This is a longer-than-usual blog post. As I note at the end, it was essentially co-developed with Jacqueline in a long session over coffee in the walled garden of the Poet's House Hotel in Ely yesterday. We think it quite important. It equates economics, health, life expectancy, oppression, discrimination, neurodivergence, poverty, and time in ways that we think are unusual. If you can find the time to read it, we think the effort will be rewarded.
John Burn-Murdoch opened a recent article in the Financial Times by suggesting that:
One of the biggest stories of the past decade has been worsening mental health among young adults. Countries across the globe have seen a marked rise in reports and diagnoses of conditions such as anxiety, autism and ADHD and a steep rise in the share who report a disability.
I want to be clear that this is a phenomenon I take very seriously. The rise in young people's psychological distress is certainly real.
I agree with him. This issue is real. Where, however, I part company with him is in his explanation of why that distress is real.
John Burn-Murdoch is a statistician. As a result, his article was principally about measurement.
He asked whether rates of mental illness have really increased, and then wondered whether we have simply become more willing to describe ordinary human distress in the language of mental health. In particular, he constructed an argument that evolved around this suggestion:
Young people and progressives have become much more likely to interpret day-to-day challenges as mental health problems
As he noted:
This shift in how people conceptualise mental health could be seen as a positive — the hard-won result of years of campaigning to reduce stigma and raise awareness and inclusivity — but if it is happening more among some groups than others, it will distort our sense of what is really getting worse and for whom.
To not be too unsubtle about it, the implication was that the issue of worsening mental health among young adults is not real, and is actually the result of young left-wingers moaning about society, and that this issue should therefore be ignored.
That is an incredibly convenient idea for the neoliberal worldview of the Financial Times, and for neoliberal governments, but I think just about everything about the suggestion is wrong.
Looking beyond diagnosis
Reduced stigma, better diagnosis and greater awareness have undoubtedly changed the way many people understand their experiences. But I think that to suggest that this is the reason why increased reporting of mental ill health by some in society is happening risks overlooking a much bigger development.
Over the last thirty years, biology has changed in ways that have profound implications for how we think about society. Those changes have received remarkably little attention outside medicine, but I think they should matter just as much to economists, politicians and anyone interested in public policy.
The reason is straightforward. Modern biology increasingly suggests that society does not merely shape our opinions, opportunities or behaviour. It shapes our bodies. I accept that this is, to many, a remarkable claim, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
The evidence we already have
We know, for example, that people living in poverty die younger than those who are better off. We also know that they spend far fewer years in good health. There is not simply a gap between the richest and the poorest. There is a social gradient. As deprivation increases, healthy life expectancy declines.
We also know that autistic people have substantially lower average life expectancy than the population as a whole. The reasons are complex, but they include high levels of chronic stress, poorer access to healthcare, higher rates of mental illness and living in environments that frequently fail to accommodate autistic ways of thinking.
We also know that people exposed to racism experience poorer health.
We know that the legacies of colonialism continue to shape health outcomes across societies.
We know that insecure work, poor housing and persistent financial insecurity all damage health.
All of these are well-established observations.
What is much less clear is why so many apparently different experiences should produce such similar outcomes.
We normally explain each of them separately. My suggestion is that perhaps we should not. Perhaps they have something much more fundamental in common.
Allostasis and the biology of adaptation
The biological idea that first made me think this might be possible is called allostasis. It is not a complicated concept. It simply describes the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them.
As we all know, nothing alive exists in a stable environment. Every living thing must continually respond and adapt to changing circumstances. Human beings are no exception. Our brains and bodies are constantly anticipating change and adjusting to it. Most of that work happens without us ever noticing. Allostasis happens all the time, and most of us do not notice. But the fact is that this continual adaptation has a cost.
If the demands placed upon us are occasional, that cost is small, and we have a chance to embrace the change during periods of recovery.
If they become continuous, the body rarely, if ever, returns to its resting state. The physiological burden is in that case both continuous and cumulative.
