Discussion 2 WK 4

Life Course Approach – Part Two

Life Course Approach – Part Two Program Transcript

STEPHEN BEZRUCHKA: So up to now, this course has led you to consider the social and political choices that societies make about how caring and sharing happens in that society. And income and equality, or various aspects of the hierarchy, is what caring and sharing is all about. Now is this causally related to the health of populations?

So I want us to address one of the key ways in which we looked at something causing something else that changed the United States society, and much of the world, and got it going in the right direction. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, almost everyone smoked. And then in 1964 the Surgeon General released a report on smoking and health. And chapter three in that report was all about how do we decide that something is causally related to something else. The report pointed out you had to have a lot of studies by different investigators on different groups all showing the same thing.

You had to decide which came first, the chicken or the egg, so to speak. And then you had to have biologic plausibility. Is there some biologic mechanisms through which smoking can produce adverse health? And we've all come to realize yes, the stuff in cigarette smoke is not healthy for us.

Is there some same way that inequality affects the health of populations? And that then brings us to the subject of the biology of inequality. If you take human societies, are those further up the social economic ladder different biologically than people lower down the ladder?

We'll have to address whether this is a Malthusian argument that the poor have made poor choices and become poorer because of that, and it's not our fault. Or do we ask the question, is this something that happens because of the choices we've made in society for who gets what share of the pie.

Life Course Approach – Part Two Additional Content Attribution

Music:

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©2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 1

Life Course Approach – Part Two

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