Who Knew That Poverty And Socialism Were The Answer?
What was the question again?
It’s really pretty weird how a magazine for doctors turns out to have the answers to the entire socieoeconomic system we live under. But then I guess that’s what we get when we allow a magazine for doctors to be run, edited, by an avowed Marxist. For that’s where we are. The Lancet now has a “Planetary Health” section. As The Guardian reports:
Consumerism and the climate crisis threaten equitable future for humanity, report says
The Earth Commission says hope lies in sustainable lifestyles, a radical transformation of global politics and fair distribution of resources
A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations
Blimey. The doctors really are living up to that reputation of arrogance then.
Just in those two headlines we’ve claims to having solved the basic questions in philosophy - that’s the “just” part - resource usage - the “sustainable” - the political problems of public choice* - the “politics” - and economic too - the whole thing.
And this all when doctors can’t solve problems in their own field like cancer, fibromyalgia or getting a GP appointment. So, arrogance then.
The actual answer is, of course, that we must have socialism and poverty. At which point we get to praise them for one thing here - they realise the two go together. They’re at least not insisting that socialism will make us richer.
Our concept of the safe and just corridor advances research on planetary boundaries and the justice and Earth-system aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals. We define safe as ensuring the biophysical stability of the Earth system, and our justice principles include minimising harm, meeting minimum access needs, and redistributing resources and responsibilities to enhance human health and wellbeing. The ceiling of the safe and just corridor is defined by the more stringent of the safe and just ESBs to minimise significant harm and ensure Earth-system stability. The base of the corridor is defined by the impacts of minimum global access to food, water, energy, and infrastructure for the global population, in the domains of the variables for which we defined the ESBs. Living within the corridor is necessary, because exceeding the ESBs and not meeting basic needs threatens human health and life on Earth. However, simply staying within the corridor does not guarantee justice because within the corridor resources can also be inequitably distributed, aggravating human health and causing environmental damage. Procedural and substantive justice are necessary to ensure that the space within the corridor is justly shared.
Therefore a bunch of doctors get to plan the global economy and define what is just and equitable.
These transformations aim to minimise harm and ensure access to essential resources, while addressing the drivers of Earth-system change and vulnerability and the institutional and social barriers to systemic transformations, and include reducing and reallocating consumption, changing economic systems, technology, and governance.
Yep, it’s a plan to change everything. By doctors. Or at least the justification is doctoring which is why the phrase “major harms to human health and wellbeing” is so liberally dropped around and, obviously, the justification for this being in The Lancet.
Thus, a safe and just corridor will only be possible with radical societal transformations and technological changes.
Socialism and poverty therefore.
Critical scholars argue that capitalist political and economic systems are the drivers that need to be transformed
“Critical” here means Marxist.
Reductions in excess consumption and reallocation of consumption
Yep, really does mean Marxist.
Legal strategies can reallocate consumption and waste by using consumer, environmental, international, and constitutional law
Obviously, it’s legal for the government to just steal it from you.
The environmental impacts of economic growth and growing inequality can be addressed through policies….that monitor and control investment, subsidies, and trade
Give the doctors complete control of the economy.
It’s not really necessary to worry much more about this kind of guff. It’s as with so many these days, Hickel for example. Now we’ve proven that socialism doesn’t make us richer they’re arguing that we should be poorer so that we can be socialist.
How fortunate we are to live in a country with a substantial supply of stout lampposts.
* And don’t ever forget Zil Lanes, never forget Zil Lanes
It's also the hubris of assuming we can "manage" the stability of the earth or the climate that gets me every single time.
Doctors do make for many a good TV series though. All the mainstream quacks being wrong, but this maverick quack with a penchant for hookers or riding bikes helmetless and with one leg, sees through their errors, and finds the answer.
But you would think a profession that does realise we're all different in the real world would reject marxism, so I wonder if this is unique to the UK. Is Lancet France (or Germany or Netherlands) written by patient focussed zealots or by system focussed marxists? I genuinely don't know.