While singular economies are in themselves a delicate balance of consumers and producers, demand and supply, our contemporary globalized economy has added complexity to fragility because it creates a system where all single economies are intertwined and interdependent. This means that when the balance is upset in even one country, all of the other countries are affected. The cases of Iceland and Greece and their responses to economic crisis, as discussed in Basu and Stuckler’s book The Body Economic, show the effects of proposing two different solutions to the same problem of economic instability and reveal not only the complexity of a globalized economy but also the direct impacts of economy on public health. While Iceland’s increase in public spending gradually led to positive economic growth, the policy of austerity adopted by the IMF and the Greek government led to declining economic growth and poor public health. In Greece, economic crisis and unsuccessful political solutions led to a vicious cycle of public health and economy; a poor economy indicated by high rates of homelessness, unemployment, and debt leads to overcrowding and collapse of healthcare systems, which leads to increases in diseases, which worsens public health factors of homelessness and unemployment, which further damages the economy, taking us right back to the beginning of the loop.
Besides the fact that economies and public health are closely related and have the possibility to create vicious cycles of poverty, what really stood out in the reading to me were the many occurrences of the government and economic institutions such as the IMF disguising, ignoring, manipulating, and even straight out denying data that proved a strong correlation between austerity and a public with worsening health and increasing instances of disease and poverty. Once the balance of Greece’s economy was disrupted, it was like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because its economy is so inextricably tied to public health and is so delicate that many solutions should have been attempted instead of using policies of austerity and then ignoring the fact that austerity feeds directly into the already existent vicious cycle of declining economies and deteriorating public health. However, because many nations and politicians are involved in our globalized economy act as interfering factors, such manipulation of data is unfortunately common to support the interests of politicians or companies above public health. We have seen examples of this in the denial of blood banks being contaminated with HIV in the U.S., in Presidents touting invalid statistics of “welfare fraud”, and in the public ignoring disparities between race and chances of getting arrested. Too often are minorities and other disadvantaged groups scapegoated for declining public health when in fact, an economy in recession leads to the poverty that creates issues with public health, further worsening economy and stability, feeding into a vicious cycle where facts are denied to maintain and improve the interests of politicians and companies. Economic crises are related to public health and to each other in such a way that one small difference in the way a country responds to recession can have enormous impacts on the eventual outcomes of economic and public health, as exemplified by the stories of Iceland and Greece.
