CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, the American economy is what doctors call an acute episode.
Employment not throb. The movement of capital is still weak. Industry is breathing, but barely. And if we agree a year into this mess, it is that just is what we can do when the patient comes this evil.
For this reason the talk is now so often of prevention. Prevent the next crisis through health insurance and a green energy sector, said the American President. Avoid that by cutting spending and encourage personal responsibility, us conservatives retort.
But the truth is that the politicians and not only in the United States, are rarely willing to invest in a problem that has not happened. Consensus and action are easier to come after a September 11 or Lehman Brothers than before. We are not interested in problems in the embryonic, soluble phase; and that we are interested often are too big to solve.
That is where comes in acupuncture.
Western medical practices have attracted similar criticism in recent years, to an emphasis to intervene in the disease rather than prevention in advance and promote day-to-day wellness. But in health, as opposed to politics, has emerged an alternative approach called welfare, focused on investment in health before it breaks down.
What welfare can tell us about our bad economic present? Measure that goes from marginal to incorporate - with wellness programs in the now in Congressional health reform proposals, manifestos of welfare in the lists of best-sellers and a welfare programme of the army of United States calling soldiers introspect and meditate, asked experts about fundamental principles of the approach and how could be applied to the political class.
So nip in the bud. Welfare advocates cultivating health a little every day, not only the restoration during disasters. We accept every time that it is better to control the blood sugar of diabetic with regular visits clinic which amputated limbs. We accept that companies can avoid costly treatments to encourage workers to quit smoking. But in our political life, we prefer to wait until things get to the emergency room.
Barely regulated financial markets for years, thinking of oppressive rules, unless we are forced to nationalize private companies. Avoid costly investments and controversial new methods of public education, then, pay the price in the lower social mobility and huge prison populations. Neglecting the construction of roads and bridges and roads in Internet, fearing the cost and then take advantage of the increased costs of falling economic grid of entire regions.
"With a lot of social problems, we are not sure, how avoid it, and therefore not spend money on it, because we always have a lot of other priorities," said David Cutler, a Harvard economist who has advised the Clinton and the white Obama houses in health care.
Go to the roots. Western medicine tends to combat the symptoms, if delete coughs or flooding the brains of depressed with serotonin. Welfare is interested in underlying causes. We wanted to see an infertile woman, for example, as a woman was stressed, instead of a female with missing ovaries and it may suggest that she eat and they work in a different way rather than taking pills of manipulation of ovary.
In public policy, regulation of bias symptom. A crisis of housing? Enacting a tax credit! Bank failures? Rescue them!
There is nothing wrong with such measures, except in what they are going out, as most economists will tell you.
Even in the midst of all this action, we have virtually ignored the complex fabric of issues under the problems: congenitally profligate small savings, an addiction of debt, a political system, an almost pathological desire for things. And, with our current cures, it should not surprise us that new signs of ancient evils appearing: surely again packaged as derivatives, bonds again on the rise on Wall Street.
"We treat the symptoms, and not look at the causes of the symptoms," Deepak Chopra, the famous alternative medicine and wellness guru, said when asked to extend the metaphor of welfare to the economy. "We're completely at the moment looking for that in a reductionist manner." The reductionist way is a bailout. And in some way to solve the problem, while the problem occurred because we were thinking of reductive.
Look inside. Welfare is the causes and cures for diseases within us. Construction of immunity to avoid infection. Defeat the disease by eating foods that help the body to heal.
With the economy, we expect everywhere but inside. It is the fault of greedy Wall Street bankers. It is the fault of Washington. Bush's mistake. Error Obama. Error of Greenspan. Someone fix it!
But what happens with us? Why not can recognize that it was that he bought all these unaffordable houses, those who listened to the gravity zero "financial advice," which bought and bought and never had a rainy day Fund? And is why, to solve the problem, expect the State to create substitute dynamism rather than renew the decentralized dynamic culture that made the vital American economy begin with?
"Conventional medicine is very unbalanced in with all its emphasis on foreign intervention and do not wish to advance that internal capacity to maintain the healing," said Andrew Weil, founder of the Arizona Center for integrative medicine and author of several books on welfare. Also with the economy, said: "instead of simply identify external threats and development of weapons and strategies against them, must instead identify and strengthen immunity and resistance."
A policy of welfare transcend party. It would emphasize the initial investments in order to achieve the fiscal solvency of long term in which the Republicans insist that Democrats. It could meet the liberal belief in a positive role for the Government in maintaining well-being, but it would honor the conviction conservative that the head of government role is to help to heal the social organism. Recognizes, with the left, the complex network of institutional and cultural influences that govern the well-being of society, while emphasizing, with the right, the limits of what can make any external healer.
I believe that welfare in these difficult times. The most urgent problems, after all, may be those who have not yet had.
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