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

There is a sense of happiness and comfort while reading about countries with massive public spending on their citizens. It is great to see healthcare for all and social safety nets. What is not great is the IMF constantly making wrong decisions for entire countries. You would think that they would learn from their previous experiences that austerity is not the proper choice for every country and in this part of the book they mention the same concept. The IMF does not even use hard data to calculate things for each individual country and instead standardizes and oversimplifies policy to get to austerity. One of the Icelandic officials was complaining that the people having a right to choose what happens with their economy was wrong and the results should be left to either a computer or a few elite intellectual few. I am sorry, but is that supposed to be the IMF? Are they the “elite” and “intellectual” because their track record indicates otherwise. To see Iceland reject the IMF policy and continue to fund public healthcare except on even grander scales was amazing! The recession even managed to allow leisure time for their citizens, allowed for more sleep, and brought back an entire economy of fishing. Greece directly contrasted Iceland with their policies of austerity. The tumor story was startling to read and I had never even heard of an underground Robin Hood network of doctors. A 40% unemployment rate in youth was to me unheard of. The way they continued to lie about their citizen’s healthcare and lack a choice with democracy, the more upsetting it was to read about Greece.

It’s interesting to read about the situations in Iceland and Greece, side by side in part II of The Body Economic, because of the significant differences between them. Basically, Iceland recovered nicely from an economic crisis by listening to the people and continuing to provide them with help, while Greece’s economy continued to suffer as they listened to the IMF, and cut budgets and healthcare. After reading about both countries, the importance of both listening to the citizens and helping them during hard times becomes obvious. However, can it really be that simple? Just continue to help your people, give them what they want, and this will help fix the economic situation? And even more so, it will help the overall health of the people too? The situation in Iceland almost sounds too good. Despite the fiscal crisis, surveys showed that people still showed positive moods, and that they actually began drinking and smoking less and eating healthier. Then again, Iceland was doing really well in terms of happiness to begin with. Social protection programs as well as a high level of social inclusion made Iceland the “happiest” country in the world since the late 1990s. There’s no doubt that this whole nature of the country helped enable it to survive the economic hardships. This is actually why, the authors say, “Iceland was a good place to test our hypothesis that the country’s strengths – notably its democratic participation, social support, and inclusive social protection system- could make it more resilient to an economic meltdown, preventing a public health disaster (59)”.

Part 2 of Stuckler and Basu’s The Body Economic stood out to me in part because of its emphasis on emotional themes like morality and unity. In discussing economics, politics and the affairs of countries, ideas like right and wrong are often ignored or treated as unimportant and idealistic. In a perfect world, or on an individual level, people should always behave morally. But must we, and do we, demand that same moral standard when it comes to the actions of countries as units? Stuckler and Basu would say yes, that holding countries to a high moral standard, demanding that they respect and serve their people, is an essential component to their success in all areas- economics, politics and public health. The authors’ discussions in Part 2 about the reactions of Iceland and Greece to their respective fiscal crises focus very much on the emotions of the people and the morality of their countries’ solutions. “Icelanders were now faced with a profound moral question,” Stuckler and Basu write on page 62. “To what degree if any were they as a people and as a country responsible for the malfeasance of their business class?” Thinking about their economic crisis on a moral level, it can be argued from the reading, is what saved the Icelanders from complete chaos. The people of Iceland, over ten thousand of them to be exact, understood that it was not right for them to have to shoulder the burden of austerity to bail out a tiny, reckless upper class. Their peaceful protest then encouraged the leaders of Iceland to also look at the issue in a moral fashion, and a democratic solution was reached: hold a public forum. Austerity was voted against, and the people of Iceland enjoyed a slow yet progressive move towards recovery without the pain of a health crisis.

This sense of morality and democracy among the Icelandic people came, in part, from their strong sense of unity. As the authors point out on page 72, “The people of Iceland felt that they were all experiencing the crisis together…Building a sense of community and togetherness…may have contributed to a heightened spirit of democracy in a time of crisis.” I find it fascinating that Stuckler and Basu chose to note and record the emotional and moral aspects of the fiscal crises- it really speaks to the idea that countries are made up, ultimately, of individuals.