By David A. Kindig, MD, PhD
The next two
months will be filled with harsh and divisive campaigning, deepening the
ideological divide that characterizes our politics these days. Both conventions
seemed primarily designed to energize their bases, by emphasizing the sharpest
differences between the political “tribes.” Perhaps this is necessary in today’s
politics, but it doesn’t bode well for population health policy over the coming
decade. Improving population health will require cutting health care costs
while preserving access and quality, enabling better health behaviors,
improving education, economic growth, and the physical environment while also
increasing social support and social capital. These are decisions that will
require careful, nuanced decisions that go far beyond simplified political
exchanges.
Last Labor
Day I blogged on my summer read of Friedman and Mandelbaum’s book That
Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can
Come Back,
and their call for third party movement or even a new party which seeks to find
common ground on such major challenges facing the country. This summer, I
continued in this genre with Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good
People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt is a
social/moral psychologist, now at the NYU Stern School of Business. The book is
a breathtaking synthesis of psychology, philosophy, evolutionary theory, anthropology,
genetics, and political science. The book jacket poses these two questions:
“Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems
mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their
fellow citizens?”