Biologists call that accumulated burden allostatic load. That issue of allostatic load might, I think, turn out to be one of the most important concepts that economists have never considered, both for healthcare and for broader questions of political economy. What is more, if that suggestion is right, then it has implications that stretch well beyond medicine.
That is because it suggests that we should stop thinking of health as something that simply happens to individuals. We should instead begin by asking what demands society places on the people who live within it, what the consequences of those demands might be, and how they might be managed.
Two kinds of adaptation
That is because not all adaptations are the same, even though the process of adaptation is inherent in the human condition. We all know that every person has to adapt because that is what life requires. Illness, ageing, bereavement and uncertainty are unavoidable. They all require adaptation. I think of this as the first differential of adaptation. It is universal. We all experience it, although not necessarily in the same way.
Societies, however, create another form of adaptation altogether.
This is not imposed by nature. It is imposed by the way we organise our institutions. I think of this as the second differential of adaptation. This second differential demands additional work from some people because society has been designed to better suit the needs of some than others.
Wealth and the burden of adaptation
That second differential is distributed very unequally. Take wealth as an example. We know it is deeply unequally distributed, and we tend to think that this means that people with greater wealth can buy more goods and services than those without it. That is true, but I suspect that is not its greatest benefit.
The reality is that wealth reduces uncertainty. In the process, it does something else that may be equally significant: it reduces the number of decisions that must be made simply to keep life functioning.
If something breaks, a wealthy person can simply have it repaired or replaced. If travel arrangements fail, alternatives can be found. If income is interrupted, there are savings to draw upon. Problems remain, because they always will, but they rarely threaten the stability of everyday life for a wealthy person. In other words, the amount of adaptation required of them is reduced.
Now compare this with life on a low income. Every unexpected event requires another calculation. Can this bill be paid? What has to be postponed? How is work reached if the car breaks down? Can the rent still be met? Will there be enough money left for food? None of those questions is asked only once. In many households across the UK, and around the world, they recur week after week, month after month, and year after year.
The effort involved is not simply financial. It is cognitive, emotional and physiological. The human body of those facing these issues is continually responding to uncertainty that never quite disappears. Their allostatic load is high, and rarely, if ever, subject to respite.
That, I think, is why poverty is so damaging. It is not simply the absence of money that creates its health impact on those who suffer it. It is the continual adaptive work that poverty demands that creates that outcome.
Neurodivergence and continual adaptation
The same way of thinking may also help explain other observed phenomena.
For example, why do autistic people, and maybe those with other neurodivergent conditions, have poorer health outcomes than neurotypical people?
The evidence is now quite strong that autistic people have significantly shorter average life expectancy than the population as a whole. Various explanations are offered. Healthcare is often less accessible for neurodivergent people. Mental ill health is more common. Suicide rates are higher. There are associated medical conditions that also matter.
But I wonder whether another factor has been underestimated. The fact is that many autistic people spend much of every day adapting to environments that were not designed with them in mind. Social conventions that many neurotypical people grasp without conscious thought require considerable effort to negotiate for neurodivergent people just to get through the day. Sensory environments that others barely notice may be exhausting. Workplaces often reward behaviours that have little to do with competence and much more to do with conformity to neurotypical expectations.
The effort involved in continually interpreting, adjusting, and masking is immense, but the issue is not autism itself; it is the continual demand for adaptation.
Institutions, inequality and adaptive work
The same point can be made about ADHD, disability - both physical and mental - more generally, racism, sexism and the legacy of colonialism. Each creates circumstances in which some people must continually adapt to the demands of institutions that others take for granted.
That is because these institutions - and I am talking about most of the institutions in our society when I make this generalisation - are not neutral. They embody assumptions about who they were designed for. Those who fit those assumptions experience relatively little friction when engaging with them. Those who do not have continually to work out how to fit in. That is adaptive work that imposes considerable strain. It is also work that is rarely recognised.
