Ecological economist Tim Jackson wonders what our economy would look like if we made wealth a subset of health? This is fundamentally a question about what we choose to “value.”
Wealth and health are both concepts that help us articulate value, but one of them helps us focus on how to protect, maintain and distribute that value while the other helps us focus on how to extract, aggregate and utilize value.
Jackson argues that by making health a subset of wealth, we in some ways undermine our own efforts to promote health. He wonders what it might look like to invert the relationship.
This leads to difficult questions.
– How would self-care fit into an economy that values communal care?
Jackson worries (and I tend to agree) that the boom in self-care in some cases undermines our ability to focus resources on communal care. Moreover, the bandwidth that comes with wealth seems to be an antecedent to self-care. But do we really have to extract value (wealth) from others in order to invest that value in caring for ourselves (health)? Or are there ways to create an economy that aligns investments in communal care and self-care?
– In an economy of health, could we still justify using metrics like “share of stomach”? How about guns? Financial instruments? Most of the obvious elements of an economy designed to maximize value by enabling (some) individuals to accumulate wealth (generally at the expense of others at least on a one-off transactional basis)?
– What would it mean to build our healthcare economy around care rather than cure? What would a REAL MAHA economy look like? How much of this would need to be done through regulation? How much through education? How much through the current medical establishment? How much through some other form of health infrastructure? How would all of this be organized?
– Might “First, do no harm” be a decent starting point for the construction of a care economy?
– Finally, what would we be giving up by making wealth subordinate to health? There are a lot of things that we like, even though they may not be healthy? Who decides what to do about those pesky benefits of wealth that are not particularly conducive to health?
These are just a few of the difficult questions raised in a discussion of an economy of that subordinates wealth to health…
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