David
Stuckler & Sanjay
Basu
The Body Economic
Why Austerity Kills
Allen Lane
2013
Présentation de l'éditeur
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.
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.
David Stuckler, MPH, PhD, is a Senior Research Leader at Oxford University and Honorary Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He lives in Oxford, England. (Pictured top)
Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD,
is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and an epidemiologist at the
Prevention Research Center of Stanford University. A former Rhodes
Scholar, he lives in San Francisco. (Pictured bottom)