Racism provides an obvious example. Those who experience it are required continually to judge situations that others pass through without thought. They have to assess whether they are safe, whether they will be treated fairly, whether prejudice will affect the outcome, and whether they need to modify their behaviour or expectations. That continual assessment has a cost.
The same can be said of colonialism. Colonial rule did not merely extract resources. It also imposed systems of law, education, administration and culture that privileged some people while marginalising others. Formal empires may have disappeared, but many of those institutional structures remain. Those whose cultures and histories were subordinated still bear much more of the burden of adaptation than those for whom those institutions were originally designed.
My suggestion is that when there is common ground - and there may be much more of that than we realise - we should stop seeing these as separate issues.
Perhaps poverty, racism, colonialism, disability and neurodivergence are all different expressions of the same underlying process.
Each requires some people to undertake much more continual adaptation than others.
If that is true, then inequality is not simply about who has more income or wealth. It is also about who carries the biological costs of adapting to the society that we have collectively created.
Rethinking economics through biology
Where does this leave economics? I think this realisation demands that economics ask very different questions from those that have dominated the subject for the last century.
Economics has largely been built around the allocation of scarce resources. It has become preoccupied with markets, prices, productivity, efficiency and growth. All of those have their place, but they also share an implicit assumption. They assume that the purpose of the economy is to produce more.
I have never believed that. The purpose of an economy is not to maximise GDP. GDP is a measure of activity. It is not a measure of success. As I now argue, the purpose of an economy is to create the conditions in which people can flourish.
If that is true, then biology may help us understand what flourishing actually means.
What a good society does
In this context, a good society is not one that eliminates adaptation. That would be impossible because life itself demands continual adaptation. That is the inevitable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Instead, a good society is one that reduces unnecessary adaptation.
That means it creates security where insecurity serves no purpose.
It creates certainty where uncertainty achieves nothing.
And it creates institutions that adapt to the people who use them, rather than requiring people to continually adapt to institutions.
That is a very different way of thinking about public policy.
Housing policy should reduce insecurity.
Employment law should reduce insecurity.
Education should recognise that human beings learn differently, rather than assuming that everyone should conform to a single model.
Healthcare should not merely treat the consequences of chronic stress. It should seek to prevent the conditions that give rise to it.
Social security should reduce uncertainty because uncertainty itself carries biological costs.
Tax, public services and adaptive costs
Tax has a role as well. I have argued for years that taxation does not fund government spending. It cannot do so when government creates the currency that it spends. Tax exists for other reasons. It helps manage inflation. It changes the distribution of income and wealth. It discourages harmful activity and encourages beneficial behaviour. Perhaps we should now add something else. Maybe a well-designed tax system changes the distribution of adaptive costs. It should limit the concentration of privilege that allows some people to avoid many of the burdens of everyday life while others carry them disproportionately.
Good public services also reduce adaptive costs. They should remove uncertainty from everyday life. Knowing that healthcare, education, care, housing, and transport will be available means society absorbs risks that individuals would otherwise have to bear alone. That is one of the things a civilised society should do.
Measuring what really matters
This way of thinking also changes how we measure success. We have become obsessed with GDP because we assume that if output increases then society must be improving. That assumption always seemed of dubious value. It now seems even more doubtful.
The reality is that we now know an economy may grow while simultaneously increasing insecurity, shortening healthy life expectancy, and imposing ever-greater adaptive burdens on millions of people. That is what we are seeing, day in and day out now. This is why so many people living in the UK, as well as in many other countries, are now so aggrieved by the situations that they face. They are, quite literally, being worn out by their allostatic load, and can take it no more.
If so, growth tells us remarkably little, and we should instead ask different questions.
How much unnecessary uncertainty does this society create?
How much unnecessary adaptation does it require?
How unevenly are those adaptive costs distributed?
Do our institutions reduce the burden of living together or add to it?
Those seem to me to be questions that economists should have been asking all along.
