Abstract
Over the long term, the processes of rapid economic growth seem to be strongly correlated with improvements in the prosperity and health of a society. Hence derives the commonplace notion that economic growth results in development. This essay argues that, contrary to this widely held opinion, economic growth entails critical challenges and threats to the health and welfare of the populations involved and does not, therefore, necessarily produce development.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The theory’s most influential progenitor, Frank Notestein, was aware of its empirical limitations by the early 1950s: D. Hodgson, ‘Demography as social science and policy science’, Population and Development Review 9 (1983): 1–34, p. 12,
citing F.W. Notestein, ‘Economic problems of population change’, Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Agricultural Economists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).
For a conceptual critique, see S. Szreter, ‘The idea of demographic transition and the study of fertility change: a critical intellectual history’, Population and Development Review 19 (1993): 659–701;
and S. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ch. 1 and Ch. 10. On contemporary mortality declines in poor countries,
see S.B. Halstead, J.A. Walsh, and K.S. Warren (eds), Good Health at Low Cost (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1985).
A.R. Omran, ‘The epidemiological transition: a theory of the epidemiology of population change’, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 49 (1971): 509–38.
On Japan, see S.R. Johansson and C. Mosk, ‘Exposure, resistance and life expectancy: disease and death during the economic development of Japan, 1900–60’, Population Studies 41 (1987): 207–35.
On the United States, see R.H. Steckel, ‘Stature and the standard of living’, Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995): 1903–1940, p. 1920; and
M.R. Haines, ‘Health, height, nutrition and mortality: evidence on the Antebellum puzzle from Union Army recruits for New York State and the United States’, in J. Komlos and J. Baten (eds), The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, Vol. 1: The Americas, Asia and Australia (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1998).
On the Netherlands, see E. Horlings and J.-P. Smit, ‘The quality of life in the Netherlands 1800–1913: experiments in measurement and aggregation’, in J. Komlos and J. Baten (eds), The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, Vol. 2: Europe (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1998).
On Germany, see S. Twarog, ‘Heights and living standards in Germany, 1850–1939: the case of Württemberg’, in R.H. Steckel and R. Floud, (eds), Health and Welfare During Industrialisation (Chicago: NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 285–330, esp. pp. 297–9 and 306–7.
On France, see D.R. Weir, ‘Economic welfare and physical well-being in France 1750–1990’, in R.H. Steckel and R. Floud (eds), Health and Welfare During Industrialisation (Chicago: NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 161–200, esp. Figs. 5.8 and 5.10.
On Australia, see G. Whitwell, C. de Souza, and S. Nicholas, ‘Height, health and economic growth in Australia 1860–1940’, in R.H. Steckel and R. Floud (eds), Health and Welfare During Industrialisation (Chicago: NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 379–422.
On Canada, see F. Pelletier, J. Légaré, and R. Bourbeau, ‘Mortality in Quebec during the nineteenth century: from the state to the cities’, Population Studies 51 (1997): 93–103, esp. Table 2 and pp. 99–100.
M.J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: the Foundation of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975).
W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
T. McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (New York: Academic Press, 1976); on the dependence of the original formulation of demographic transition theory on the British historical evidence, see S. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender, cited in note 1, pp. 9–21.
E.H. Ackerknecht, ‘Hygiene in France, 1815–48’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948): 117–55, p. 140;
E.H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 156;
W. Coleman, ‘Health and hygiene in the Encyclopédie: a medical doctrine for the bourgeoisie’, Journal of the History of Medicine 29 (1974): 399–421;
K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1957; 1st edn 1944), p. 103.
On France, see W. Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison: Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine, 1982)
and A.F. La Berge, Mission and Method: the Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
On Germany, see E.H. Ackerknecht, Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953)
and S. Tesh, Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
On Britain, see M.W. Flinn, ‘Introduction’ to E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, reprint, 1965);
R. Lambert, Sir John Simon 1816–1904 and English Social Administration (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1963);
J. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: the Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979);
and C. Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
For the concept of the competitive interdependence of labour and capital, see M. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1979)
and M. Burawoy, The Politics of Production (Verso UK, 1985).
