Profit Motive: A Vicious Determinant Of Health

The health of a population is dependent upon a wide variety of factors—environmental conditions, lifestyle choices and behaviors, genetics, and many more. But in their latest book, Building the Worlds that Kill Us, authors David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz argue that a key determinant of health over the course of US history has been the structural conditions that those in power have built. As they write, “This book focuses on how the social and economic arrangements Americans have created and maintained have shaped patterns of disease occurrence, prevalence, distribution, and recovery over the course of the country’s history.” In particular, their emphasis is upon understanding disease and suffering “as the product of dominant ideologies that reinforced...