A framework for adaptive political economy
I stress, I do not suggest that what I have outlined here is an established scientific theory. It is not. But I do think it is a framework for political economy that deserves exploration, especially when it appears capable of explaining a remarkable range of observations we usually treat as unrelated.
We know poorer people die younger, and that people with autism die younger, whilst trends in healthy life expectancy closely follow social deprivation. Racism does undoubtedly damage health, as does the legacy of colonialism, and insecure work, as does poor housing.
We normally try to explain each of these separately, but perhaps they are not separate. Perhaps they all have one thing in common. Perhaps they all increase the amount of adaptation that some people must undertake simply to participate in the societies in which they live.
If that is true, then inequality is not simply an unequal distribution of income or wealth. It is also an unequal distribution of the biological costs of adaptation, with the bias in that distribution being towards high income, high wealth, neurotypicality, and being endogenously white.
That changes how we think about political economy. Politics then becomes the process by which societies decide how those costs of adaptation are distributed, whilst economics becomes the study of how institutions either increase or reduce them. Accounting becomes the means by which we identify who ultimately bears the cost of adaptation and health becomes one of the principal ways in which we observe its effects.
In that case, I suggest that biology may provide a foundation for political economy that economics has largely ignored. For a century or more, economists have borrowed their metaphors from physics. They have sought equilibrium, optimisation, and mechanical efficiency. Perhaps they have been looking in the wrong place because economies are not machines. They are living systems inhabited by living people. Their purpose should be to enable those people to live long, healthy, creative and fulfilling lives.
If they fail to do that then, whatever else they may achieve, they are failing.
I tentatively call this way of thinking 'adaptive political economy', but the underlying idea is straightforward. Every human being must adapt because that is what life requires. The question for political economy is whether the society we create unnecessarily adds to that burden or helps reduce it, and my suggestion is that the first duty of any society should be to reduce the unnecessary biological costs that it imposes upon the people who live within it.
That, I think, is the question that John Burn-Murdoch's article unexpectedly led me to ask. It is also the question that I now think economics should begin with.
Acknowledgement
Saying that, I must acknowledge one last thing. This article emerged out of a morning of conversation with Jacqueline. The idea of allostatic burden came from her. I adapted it in response to an FT article to which we both took objection for offering simplistic and potentially deeply misleading conclusions with regard to the causes of mental ill health, which we think might well have sound biological roots.
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An excellent, thoughtful piece; thank you to both of you.
This indicates, perhaps, where next Iran War: What Happens When the US Hits the Limits of Escalation Options? | naked capitalism
Thank you
This is a really excellent re-framing, that fits perfectly with what medicine is learning about for example, the gut and it’s relations to our environment, immune system and brain. We are ecosystems, living inside ecosystems.
The least we should do is try and make sure that one of the most impactful ecosystems we live in – society, the ecosystem(s) we create, the ones that made us so successful – doesn’t increase the allostatic load. Brings new meaning to my favourite David Graeber quote:
“The ultimate hidden secret of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
Thank you
Interesting piece.
I have long thought that economic insecurity was a cause of poor mental/physical ill health – I would argue that it is more or less self-evident. But your extension (and explanation) seems to make a lot of sense…. adaptation is hard work, draining and can carry a cost to one’s health.
John Burns-Murdoch led his piece with hard data about hospital admissions for self harm among young women…. and states clearly that there is deteriorating mental health. To me, the rise across the world is shocking – but also, the difference between Spain and the UK.
In defence of John B-M, the rest of the article explores how different groups see the issue… which is interesting and important (eg left leaning people report more mental health issues) but the take away I took from his analysis was NOT that he was trying to “explain away” the data but rather that different groups have different narratives (on which is conspicuously neutral) and that this “culture war” is a real barrier to addressing what is clearly a serious problem.
I have read too much of him of late to think him anything but a pure FT spokesperson….
This mirrors other commentary that suggests that ‘mental health problems’ are in fact normal reactions to a hostile environment. The particular adaptive angle you write about has a lot to commend it. Society, for want of a better word, has clearly been designed unequally and wealth sold as a function of hard work rather than an accident of birth placing some in advantageous positions.