Figures (rounded) from N. Crafts and C.K. Harley, ‘Output growth and the British industrial revolution: a restatement of the Crafts–Harley view’, Economic History Review 45 (1992): 703–30, p. 715;
and C.H. Feinstein, National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom, 1855–1965 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Of course, these average annual rates of growth are toward the lower end of what economists would categorise as rapid economic growth in the late twentieth century. Indeed, this modern perspective partly lies behind the currency of the historiographical notion of slow growth as characterising Britain’s early, eighteenth-century stages of industrialisation, following Harley’s celebrated revisionist article:
C.K. Harley, ‘British industrialisation before 1841: evidence of slower growth during the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History 42 (1982): 267–89. The key historical point, of course, is that sustained economic growth at rates substantially above 1 per cent per annum for any length of time, let alone a period running into decades on end, was unprecedented in world history. If an economy today began to experience growth rates of about 15–20 per cent per annum, decade after decade, this would be a reasonable historical analogy to the revolutionary speed of sustained growth achieved by the British economy from c. 1800 onward.
E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), Table A3.1. These figures more or less represent England and Wales: in 1871 the population of Wales was about 1.3 million and in 1911 it was about 2 million.
P.J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), Tables I and II. In 1801, 70 per cent of the population still lived in an essentially rural environment (defined as a settlement of fewer than 2500 persons).
S.D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (2nd edn, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987), p. 21. Of course, the factory method of workforce organization had already been pioneered before the application of the rotary steam engine, particularly from 1771 by Richard Arkwright at his water-powered cotton mills at Cromford, Derbyshire.
S. Szreter and G. Mooney, ‘Urbanisation, mortality and the standard of living debate: new estimates of the expectation of life at birth in nineteenth-century British cities’, Economic History Review 51 (February 1998): 84–112, Table 7. Outside England and Wales, the other major cities in Great Britain with over 100 000 inhabitants in 1871 were Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Dublin and Belfast.
M.W. Flinn, ‘Trends in real wages 1750–1850’, Economic History Review 27 (1974): 395–413;
E.H. Hunt, British Labour History 1815–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), Ch. 3;
P. Lindert, ‘Unequal living standards’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain Since 1700, vol. 1: 1700–1860 (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 368–72. The most recent research has revised downward to extremely modest rates the scale of likely real wage and real household income rises experienced before the 1840s by the population in general:
C.H. Feinstein, ‘Changes in nominal wages, the cost of living and real wages in the United Kingdom over two centuries, 1780–1990’, in P. Scholliers and V. Zamagni (eds), Labour’s Reward: Real Wages and Economic Change in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe (Aldershot, England: E. Elgar, 1995), pp. 3–36;
S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review 48 (1995): 89–117. However, it remains the case that urban, industrial workers and their families are believed to have been the main beneficiaries of the real wage and income rises that occurred throughout the period (see following note).
K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. Ch. 1.
L.D. Schwarz, ‘The standard of living in the long run: London 1700–1860’, Economic History Review 38 (1985): 26–41;
E.H. Hunt, ‘Industrialisation and regional inequality: wages in Britain, 1760–1914’, Journal of Economic History 44 (1986): 935–66;
E.H. Hunt and F.W. Botham, ‘Wages in Britain during the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review 40 (1987): 380–99;
L.D. Schwarz, ‘Trends in real wages, 1750–1790: a reply to Botham and Hunt’, Economic History Review 43 (1990): 90–8.
Wrigley and Schofield, cited in note 10, Table A3.1; E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, and R.S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Table A9.1.
