CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: The American economy is what doctors call an acute episode.
Employment not throb. The movement of capital is still weak. The industry is breathing, but barely. And if we can reach a year nothing into this mess, is just what we can do when the patient comes this evil.
Why, the talk is now so often of prevention. Prevent the next crisis through the health insurance and a green energy sector, said the American President. Avoid reducing public spending and encourage personal responsibility, American 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 a 9/11 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 acupuncture.
Western medical practices have attracted similar criticism in recent years, an emphasis on involved 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 the break.
How can welfare tell us about our current bad economic? Measure that goes from fringe to mainstream 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 approach and how it 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. Increasingly, we accept that it is better to control the blood sugar in diabetic with regular clinic that visits to amputate 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.
We only regulate financial markets for years, thinking oppressive Regulation, until we are forced to nationalize private firms. Avoid costly investments and controversial new methods in public education, and then pay the price in less social mobility and the large prison populations. Neglecting the construction of roads and bridges and highways of the Internet, fearing the cost and then take advantage of the increased costs of entire regions fall outside the economic.
"With many social problems, it is not sure how to prevent it, and therefore, not to spend money on it, because we always have many other priorities", said David Cutler, a Harvard economist who has advised Clinton and white Obama houses on health care.
Go to the roots. Western medicine tends to combat the symptoms, if suppress coughs or flooding the brains of depressed with serotonin. Welfare is interested in underlying causes. He is inclined to see an infertile woman, for example, as a woman longer rather than a woman with ovarian missing and it may suggest that she eats and they work in a different way rather than taking pills for manipulation of ovary.
Public policy, a bias of symptom rules. A housing crisis? Enacting a tax credit! Bank failures? Rescue them!
There is nothing wrong with these measures, unless that is you go outside, as most economists will tell you.
Even in the midst of all this action, we have virtually ignored tissue complex problems under the themes: small savings, an addiction to debt, a political system congenitally spender, an almost pathological desire for things. And with our current priests, should not be surprised we see new signs of old ills that appear: insurance again packaged as derivatives, bonds again 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 this time looking for it in a reductionist manner." The reductionist way is a bailout. "And in some way to solve the problem, as long as the problem occurred because we were thinking of reductive."
Look inside. Welfare sees the causes of and remedies for ailments such as lie within us. Prevent infection through the creation of immunity. Defeat the disease by eating foods that help the body to heal.
With the economy looking everywhere but inside. It is the fault of greedy Wall Street bankers. It is the fault of Washington. Bush's mistakes. Error Obama. Greenspan faults. Someone fix it!
But and us? Why not we recognize was that he bought all these unaffordable houses, those who heard that gravity zero "financial advice," which bought and bought and never kept a rainy day Fund? And do, to solve the problem, we expect the State to create dynamism substitute rather than renew the decentralized dynamic culture that was so vital to start with the economy of United States?
"Conventional medicine is very unbalanced in with its emphasis on external interventions and do not want to move 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. In the same way with the economy, said: "instead of simply identifying external threats and the development of weapons and strategies against them, we should instead identify and strengthen immunity and resistance."
A welfare policy that transcend party. It would emphasize the initial investments to achieve the fiscal solvency of long-term insist the Republicans than Democrats. It could meet the liberal belief in a positive role for the Government in maintaining well-being, but it could honour the conviction conservative that the head of government role is to help to heal the social organism. With the left, could recognize the complex network of institutional and cultural influences that govern the well-being of society, while emphasizing with the law, the limits of what can make any external healer.
That welfare in these difficult times. After all, the most urgent problems, may be that we have not yet.
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