Adjacent to this our ability to evince curiosity or fear when faced with the unknown. This is, I feel, inextricably linked to the degree of safety experienced in our infant years as well as innate differences that don’t match expected norms.
I think you make good points. We also lose some capacity to reflect and look for better, when the daily grind is unremitting, we are too tired. For some, that never ends, and as you say, we are all adapted to these stresses differently.
Richard
I agree. Quite a lot of mental health issues are, I think better described as emotional health issues. We have emotions to cope with the physical world and how we adapt . Sometimes we need to be afraid – of fire, people, sabre tooth tigers -in our joint past, but the brain and nervous is little different to those of our ancestors.
A lot of reference is made to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association ( or the International Classification of Disease used in Europe ) to describe mental problems.
In the US much medical care is paid for by insurance and they won’t pay out unless there is a diagnosis. I feel we are seeing a process of reification, treating an abstract as though it were a physical thing. He has got “such and such a disorder“. These concepts have their uses but the danger is we can lose sight of the person. We don’t try to heal a condition. It is the human condition we address. That was the approach I came to use as a therapist. That needs empathy, experience and some understanding of the world and how people’s emotions work (in infinite ways from a few basic ones -like an artist’s palette ) That is why AI is never going being enough by itself
A lot to agree with.
Thinking about this further, I am struck by an anecdote I was told about 5-6 years ago by a GP acquaintance of mine. I live & work in rural Somerset, about 20 miles or so south of Bristol and not very far from the M5. Nearby is a village that fifty years & more ago was what might be called a “working village” with several small dairy farms, a factory where milk collected in churns was processed, a leather manufacturing business, and a decent number of shops (even including a small ‘department store’). With the spread of the motor car, the village became slowly gentrified. My office was there until 2015 and you could buy double egg & chips for £2 in the un-redeveloped pub that had been run by the same couple since 1970.
Today, the village has expanded considerably with new builds and has been rapidly populated by “DFLs” (“Down from London”), pricing out the younger members of long-established families.
The GP told me that this particular village, whilst happy and wealthy on the surface, had the highest number of heavy drinkers & people on anti-depressants in the county. Whether that’s entirely true, I don’t know, but it perhaps reinforces the old adage that money can’t buy you happiness (which is absolutely true, I think).
Money cannot buy you love.
It can make you feel decidedly unloved though.
The wonderful thing about money is that it buys you the opportunity to make choices.
Whether your choices are ultimately beneficial to you or anybody else is a different matter.
Excellent, makes sense of observations and ideas that many of us have likely made. I think this is a neglected field with much to tell us.
I think we need more politicians from unprivileged backgrounds, and with more empathy. I recollect a newspaper article some years back, which said that an MP who had agreed to the challenge of living on social security support for a week, had concealed a £50 note about her person. The challenge was too much, even for a week, so she cheated, it seems. The aim was to tell people to pipe down, they were fine. And we are not.
Age has a bearing on how people will speak up; some will say we need to ‘get back to the good old days’ and make the perennial complaints about the youth of today. Those who see a connection between ill health and an ill society are in some circles being isolated and gas-lighted, so your and Jacqueline’s exploration of the topic is very positive and timely, thank you.
Thank you.
This matters to us.
I really enjoyed reading this, if enjoyed is the right word. It is good to see a rebuke of the idea that mental health issues are just a result of people not being resilient enough. As a parent of an autistic child and as someone with ADHD, I often wonder about this. Could it be that many are now feeling some measure of what non-neurotypicals have felt all along, of being trapped in a world hostile to their needs, and in which the rules feel unfathomable and capricious? As someone said above, is poor mental health simply a reaction to a hostile environment, an environment in which only the worst of us can excel? This could make for an interesting subject for a book.
