The Body Economic

Author : David Stuckler
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465063977
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Body Economic written by David Stuckler and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 1400826845
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Body Economic written by Catherine Gallagher and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141976039
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Body Economic written by David Stuckler and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 highly significant new 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. Why, it asks, did Sweden experience a fall in suicides during its banking crisis? What triggered a mosquito-borne epidemic in California in 2007? What caused 10 million Russian men to 'disappear' in the 1990s? Why is Greece experiencing rocketing HIV rates? And how did the health of Americans actually improve during the catastrophic crisis of the 1930s? The conclusions it draws are both surprising and compelling: remarkably, when faced with similar crises, the health of some societies - like Iceland - improves, while that of others, such as Greece, deteriorates. 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. 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. 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 : Tomas Sedlacek
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199831906
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Economics of Good and Evil written by Tomas Sedlacek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.

Author : Roderick Floud
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139500805
Total Pages : 459 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Changing Body written by Roderick Floud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : The Bush Institute
Publisher : Crown Currency
ISBN 13 : 0307986152
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The 4% Solution written by The Bush Institute and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by President George W. Bush With contributions from world renowned economists and Nobel prizewinners, The 4% Solution is a blueprint for restoring America’s economic health The United States is reaching a pivotal point in its economic history. Millions of Americans owe more on their homes than they are worth, long-term unemployment is alarmingly high, and the Congressional Budget Office is projecting a sustainable growth rate of only 2.3%—a full percentage point below the average for the past sixty years. Unless a turnaround comes quickly, the United States could be mired in debt for years to come and millions of Americans will be pushed to the sidelines of the economy. The 4% Solution offers clear and unflinching ideas on how to revive America’s economy. It sets a positive economic goal and asks some of the top economic minds on how to achieve it. With a focus on removing government constraints, The 4% Solution defines the policies that will allow Americans to save, invest, and create the jobs that the United States needs. The 4% Solution draws on the best minds in the business, including five Nobel laureates: · Robert E. Lucas, Jr., on the history and future of economic growth · Gary S. Becker on why we need immigrants in order to grow · Edward Prescott on the cost (to growth) of the welfare state · Vernon Smith on why housing leads us into and out of recessions · Myron Scholes on why we need to innovate in order to grow the economy

Author : George A. Akerlof
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400834724
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Animal Spirits written by George A. Akerlof and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, the case for why government is needed to restore confidence in the economy The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity. Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government—simply allowing markets to work won't do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life—such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes—and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them. Animal Spirits offers a road map for reversing the financial misfortunes besetting us today. Read it and learn how leaders can channel animal spirits—the powerful forces of human psychology that are afoot in the world economy today. In a new preface, they describe why our economic troubles may linger for some time—unless we are prepared to take further, decisive action.

Author : S. E. G. Lea
Publisher : CUP Archive
ISBN 13 : 9780521317016
Total Pages : 660 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Individual in the Economy written by S. E. G. Lea and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1987-04-24 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Individual in the Economy presents interesting analyses of important human behaviours.

Author : Joseph P. Quinlan
Publisher : McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN 13 : 0071753532
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Economic Superpower: The Retreat of Globalization, the End of American Dominance, and What We Can Do About It written by Joseph P. Quinlan and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2010-11-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Risks and Rewards for the West in the Coming Multipolar World "A marked shift has occurred in the tone and assumptions surrounding our national fortune. Nowhere is this better seen than in the second generation of books dealing with America’s financial crisis, particularly Joseph P. Quinlan’s The Last Economic Superpower." New York Journal of Books The global economy, designed by Western powers with the United States as lead architect, is in the process of reconfiguration. The 2008 global financial crisis has terminated America’s reign as sole economic superpower and opened up important new spheres of influence to developing nations. Does this signal the retreat of globalization as we know it? Has an economic “cold war” already begun? Will the West ever exert the kind of control and influence it enjoyed just a few short years ago? In The Last Economic Superpower, Joseph P. Quinlan, a Wall Street veteran and expert on global economic affairs, addresses these questions and many others. Presenting his vision with refreshing clarity and objectivity, Quinlan examines: How America went from being a major creditor to the world’s largest debtor nation in only two decades Five critical issues America must face in order to prevent permanent fragmentation of the global economy What the fading appeal of Europe and Japan means for the future of globalization What China, India, and others have that the West doesn’t--and why this gives them unprecedented leverage Decisions made now will shape the course of history. The Last Economic Superpower outlines critical choices that must be made in order to recast, reinvent, and reenergize a new style of globalization. The Last Economic Superpower lays bare the issues and challenges that will decide whether the world builds a new, functional system that serves all or fragments into separate spheres of influence, which benefits no one.

Author : David Stuckler
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781443420440
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Body Economic written by David Stuckler and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.