York Times Book Review From the prizewinning economic historian and author of Shutdown and The Deluge, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in US banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. With a historian’s eye for detail, connection, and consequence, Adam Tooze brings the story right up to today’s negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.
Author: Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541797728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 504
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Book Description
The preeminent doctor and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel is repeatedly asked one question: Which country has the best healthcare? He set off to find an answer. The US spends more than any other nation, nearly $4 trillion, on healthcare. Yet, for all that expense, the US is not ranked #1 -- not even close. In Which Country Has the World's Best Healthcare? Ezekiel Emanuel profiles eleven of the world's healthcare systems in pursuit of the best or at least where excellence can be found. Using a unique comparative structure, the book allows healthcare professionals, patients, and policymakers alike to know which systems perform well, and why, and which face endemic problems. From Taiwan to Germany, Australia to Switzerland, the most inventive healthcare providers tackle a global set of challenges -- in pursuit of the best healthcare in the world.
Author: Charles Wohlforth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804197989
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
From a leading planetary scientist and an award-winning science writer, a propulsive account of the developments and initiatives that have transformed the dream of space colonization into something that may well be achievable. We are at the cusp of a golden age in space science, as increasingly more entrepreneurs—Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos—are seduced by the commercial potential of human access to space. But Beyond Earth does not offer another wide-eyed technology fantasy: instead, it is grounded not only in the human capacity for invention and the appeal of adventure but also in the bureaucratic, political, and scientific realities that present obstacles to space travel—realities that have hampered NASA’s efforts ever since the Challenger disaster. In Beyond Earth, Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R.Hendrix offer groundbreaking research and argue persuasively that not Mars, but Titan—a moon of Saturn with a nitrogen atmosphere, a weather cycle, and an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy, where we will even be able to fly like birds in the minimal gravitational field—offers the most realistic and thrilling prospect of life without support from Earth. (With 8 pages of color illustrations)
Author: Charles Wohlforth
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 1429923741
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
In The Whale and the Supercomputer, scientists and natives wrestle with our changing climate in the land where it has hit first--and hardest A traditional Eskimo whale-hunting party races to shore near Barrow, Alaska--their comrades trapped on a floe drifting out to sea--as ice that should be solid this time of year gives way. Elsewhere, a team of scientists transverses the tundra, sleeping in tents, surviving on frozen chocolate, and measuring the snow every ten kilometers in a quest to understand the effects of albedo, the snow's reflective ability to cool the earth beneath it. Climate change isn't an abstraction in the far North. It is a reality that has already dramatically altered daily life, especially that of the native peoples who still live largely off the land and sea. Because nature shows her footprints so plainly here, the region is also a lure for scientists intent on comprehending the complexities of climate change. In this gripping account, Charles Wohlforth follows the two groups as they navigate a radically shifting landscape. The scientists attempt to decipher its smallest elements and to derive from them a set of abstract laws and models. The natives draw on uncannily accurate traditional knowledge, borne of long experience living close to the land. Even as they see the same things-a Native elder watches weather coming through too fast to predict; a climatologist notes an increased frequency of cyclonic systems-the two cultures struggle to reconcile their vastly different ways of comprehending the environment. With grace, clarity, and a sense of adventure, Wohlforth--a lifelong Alaskan--illuminates both ways of seeing a world in flux, and in the process, helps us to navigate a way forward as climate change reaches us all.
Author: Charles Wohlforth
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429924055
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 899
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Book Description
"What capacity for good lies in the hidden depths of people?" Starting with this question, award-winning author Charles Wohlforth sets forth on a wide-ranging exploration of our relationship with the world. In The Fate of Nature, he draws on science, spirituality, history, economics, and personal stories to reveal answers about the future of that relationship. There is no better place to witness the highs and lows of our treatment of the natural world than the vast wilds, rocky coasts, and shifting settlements of Alaska. Since the first encounter between Captain Cook's crew and the Alaskan Natives in 1778, there have been countless struggles between people who have had different plans for the region. Some have hoped to preserve Alaska as they found it, while others aimed to create something new in its place. Incidents such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill may seem like cause for despair. In the face of such profound tragedies, Charles Wohlforth has found heartening developments in the science of human altruism. This new understanding of what causes humans to cooperate and act conscientiously may be the first step toward taking the actions necessary to preserve an environment that has already been altered drastically in our lifetime. A clear-eyed, original work of research, reportage, and philosophical reflections, The Fate of Nature gives us a chance to change the way we think about our place in society and the world at large.
Author: Jeffrey M. Lobosky
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442214643
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
It's Enough to Make You Sick explains how the American health care system developed and how it has deteriorated into a national disgrace. Lobosky indicts the special interests who have played a role in the demise of American health care, examines the current attempts at reform, and offers a practical, compassionate blueprint for effective change.
Author: Scott Timberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300210655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Change is no stranger to us in the twenty-first century. We must constantly adjust to an evolving world, to transformation and innovation. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it all but impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work. This important book looks deeply and broadly into the roots of the crisis of the creative class in America and tells us why it matters. Scott Timberg considers the human cost as well as the unintended consequences of shuttered record stores, decimated newspapers, music piracy, and a general attitude of indifference. He identifies social tensions and contradictions—most concerning the artist’s place in society—that have plunged the creative class into a fight for survival. Timberg shows how America’s now-collapsing middlebrow culture—a culture once derided by intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald—appears, from today’s vantage point, to have been at least a Silver Age. Timberg’s reporting is essential reading for anyone who works in the world of culture, knows someone who does, or cares about the work creative artists produce.
Author: Debora MacKenzie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780349128351
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
'You could not hope for a better guide to the pandemic world order than Debora MacKenzie, who's been on this story from the start. This is an authoritative yet readable explanation of how this catastrophe happened - and more important, how it will happen again if we don't change' Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, Adapt and Messy 'This definitely deserves a read - the first of the post mortems by a writer who knows what she's talking about' Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World In a gripping, accessible narrative, a veteran science journalist lays out the shocking story of how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic happened and how to make sure this never happens again Over the last 30 years of epidemics and pandemics, we learned every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded almost none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics. Debora MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades, and she draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a potentially manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101--how viruses spread and how pandemics end--and outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis. In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argument: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals--but it is possible. No one has yet brought together our knowledge of COVID-19 in a comprehensive, informative, and accessible way. But that story can already be told, and Debora MacKenzie's urgent telling is required reading for these times and beyond. It is too early to say where the COVID-19 pandemic will go, but it is past time to talk about what went wrong and how we can do better.
