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Public Health

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Abstract

It is widely believed that prevention is better than cure, and there is an obvious sense in which it is. But there has been a chastening tendency for the dismal science to indicate that measures enthusiastically advocated as ways of stopping people from becoming ill are often rather poor investments compared with ‘curative’ activities.

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Bibliography

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Williams, A. (2018). Public Health. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1901

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