2023-09-25 21:19:05
Since the industrial revolution, our progress has been measured by the yardstick of GDP which increases in parallel with the goods, techniques and services available to citizens to improve their comfort, their education and their health. This financial indicator is also a good health indicator. Indeed, in the majority of countries, the objective health of the population improves when GDP increases. The rule also applies at the individual level: the state of health is better among the most economically advantaged individuals.
However, in recent years, several studies have suggested that subjective perceptions of health and happiness are no longer correlated with GDP. Surveys by economists Richard Easterlin and Amartya Sen reveal that the perception of happiness and health no longer increases, or even decreases, when GDP increases. These studies have been contested, because at the individual level, the correlation between economic status and health remains strong.
But these quarrels are from another age, because the increase in social inequalities in all countries, rich or poor, reshuffles the data, both at the population level and at the individual level.
On the one hand, the subjectivity of happiness varies according to the differences perceived in comparison with one’s fellow citizens. Being poor and sick seems more bearable in a poor environment than being surrounded by healthy rich people.
On the other hand, health and happiness are also deteriorating objectively, for all social classes, despite the increase in GDP. The reasons for this are varied.
If obesity and smoking are classically linked to poverty, alcoholism, addictions, diabetes, mental and psychiatric disorders are constantly increasing in all social classes. Environmental toxicants affect all classes, even if the disadvantaged are often more exposed to them. The social and financial cost of these diseases is so high that it wipes out all the growth gains of recent decades.
Screenings degrade subjective health, but the overmedicalization and the iatrogenic pathology that they cause also degrade objective health. This paradoxical phenomenon concerns more the rich, more inclined to screening and more dependent on care. Its social and financial cost is also very high and cancels out the GDP gains.
Finally, parental education, classically protective against infant mortality and morbidity, now contributes to degrading the subjectivity of happiness, because anxiety in the face of ecological disaster is transmitted by education, particularly in the privileged classes. This eco-anxiety leads to a procession of psychosomatic and even psychiatric disorders starting at younger and younger ages.
Obviously, GDP no longer has an impact, either on subjective health or on objective health. Let us even dare to assert that degrowth will soon be the best way to improve health indicators.
Reference
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