Jason Beckfield - Political Sociology and the Peoples Health (Small Books Big Ideas in Population Heal)

Series Editor

Nancy Krieger

1. J. Beckfield. Political Sociology and the Peoples Health

Jason Beckfield

PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF

SOCIOLOGY

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR O F

THE HARVARD CENTER FOR

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT

STUDIES

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Oxford University Press 2018

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ISBN 9780190492472
eISBN 9780190492496

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Nancy Krieger

For the Peoples HealthWhy this Book Series of Small Books with Big Ideas

Nancy Krieger

Several years ago, when I first conceived of this series of small books with big ideas to expand social epidemiologys contributions to the ongoing collective quest for health equity, I knew that more critical dialogue was neededboth within the discipline and with allied disciplines, inside and outside the field of public health. Concise texts provide an ideal forum in which to present this type of critical thinking: provocative, probing, longer than a journal article, shorter than a tome, affordable, and accessible for assigning as reading material for academic courses. The point of this series is to make sharp ideas attractively available, motivated by the urgent need for both critical thinking and action for the peoples health.

Why? Three reasons.

The first reason, internal to the field, is that as a discipline matures, it risks becoming set in its ways. It is thus timely to revisit the fields ideas, methods, and evidence, and to search out allies who can both inform the ideas that feed the hypotheses and data that social epidemiologists analyze and interpret, and also translate our fields findings into actionable steps for reducing health inequities and improving population health. Among the initial array of topics to be addressed in this series are connections between social epidemiology and diverse disciplines (e.g., political sociology, Latin American social medicine), issues (e.g., climate change, causal inference), and mechanisms (e.g., epigenetics)and the list will expand.

A second reason is that fast-moving transformationssuch as global climate changeare threatening the well-being of life on this planet in truly new and potentially catastrophic ways.

The third reason is that social epidemiology, as a discipline, needs to be clear on who and what are the adversaries that stand in the way of eradicating health inequities. It is not enough, for example, to provide empirical evidence that, say, egalitarian and environmentally sustainable policies promote both health equity and population health. After all, at one level, such evidence should be in the proverbial American Mom and apple pie category of phenomena: who could possibly oppose such a seemingly beneficent and anodyne recommendation?

Except that clearly many can and dobecause if the arguments for health equity were as compelling as many in social epidemiology would like to believe, all of us on this planet would be living in a very different, healthier, and more equitable world, one not imperiled by environmental degradation, climate change, and the avaricious private accumulation of more and more wealth by an ever smaller portion of the worlds people, and its effect on local, national, and global governance and population health.

Last year saw the biggest increase in the number of billionaires in history, with one more billionaire every two days. There are now 2,043 dollar billionaires worldwide. Nine out of 10 are men. Billionaires also saw a huge increase in their wealth. This increase was enough to end extreme poverty seven times over. Eighty-two percent of all of the growth in global wealth in the last year went to the top 1%, whereas the bottom 50% saw no increase at all.

In the United States, as I write this introduction in February 2018, we confront a federal administration intent on dismantling environmental regulations and instead protecting and expanding the fossil fuel industries; slashing taxes and regulations for corporations and shrinking taxes for wealthy households, while decimating agencies and funding for social programs that help people live healthier lives; undercutting civil rights and attacking independent journalism, the rule of law, and scientific evidence; intensifying anti-immigrant policies and attacks on reproductive and sexual rights and healthall policies bolstered by a president whose endless tweets are a unique brand of ceaseless demagoguery, falsehoods, racism, misogyny, and disdain for actual knowledge. To make a difference, we in public health, including social epidemiology, need to be explicit about naming who and what harms the peoples health, so as to promote accountability and alliances to galvanize change.