D.V. Glass carefully examined the technical reliability of Farr’s early life tables, taking into account weaknesses of under-registration, especially of deaths, by the early vital registration system. He was nevertheless satisfied that there were no major problems with Farr’s estimates and was prepared to cite them himself. Subsequently, Lee and Lam have noted minor technical problems with some of the early censuses but, again, their research would not indicate a need for any significant change in the figures calculated by Farr. D.V. Glass, ‘Some indicators of differences between urban and rural mortality in England and Wales and Scotland’, Population Studies 17 (1964): 263–7;
R. Lee and D. Lam, ‘Age distribution adjustments for English censuses 1821–1931’, Population Studies 37 (1983): 445–64.
The national and sectional life tables based on the 1841 census were published in 1843 and 1845 in the 5th and 7th Annual Reports of the Registrar-General, while the Healthy Districts table, based on the 1851 census, was published in W. Farr, ‘On the construction of life-tables, illustrated by a new life-table of the healthy districts of England’, Philosophical Transactions 149 (1859): 837–78.
P. Laxton and N. Williams, ‘Urbanisation and infant mortality in England: a long-term perspective and review’, in M.C. Nelson and J. Rogers (eds), Urbanisation and Epidemiologic Transition (Uppsala: Uppsala University, Department of History, Family History Group, 1989), pp. 109–35;
J. Landers, ‘Age patterns of mortality in London during the “long 18th century”’, Social History of Medicine 3 (1990): 27–60.
Snell, cited in note 15, Ch. 1 and Appendix, on southern agricultural incomes; E. Hobsbawm and G.F.E. Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969).
W.A. Armstrong, ‘The trend of mortality in Carlisle between the 1780s and the 1840s: a demographic contribution to the standard of living debate’, Economic History Review 34 (1981): 94–114;
Szreter and Mooney, cited in note 13; P. Huck, ‘Infant mortality and living standards of English workers during the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History 55 (1995): 528–50, Table 1, examining infant mortality trends in West Bromwich, Sedgely and Walsall in the South Staffordshire Black Country and in Wigan and Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire.
R. Woods, ‘On the historical relationship between infant and adult mortality’, Population Studies 47 (1993): 195–219; Wrigley et al., English Population History, cited in note 17. p. 260 and Figure 6.8.
On crime, see V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘The decline of theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England and Wales’, in V.A.C. Gatrell, et al. (eds), Crime and the Law: the Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa Publications, 1980), pp. 238–370.
On illegitimacy, see P. Laslett and K. Oostereven, ‘Long-term trends in bastardy in England’, Population Studies 27 (1973): 255–86.
On industrial urban literacy, see R. Schofield, ‘Dimensions of illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History 10 (1973): 437–54.
And on heights, see R. Floud, K. Wachter and A. Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and P. Johnson and S. Nicholas, ‘Health and welfare of women in the United Kingdom, 1785–1920’, in Steckel and Floud, Health and Welfare, cited in note 3, pp. 201–50.
M.W. Flinn, Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 388–95.
S. Cherry, ‘The hospitals and population growth: the voluntary general hospitals, mortality and local populations in the English provinces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Population Studies 34 (1980): 59–75 (part 1), 251–66 (part 2).
H.J. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 135–6, 419;
H. Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Chs 11.1, 14.3–14.4.
M.A. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), esp. p. 157 and Table 43;
C. Pooley and S. D’Cruze, ‘Migration and urbanisation in north-west England circa 1760–1830’, Social History 19 (1994): 339–58;
see also S. King, ‘Dying with style: infant death and its context in a rural industrial township 1650–1830’, Social History of Medicine 10 (1997): 3–24.
H.J. Dyos and D.A. Reeder, ‘Slums and suburbs’, in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Vol. 1, pp. 359–86, p. 369.
J.R. Kellett, ‘The railway as an agent of internal change in Victorian cities’, in R.J. Morris and R. Rodger (eds), The Victorian City: a Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 181–208.
E.P. Hennock, ‘Finance and politics in urban local government in England, 1835–1900’, Historical Journal 6 (1963): 212–25;
D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: the Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976).
S. Szreter, ‘The GRO and the public health movement 1837–1914’, Social History of Medicine 4 (1991): 435–63, p. 438.
E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone 1860–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
J. Prest, Liberty and Locality: Parliament, Permissive Legislation, and Ratepayers’ Democracies in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Hennock, cited in note 35.
P. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
R. Shlomowitz, Mortality and Migration in the Modern World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996);
R. Haines, R. Shlomowitz and L. Brennan, ‘Maritime mortality revisited’, International Journal of Maritime History 7 (1996): 133–72;
S.R. Johansson, ‘Death and the doctors: elites, mortality and medicine in Britain from 1500 to 1800’, unpublished paper, April 1997.
A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1920).
J.A. Hassan, ‘The growth and impact of the British water industry in the nineteenth century’, Economic History Review 38 (1985): 531–47, esp. pp. 535–6.
S. Szreter, ‘The importance of social intervention in Britain’s mortality decline c. 1850–1914: a re-interpretation of the role of public health’, Social History of Medicine 1 (1988): 1–37, pp. 25–6.
The most detailed and illuminating account of the origins and influence of the civic gospel is found in E.P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1973), which examines its provenance among the dissenting congregations of the Birmingham social elite and its influence in the city of Leeds.
A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 206.
Boyd Hilton has dubbed the earlier era ‘the age of atonement’, distinguishing it from the subsequent period of much more confident, incarnational religion and missionary zeal on the part of the upper and middle classes, earnestly endeavouring to bring the light of ‘civilisation’ to the poor and ignorant, both at home and abroad. B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
C.T. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy1860–86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976);
C.D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
The history of change both in formal municipal voting qualifications and in the actual practices found in different towns is extraordinarily complex throughout the nineteenth century. A standard introductory text is B. Keith-Lucas, The English Local Government Franchise: a Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), Ch. III. I believe that H.P. Hennock’s otherwise excellent, pioneering research in this area tended to discount too much the significance of change in the municipal electorate during the late 1860s and 1870s and placed too much emphasis, instead, on expansion of the municipal electorate in the 1850s: Hennock, cited in note 35, esp. pp. 221, 224. The most recent research has concluded that the sequence of developments between 1867 and 1883 renders this the key period in the expansion of the urban municipal electorate to incorporate a dominant section of the working class:
J. Davis and D. Tanner, ‘The borough franchise after 1867’, Historical Research 69 (1996): 306–27.
P.J. Waller, Town, City and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 297–8;
D. Read, The Age of Urban Democracy: England 1868–1914 (Rev. edn, London: Longman, 1994), pp. 266–7.
R. Millward and S. Sheard, ‘The urban fiscal problem, 1870–1914: Government expenditure and finance in England and Wales’, Economic History Review 48 (1995): 501–35.
J.F. Wilson, S. Sheard, and R. Millward, ‘Trends in local authority loan expenditure in England and Wales 1870–1914’, University of Manchester Working Papers in Economic and Social History No. 22 (1993), pp. 6–8.
R. Millward and S. Sheard, ‘Government expenditure on social overheads and the infrastructure in England and Wales, 1870–1914’, University of Manchester Working Papers in Economic and Social History No. 23 (1993), p. 9. These are trading profits after subtraction of loan charges, which can be calculated for these years, 1903–5.
The principal comparative evidence in favour of public health expenditure and measures was assembled in S.H. Preston, Mortality Patterns in National Populations: with Special Reference to Causes of Death (New York: Academic Press, 1976).
The revisionist reworking of McKeown’s historical epidemiological data for nineteenth-century Britain was published in Szreter, cited in note 44, pp. 5–17; see also S. Guha, ‘The importance of social intervention in England’s mortality decline: the evidence reviewed’, Social History of Medicine 7 (1994): 89–113;
S. Szreter, ‘Mortality in England in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: a reply to Sumit Guha’, Social History of Medicine 7 (1994): 269–82;
and S.R. Johansson, ‘Food for thought: rhetoric and reality in modern mortality history’, Historical Methods 27 (1994): 101–25.
C.A. Nathanson, ‘Disease prevention as social change: toward a theory of public health’, Population and Development Review 22 (1996): 609–37.
