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

In The Body Economic, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu do a great job showing the connection between bad economic conditions, government policies and public health. Besides for suicides rising in bad times, I would never think that public health would be so correlated with the economy. The graphs on page 9, one showing state income per capita from 1927 to 1937 and the other showing trends in death rates from 1927 to 1937, surprise me, as to how similar they are, more or less rising and falling in the same time periods. But what I found important was that the authors not only explained why a bad economy could lead to less-deaths, but also made it a point to address all the other variables that could have led to the death rates declining as well. Stuckler and Basu look to see if the falling death rate is consistent with previous trends. They even say, “During the Great Depression, most of the changes in death rates apparently weren’t being caused by the economic downturn itself.” However, due to the epidemiological transition, less people died from infectious diseases like pneumonia, but more from non-infectious ones. The depression also correlates with less road deaths because less people are driving, and it also hit around the time of prohibition. There are always so many different factors to account for in scientific research, and I’m glad the authors account for them. Additionally, as they do, it’s great to draw parallels between the Great Depression and more recent economic problems, because this will surely aid us in getting to the roots of the problems and fixing them.

Once again, we read a depressing and disturbing article. There’s almost a sick humor in that, efforts to make minority and poor populations move out of concentrated areas only made things way worse for the overall areas. Basically, AIDS spread and housing overcrowding made safety even less possible to maintain. However, when I detach from the situation and look at it without thinking of it in terms of real people in places so close to us, I actually find the way things work quite fascinating. Simply put, once something bad happens, it only leads to more bad things to follow. For example, people living in a building suffer from AIDS and this can lead landlords to abandon the buildings in poor neighborhoods. Or, people flee from a place, but then it leads to overcrowding in another place…

What actually interests me most is the fact that so many complicated mathematical formulas are used in this article. This might be because I like math. I always think of topics such as this one as being totally about opinions, facts and simple statistics and correlations, trying to solve one of the many problems in the world. I haven’t even tried to understand the formulas in the article, especially those starting on page 22, but I kind of like how these human trends can be understood with straight formulas, rather than just a bunch of people brainstorming different ideas.

The idea of urban renewal is quite confusing. The words urban renewal themselves sound like they describe something great, like improvement and progress. And those in charge of urban renewal, the leaders and the people who plan the renewal projects, seem to have great intentions. Not only will the cities be more beautiful, but also they’ll be safer and have more to offer, including new buildings, businesses and homes. However, for some reason, the plans often seem to fail, especially for those who were living in the places that were renewed. People are forced to leave their homes- often minorities or people with low income. People lose the tight-knit communities that they once took pride in. These people are not considered when the plans are made. To the planners (often outsiders to the communities), the areas being renewed NEED to be renewed. It will be better! Or at least they claim to think so. In a way, this reminds me of a typical problem that I learned in accounting class. The manager of a company suggests something like “If we spend $1000 more in advertising, our sales will increase by 10% and we’ll end up making more money.” Then the accountant takes the numbers and actually does the calculations, only to prove that the manager’s suggestion would actually result in a loss. The point here is that while the manager of the company surely wants to improve the company and thinks he has a beneficial plan, the plan needs to go through someone (the accountant) with inside knowledge on how everything will play out/ what the effects will be. This same idea can relate to urban renewal because sure, the leaders of a city might think that their plan is helpful- and maybe it has potential to be so, but the people living there, who can predict how they will be affected by it, should be more involved in the planning. This way they can also help make sure that everything gets followed through and the area is actually benefited.

It’s similar to what Mr. Meadows says in the interview in the reading:
“You might say that you develop this area in here for a better improvement.
No, no, it didn’t do that.
What it did, it made us struggle harder…”