2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

I found Part I of Stuckler and Basu’s The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills to be clear, informative and interesting. At its core lay several important ideas that I had never heard before, and if I did, I had not properly understood them. For example, the idea that public health does not have to suffer even though the economy is suffering- if a government chooses to continue or increase spending on public health, its people will be better cared for and the economy can bounce back. What helped me understand this concept the was the authors’ distinction between personal debt and government debt. When I hear the word “debt”, I assume that the most important and effective course of action would be one that decreases spending immediately, in an effort to build up savings and avoid slipping further into debt. But the economist understands that there is a fundamental difference between government debt and personal debt, and that spending on social projects is essential in protecting the people during an economic crisis. “What the Great Depression shows us is that even the worst economic catastrophe need not cause people’s health to suffer, if politicians take the right steps to protect people’s health.”

One of the most important ideas that weaves through the various readings we have been assigned is the idea of cause and effect. Our sociological structure is so fragile, made up of so many interconnecting pieces, that when abused, tragedy ensues. The fields of sociology and public health are all about identifying these relationships and coming up with ideas to repair the social structure. Ghost Map provided us with our first example: raw sewage mixed with the drinking water supply can cause a cholera epidemic. Root Shock provided us with another: the disruption of communities can cause an increase in mental illness and AIDS in the people who are displaced. And now Roderick Wallace gives us another, even more sinister example- when fire safety services are deliberately cut from disadvantaged areas, the rate of urban decay and the amount of AIDS diagnoses both increase significantly.

But there are important differences in readings like Ghost Map and readings like Wallace’s article- like the idea of deliberate action. The further we’ve gotten in the semester, the more we’ve seen an active hand in these cause and effect relationships; a level of deliberate action on the part of some dominating authority that endangers the minority. The New Jim Crow brought a myriad examples of court cases and legal practices that demonstrated how white law enforcement deliberately traps minorities like blacks in a vicious cycle of drugs, incarceration and poverty. While our focus as sociological thinkers should certainly be on how to solve the issues we have been reading about, another idea to ponder is how to put an end to the deliberate side of the cause and effect cycle, to identify and take punitive action against the policies and ideas that have a hand in causing these public health issues.

Before I had taken this class, I had a very limited understanding of what “public health” meant. What came to mind at hearing this term were ideas like healthcare, insurance and the qualities of hospitals. When I think of health, in general, my first thoughts center around physical health, and what it means to live with or around disease. I think of statistics, of maps, of populations and large groups of people.

What is striking to me, then, about readings like Root Shock and even the reading we had for last week, is that they focus intensely on the emotional aspect of public health as well as the individual aspect of public health. Dr. Fullilove presents her findings on a very personal level, regaling the reader with various tales of individuals she has encountered while doing her research and the way urban renewal has specifically affected their own lives. Her argument is centered around the concept that the emotional changes that come with losing one’s home within a community pose severe consequences to the quality of life that individual will face moving forward. While it may be obvious that a tragic outbreak of cholera in Victorian London because of unsanitary conditions is a major public health issue, I believe the displacement of communities, usually low income minorities, in twentieth century America is an issue not as many people recognize as being one of public health. I certainly did not.

“Kindness worked through the collective as both buffer and glue. It was a force for tolerance and respect…[But] in the aftermath of urban renewal, individuals were preoccupied with making a new life, and perhaps they could not be as kind as they had been previously.” This passage in the reading really struck me, and is an excellent example of the point I am trying to make. To focus on the level of kindness present within a community may sound like something very personal, a well as something trivial, in discussing the health of the residents of that community. But Dr. Fullilove focuses on it extensively, describing different people’s reactions to the decline of kindness in their renewed neighborhoods. What the reading for this week shows is that emotional health is just as pressing an issue as physical health, and individuals demand our attention so that we can learn from their personal stories and fix the problems of the collective. After all, isn’t it individuals who make up our statistics?