Archive for August, 2011
Democracy and the healthy society: The chicken and the egg.
Chad. High disease prevalence and not much democracy
Amartya Sen has powerfully made the case that democracy brings with it guarantees of social justice.
Summarising for speed, Sen has argued that democracies don’t have famines, that they provide regulatory minimum standards that ensure that earthquakes don’t result in huge death-tolls as poorly-built structures collapse, and so on.
In a democracy, we are very likely to have better, universal services compared to non-democracies.
It’s a familliar argument, but one that was recently subject to a fascinating twist. In a recent New Scientist [£] article, evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill makes the case that democracy only emerges in societies in which there is a relative absense of infectious disease.
In summary, societies with a high prevalence of infectious diseases tend to an understandable level of xenophobia. Epidemics, after all, are often the consequence of population movements, therefore, outsiders are treated with a good deal more suspicion. Read the rest of this entry »