4 results
10 - Can Communities Succeed When States Fail Them?
- Edited by Peter A. Hall, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, Massachusetts
-
- Book:
- Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2013, pp 293-318
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Early human development matters. By school age, the experiences children have had in the places where they have grown up, lived, and learned have influenced their level of development, that is, understanding and expressing language, sense of belonging, capacity for empathy and self-control, and ability to focus on complex tasks (Barker 1994; Bronfenbrenner 1979; Wadsworth 1997). Some children grow up in warm, responsive environments that protect them from inappropriate disapproval and punishment and where there are opportunities to explore their world, to play, and to learn how to speak and listen to others (Ramey and Ramey 1998). But others do not. Although abuse and neglect are serious matters, these relatively subtle differences in children's day-to-day environments accumulate into large developmental effects. For example, the number of words a child can recognize and express by age three years varies by more than threefold among otherwise normally developing children. This is because receptive and expressive language skills improve in a “dose-response” fashion with the number and variety of words spoken directly to them, and the forms in which language is used, during those three years (Hart and Risley 1995a). By the time they reach school age, the American child who has heard the most language has actually heard approximately 30 million more words than the child who has heard the least (Hart and Risley 1995b)!
Early experiences, and the state of development they produce, go on to influence health, well-being, learning, and behavior across the balance of the life course. By the second decade of life, early experiences influence the risk of school failure, teen pregnancy, and criminality. By the third and fourth decades of life, early life influences obesity, blood pressure, and depression; by the fifth and sixth decades, coronary heart disease and diabetes; and by late life, premature aging and memory loss (Harkonmäki et al. 2007) Social factors, from the most intimate experiences within the family to the most global, influence early human development in tangible and highly interdependent ways. Taken together, these factors function similar to complex adaptive ecological systems in nature.
8 - National Differences in Population Health and Development
- Edited by Peter A. Hall, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, Massachusetts
-
- Book:
- Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2013, pp 239-264
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Evaluating Social Resilience: Population Health and Development Outcomes
As Evans and Sewell argued in Chapter 1, the period from around 1980 forward can be described as a “neoliberal era” during which a set of economic and political forces, underpinned by a relatively clear ideological perspective, revamped the post–World War II consensus that had coalesced around modest levels of state intervention. Although there are other aspects of a more general trend toward globalization before and during this neoliberal turn, it is fair to note that the impact on social organization and action of neoliberalism was profound. Evans and Sewell identify central features linked to this shift, including a turn toward economic and social policies that focused more on private and market-driven rather than collective or state-driven solutions to social challenges, on deregulation of market forces, and on individual responsibility rather than shared risk and public protection against negative economic events. In some countries, these policies were aligned with an explicit ideological movement that strongly affected the social imaginary – Margaret Thatcher's claim that “there is no such thing as society” comes immediately to mind – but in others the shifts were a pragmatic response to real or perceived mandates from external powerful actors, often characterized as global market forces.
A key question animating this volume is how effectively different societies responded to this set of challenges. The core construct is the notion of resilience, which draws attention to differences across societies in the quality and effectiveness of how they dealt with the neoliberal challenge. This chapter looks at important outcomes in population health and development and then examines whether such differences in population outcomes can be systematically linked to identifiable aspects of different societal responses.
1 - Population Health and the Dynamics of Collective Development
- Edited by Peter A. Hall, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, Massachusetts
-
- Book:
- Successful Societies
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 August 2009, pp 23-52
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The level of health of people living in a society is an indicator of success of that society. Population health is determined by the circumstances and contexts of life, from the most intimate to the broadest socioeconomic element. These conditions, in turn, are strongly influenced by institutions and policies of a society. In this chapter, we argue that there are four main implications for the relationship between society and health. The first implication is that material and psychosocial conditions express themselves in the form of health inequalities or “gradients.” The second is that public provision is critical to population health because it has the capacity to reduce the level of socioeconomic inequality generated by market forces and to buffer its effects. The third is that, since socioeconomic, institutional, and policy shifts often unfold over decades, population health must attend to these big, slow-moving processes. The fourth implication is that, in turn, a longitudinal perspective on population health trends can reveal large, slow-moving processes that might otherwise remain undetected.
From cross-sectional and life course studies, the mechanisms connecting society and health can be framed at three levels of societal aggregation. At the macro level are such society-wide influences as levels and fluctuations of national income, and particularly patterns of distribution, and policies intended to affect these (for example, income support, education, health care or employment policies). At an intermediate, or meso level, are the characteristics of one's immediate community or workplace.
ten - The social epidemiology of population health during the time of transition from communism in Central and Eastern Europe
- Edited by Salvatore J. Babones
-
- Book:
- Social Inequality and Public Health
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 22 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2009, pp 143-156
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
The present study offers a social epidemiological perspective on population health in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) following the major societal transition there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time, in much of CEE, a change of guard occurred from Soviet-style communist regimes to equally ‘fundamentalist’ capitalist (free-market) economic approaches; a phenomenon described as ‘shock therapy’ that was marked by a breakdown in the trade relationships among the Warsaw Pact countries, rapid economic decline and high rates of unemployment and inflation (Sachs, 1994; Brainerd, 1997; Klein and Pomer, 2001).
This was also a period of rapid political change. Although the end of the Soviet era brought with it free speech and a system of parliamentary democracy, instability was rampant in the region, with democracy-watchers concerned that electoral patterns revealed the fragility of the reform process (United Nations Development Programme, 1996). In psychosocial terms, CEE showed a low prevalence of post-material attitudes (for example, concern for ‘higher-order’ values such as free speech and democracy, compared with more ‘basic’ concerns such as price inflation and maintenance of basic order in society), consistent with the pattern observed in poor countries (Abramson and Inglehart, 1995).
Population health statistics suggest that during the first four years of the transition period, there were dramatic increases in mortality among males and females of working age. Among males aged 30–49, mortality rose as much as 70-80% in Russia, 30–50% in Ukraine and 10–20% in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Among females, mortality in the same age range rose 30–60% in Russia, 20–30% in Ukraine and more modestly in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania (UNICEF, 1994).
The conditions leading to this mortality increase were primarily cardiovascular and external causes of death (UNICEF, 1994). However, these were also the most prevalent conditions in working-age persons at the beginning of the transition period; mortality due to these two causes was increasing even before the end of the Soviet period. This chapter suggests, then, that explaining the health crisis in CEE must go beyond understanding the determinants of these conditions, and address the factors that created general risk of mortality, in particular among the working-age population.