Published 11 December 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2811
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2811

Editorials

The health of nations

Past performance is not a guide to future results

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

A remarkable feature of the recent global financial crisis is that so many of the lavishly rewarded analysts on Wall Street and in the City of London failed to see it coming. Seemingly ignorant of history’s lessons, they viewed a catastrophic reversal of fortune as inconceivable. The history books record the green stains on the marble floor of the Basilica Aemilia in Rome, all that remains of the coins abandoned by money changers who continued to trade oblivious of the Goths breaching the city walls; the rise and fall of the market in tulips in 17th century Holland; and the South Sea bubble. Even recent memory of last decade’s dot.com bubble seems to have been repressed.

The progress of nations, however, is measured in much more than wealth. Indeed, there is growing recognition, advanced by the ideas of economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen,1 that measures such as life expectancy are . . . [Full text of this article]

Martin McKee, professor of European public health1, Anthony J McMichael, professor2

1 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT, 2 National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia

martin.mckee@lshtm.ac.uk


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