I am pretty sure you have hit the nail on the head
This resonates with me somewhat. All my life I’ve had problems with numbers and math. I still have a secret hang up over that now by being made to be embarrassed in front of others at school. Yet on a foundation course to get onto a degree course in my late 20’s a really good lecturer had me doing equations for bending moments for beams used in construction and I passed!! By the way – he was from the Middle-East and that tells you something.
It seems to me that Western modern life thrives on a model sort of person to educate, lie to and exploit. That has not been me at all. How I build knowledge is through linkages, networks etc. Show me something in isolation and I am likely not to get it because I just can’t put it together. It is both a curse and to my credit. But this is where schooling and support really lets us down – the requirement to mould peoples’ needs to means that are created out of an artificial lack of something is what lets us down. Large class room services, national curricula etc., the whole system is a sausage machine for young people these days and it robs them of their child hood, parents of their parenthood and then sends them off into the world to be exploited en masse. It teaches them to pass exams perhaps but not to live.
Even as an adult working in today’s public sector, employers are full of the language of inclusivity but practice insists on it being your fault if you didn’t get something. Then the feelings of inadequacy and falling short mount. Cruelty and ‘tough shit’ rules the roost too often.
The problem with a great deal of education as far as neurodivergent people are concerned (and I am not saying you are, but I speak from my perspective) is that it requires us to learn something without ever explaining why, what the benefit of learning it might be, and what we might use the skill acquired for. This is education in a silo with which the compliant do not appear to have a problem. Those who question everything do, however, have an enormous problem with this, and as a result we are deemed to be awkward, or even dim, when what we are actually revealing is the fact that we can intelligently question the supposed educator, which many of them do not like.
Well, all I can say is that given your response, my experience is yours. Yes, I know those phenomenon quite well.
The word ‘difficult’ and ‘intimidating’ has accompanied me for some time but I’ve no idea if I’m ND or not. I just notice gaps in things and if my curiosity is not met, if I am not allowed to ‘complete the circuit’ or improve where it is needed as it were, I turn off or take a course of my own. I can be quite meticulous as well, but the dark side of that is stepping into rabbit holes and veering off at a tangent. Those who appreciate me put me too good use; those who don’t contain me with boring work or side issues. Over the years though I have learnt just to go for it too and learn from doing as much as planning ahead – even mixing those approaches,. Sometimes those butterflies are not fear; its actually excitement of the unknown and we’re just misreading ourselves. It’s all very deep isn’t it – every human a universe of their own.
Much to agree with
I couldn’t agree more. I was bored rigid at school and had great trouble paying attention. If my maths teacher had explained that A Level trigonometry explained almost everything you ever wanted to know about wireless telegraphy I might have done better. I was 24 years old before that particular light bulb was switched on for me and a few years later I was the one teaching it.
I suspect you taught it well then
The shortness and poor quality of sleep affects people’s health, which seems likely to be a consequence of the factors you describe and also to compound them.
Agreed
An excellent post from Jacqueline and yourself.
The link comes from a slightly different angle.
Martin Seager and a number of names prominent in psychotherapy came up with the concept of a unifying paradigm for aspects of social care, from adoption to provision of care for the elderly. It was based on Bowlby’s attachment theory which is one of the best attested theories.
There are others out there who support the sort of approach you address here . I hope I stay around long enough to see these movements come together and real change result.
https://www.emerald.com/jpmh/article-abstract/11/3/153/227861/Towards-a-public-health-psychology?redirectedFrom=PDF
The ideas contained within this post make a lot of sense. They provoked the obvious question ‘how could a country actually implement social and other programs to allow everyone’s allostatic load to be less unfair for many people?’
But then I wondered if a post such as this would be so obviously needed in Sweden, for example? And this led to wondering if there is any data that shows that, in any society, the allostatic load and its distribution are related in some simple way to the degree of inequality. ie some societies perhaps have a state ethos of support that is sufficient for most individuals to be able to cope with the vicissitudes of day to day life. Those individuals who need support live in a society that simply recognises need when they see it and their political system has made sufficient provision to allow them to cope.