C. Hamlin, ‘Muddling in Bumbledon: on the enormity of large sanitary improvements in four British towns, 1855–1885’, Victorian Studies 32 (1988/89): 55–83;
C. Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
W.F. Bynum, ‘Darwin and the doctors: Evolution, diathesis, and germs in nineteenth-century Britain’, Gesnerus 40 (1983): 43–53.
M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Ch. 3.
On the concept of brokers, see H.R. Wolf, ‘Aspects of group relations in a complex society: Mexico’, in T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 50–68.
J. Powles and N. Day, ‘The East Europeans dying before their time’, European Brief 2 (1995): 50–1. See also the papers from the session on ‘Mortality Reversals and Their Causes in the Former USSR and Eastern Europe’, by V.M. Shkolnikov, F. Meslé, V. Hertrich, et al., in IUSSP, International Population Conference, Beijing 1997, Vol. 2 (Liège, 1997), pp. 473–579.
On the importance of the principle of universality in social security and welfare entitlements in promoting social inclusionism, avoiding social deprivations, and enhancing citizenship, see R.M. Titmuss, Commitment to Welfare (London: W. Pickering, 1968).
J. Chen, T.C. Campbell, J. Li and R. Peto, Diet, Lifestyle and Mortality in China: a Study of the Characteristics of 65 Chinese Counties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 102–3. See also the papers from the session on ‘Mortality Trends in China’, by Z. Weimin, X. Li, J. Banister, et al., in IUSSP, International Population Conference, Beijing 1997, Vol. 3 (Liège, 1997), pp. 1325–69.
J. Drèze and A. Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 11–2.
On these issues in Britain, see for instance A. Offer, Property and Politics 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology, and Urban Development in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
and M.A. Crowther and B.M. White, ‘Medicine, property and the law in Britain 1800–1914’, Historical Journal 31 (1988): 853–70.
For the original work on entitlements, see A. Sen, Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and for a summary of entitlements and capabilities, see Drèze and Sen, cited in note 71, pp. 9–19.
R. Dorfman, ‘Review article: Economic development from the beginning to Rostow’, Journal of Economic Literature 29 (1991): 573–91, p. 573.
W. Hutton, The State We’re In (London: Cape, 1995), Ch. 10.
N.F.R. Crafts, ‘The golden age of economic growth in Western Europe, 1950–1973’, Economic History Review 48 (1995): 429–47, p. 434. For reviews of new growth theory, see the special issues of two journals devoted to this subject: Oxford Review of Economic Policy 8, no. 4 (1992) and Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 1 (1994). More generally,
see M. Abramovitz, Thinking About Growth: and Other Essays on Economic Growth and Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
J.S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), Ch. 12. Social capital should not be confused with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital (more or less corresponding to an individual’s success in the educational system), though it is certainly related to it;
see P. Bourdieu, ‘Cultural reproduction and social reproduction’, in R. Brown (ed.), Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change (London: Tavistock, 1973), pp. 71–112. Social capital is the property of a social group and its institutions, not of an individual. Coleman distinguishes social capital from the related concepts of economic capital (productive plant and finance) and human capital (which is not dissimilar to Bourdieu’s cultural capital, being the aptitudes, skills, and training possessed by an individual worker). Social capital is lodged neither in individuals, as their capacities, nor in the physical implements of production. It inheres in the pattern of relationships between persons: how they are able to communicate with each other. It is therefore constituted in the institutions, associations, and communities of society and the economy.
On social capital and both civic participation and economic performance, see in particular R.D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
On social capital and health, see R.G. Wilkinson, ‘Health inequalities: relative or absolute material standards?’ British Medical Journal 314, no. 7080, 22 February 1997 (online publication); and R.G. Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: the Afflictions of Inequality (London: Routledge, 1996).
M. Granovetter, ‘Economic action, social structure, and embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481–510;
P. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Szreter, S. (2001). Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development. In: Price-Smith, A.T. (eds) Plagues and Politics. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524248_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524248_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42071-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-52424-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)