Author: David Stuckler
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465063977
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Politicians have talked endlessly about the seismic economic and social impacts of the recent financial crisis, but many continue to ignore its disastrous effects on human health—and have even exacerbated them, by adopting harsh austerity measures and cutting key social programs at a time when constituents need them most. The result, as pioneering public health experts David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu reveal in this provocative book, is that many countries have turned their recessions into veritable epidemics, ruining or extinguishing thousands of lives in a misguided attempt to balance budgets and shore up financial markets. Yet sound alternative policies could instead help improve economies and protect public health at the same time. In The Body Economic, Stuckler and Basu mine data from around the globe and throughout history to show how government policy becomes a matter of life and death during financial crises. In a series of historical case studies stretching from 1930s America, to Russia and Indonesia in the 1990s, to present-day Greece, Britain, Spain, and the U.S., Stuckler and Basu reveal that governmental mismanagement of financial strife has resulted in a grim array of human tragedies, from suicides to HIV infections. Yet people can and do stay healthy, and even get healthier, during downturns. During the Great Depression, U.S. deaths actually plummeted, and today Iceland, Norway, and Japan are happier and healthier than ever, proof that public wellbeing need not be sacrificed for fiscal health. Full of shocking and counterintuitive revelations and bold policy recommendations, The Body Economic offers an alternative to austerity—one that will prevent widespread suffering, both now and in the future.
Author: Catherine Gallagher
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.
Author: David Stuckler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781443420440
Category : Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Recessions can hurt . . . but austerity kills In The Body Economic, Dr. David Stuckler and Dr. Sanjay Basu provide hard evidence to reveal the tragic human toll of the ongoing recession worldwide. From a rise in alcoholism in the UK to scores of suicides in California to HIV outbreaks and abandoned children in Greece, the book tells the stories of people who were not bailed out and who are now bearing the brunt of the 2007 stock-market crash. The authors argue that this suffering is not inevitable. Based on a decade of groundbreaking research stretched across five continents, The Body Economic shows how key public health decisions can affect the impact of financial crises for better or for worse. Urgent and provocative, The Body Economic draws attention to a growing area of "recession medicine." It speaks to a hopeful audience, not only providing evidence of the realities of recession and illness but also presenting illuminating case studies of resilience and creative response to difficult conditions. The authors show that recession can provide opportunities to tackle long-standing public-health problems in surprising new ways, paving the way for a happier and healthier future.
Author: David Stuckler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781443420457
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
An agenda-shaping look at the human costs of financial crisis--the culmination of ten years' work by two pioneering researchers Politicians have talked endlessly about the seismic economic and social impact of the Great Recession, but many continue to ignore its disastrous effects on human health and have even exacerbated them by adopting harsh austerity measures and cutting key social programs at a time when citizens need them most. The result, as pioneering public health experts David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu reveal in this provocative book, is that many countries have turned their recessions into veritable epidemics, ruining or extinguishing thousands of lives in a misguided attempt to balance budgets and shore up financial markets. Yet sound alternative policies could help improve economies and protect public health at the same time. In The Body Economic, Stuckler and Basu mine data from around the globe and across history to show how government policy becomes a matter of life and death during financial crises. Through a series of case studies stretching from the United States in the 1930s to Russia and Indonesia in the 1990s and present-day Greece, Britain, Spain, Canada and America, Stuckler and Basu reveal that political mismanagement of financial crises has resulted in a grim array of human tragedies, including suicides, HIV infections, West Nile Virus and tuberculosis epidemics. Yet people can and do stay healthy, and even get healthier, during downturns. During the Great Depression, U.S. death rates actually plummeted, and today, people in Iceland, Norway and Japan are happier and healthier than ever. Full of shocking and counterintuitive revelations and bold policy recommendations, The Body Economic offers an alternative to austerity--one that will prevent widespread suffering, both now and in the future.
Author: Sanjay Basu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
The global financial crisis has had a seismic impact upon the wealth of nations. But we have little sense of how it affects one of the most fundamental issues of all: our physical and mental health. This book, based on the authors' own groundbreaking research, looks at the daily lives of people affected by financial crisis, from the Great Depression of the 1930s, to post-communist Russia, to the US foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s.
Author: David Stuckler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The Body Economic is the first, agenda-shaping, look at the human costs of financial crisis - the culmination of ten years' work by two pioneering researchers - Sanjay Basu and David Stuckler. The global financial crisis has had a seismic impact upon the wealth of nations. But we have little sense of how it affects one of the most fundamental issues of all: our physical and mental health. The Body Economic puts forward a radical proposition. Austerity, it argues, is seriously bad for your health. We can prevent financial crises from becoming epidemics, but to do so, we must acknowledge what the hard data tells us: that, throughout history, there is a causal link between the strength of a community's health and its social protection systems. Even amid the worst economic disasters, negative public health effects are not inevitable: it's how communities respond to challenges of debt and market turmoil that counts. Now and for generations to come, our commitment to the building of fairer, more equal societies will determine the health of our body economic.
Author: Roderick Floud
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500805
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 459
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Book Description
Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today's developing world and the health trends of the future.
Author: Peter-Paul Banziger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315522764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Global issues such as climate change and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have spurred interest in thinking about the history of the modern economy that goes beyond disciplinary economic history. This book contributes to the cultural history of capitalism and its different regimes of productivity by pursuing the perspective of body history and by providing a global scope. Throughout modernity, the body served as a fundamental, albeit essentially changing, linchpin for both the organization of economic practices and for intellectual reflections on the economy. In particular, it was the pivotal interface to render notions of economic productivity intelligible. The book explores this central thesis in a range of case studies, drawing on source material from West Africa, Europe, Mexico, and the US. Framed by a theoretically informed introduction, which also provides a conceptual history of notions of productivity, and by an afterword that brings the approaches explored in this volume into dialogue with scholarship inspired by Marx and Foucault, the individual chapters tackle the concept of productivity from a wide array of angles, each illuminating the promises and problems of a cultural take on the history of economic productivity.
Author: Henry George
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Author: Wilhelm Roscher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 502
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Book Description