I personally would prefer to live in such a generous society rather than one in which the disadvantaged (for whatever reason) had to battle with bureaucracy to first prove their problems/need before getting support.
I suspect that the generous society would be less expensive and happier.
I think you are right
Those who cannot identify with what Richard is saying (a lot of MPs, pundits and journalists) are failing to realise the “escape routes” that are available to them, to cope with life challenges.
Solutions that involve money, help people cope with the universal stresses of illness and bereavement. I’ve experienced temporary poverty in mid life, but I KNEW it would be temporary – I had resources to draw on, and I’ve never had to cope with housing insecurity. In later life, I’ve had to be a carer both for a spouse and an alcoholic and epileptic undiagnosed neurodiverse family member. But again – I had resources available. The stress was 24/7 for those I lived with – no escape from THEIR experience, no matter what I did. For many, there is NO relief – just constant pressure, insecurity, exhaustion, such as “masking” every time you are in company, as well as not being able to afford any means of relaxation like a holiday – and your neighbours experience the same issues, so people resort to substance abuse as a means of coping.
EVERYONE I know locally is in this situation. Everyone in our little church community is surrounded by or experiencing a host of ongoing crises. They show amazing resilience – but their circumstances, take a relentless toll. Those who have not experienced the stress involved in chronic poverty, family abuse, in being neurodiverse, or being denied health care, or who have no experience of coping with discrimination about something they cannot change – will really struggle to understand what Richard is talking about here. Residents of Clifton live longer than residents of Hartcliffe and Knowle West, and this post explains WHY.
Great post.
I wrote about those people.
The people Jacqueline saw, in the main, as a GP.
Thank you, Robert.
[…] I (or rather, Jacqueline and I) wrote about the problem of allostatic loading and the inequality that differing epigenetic experiences created […]
Is this, perhaps, the best (overall) article you’ve ever written? I think it might be. I’m sharing this one.
I have no idea
But maybe it’s better for Jacqueline’s involvement
Terrific stuff. My mind went “snap” (almost a physical sensation) when I realised how many aspects of misfortune are drawn together by this framing. It’s just intuitively true. Next move is to work out what can be done: socially, answers are fairly easy but need s change in the system. Individual; not so obvious. I’ll start by arguing with the “it’s their own fault”, “it’s not real”, “people just need to toughen up as we used to” brigade whenever I can. I realise in theory how fortunate I am to have choices myself, but theory doesn’t really bite on an individual level until you come into contact with some of these effects of society.
Thanks
I am sharing this with academic friends
Thanks for this thoughtful piece, both of you – it shows the value of ignoring the boundaries between disciplines! I wish more political economists would do so. It also resonates with me as a chronic fatigue sufferer. As social animals we are all in various ways capable, vulnerable, dependent and needy. The point of economic activity is provisioning to support human flourishing (as Aristotle and Confucius argued) or as you say, care. Aristotle regarded the pursuit of money as an end in itself as an aberration, a form of madness, but today it has become a normalised obsession. I guess you and Jacqueline know Bessel van den Kolk’s important book The Body Keeps the Score.
I am not sure I do…I will ask her
—-
Correction. I checked it. I know J has read that.
I have been thinking long and hard about this and there are a number of examples from my own experience that I now see as this but there is one in particular I would like to share.
I taught for 20 years in two inner city schools and the continuing debate about the attainment gap misses an important point. Starting in the 1980s there was a slow decline in discipline and attendance which I am now sure was linked to the allostatic load on the parents leading to a loss of any confidence that education might bring improvement to their children’s lives. Previously in Scotland people had great faith in the advancement which came from education over successive generations.
Thank you
This really gets to the heart of adaptation: it is not simply about asking individuals to cope better with pressure, but about whether society gives people the income, time, security, and public services needed to do so. When those foundations are missing, “adaptation” can become another way of shifting systemic failures onto those already carrying the greatest burden.