Reuters Insider - Breakingviews: Ebola and inequality
10/10/2014 14:03
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Description: The spread of Ebola shows the dangers, and power,
of globalisation, says Reuters Breakingviews
economics editor Edward Hadas.
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Transcript (May be auto-generated)
Ebola shows the dangers and powers of globalization is a piece that Edward Hadas
has written for Reuters Breakingviews today. This is their look at Ebola and I
guess it's- and in fact, Edward, you said just before we started, an indictment
of global inequality that GDP doesn't measure. I guess this is the way you're
looking at this story? Yes, that's exactly right. If you look at say, the
difference in wealth between Sierra Leone or Liberia, where this disease is
concentrated and Spain, where we just had the first or we have one case there,
you think, oh, it's 20 times richer or whatever. But actually it's a lot worse
than that because in these poor countries, you don't have the resources either
the financial or the social resources to actually deal with an epidemic of this
sort. And that's why it spread. This is not a very contagious disease. If you do
the correct thing in terms of quarantining people, identifying people who have
been possibly affected by it, exposed to it, you can actually control it.
They've been able to do that in Nigeria and Senegal, neither countries you would
think of as, oh, like Spain. But when you're really poor in this world, things
are really bad. I mean, it's not that last part but what you've just said before
then is quite a refreshing message given whether we should call it
scaremongering that is going on. There's a very important line in the piece as
well: "There's enough at stake for the rich world for the rich to help the poor
and sort this out." Yeah. If you look at the number of diseases that affect the
poor disproportionately that make the lives of the poor wretched in ways that as
I say, GDP doesn't measure, Ebola is really pretty small by that standard, that
grim, grim standard. But because this travels, because people have been bringing
it to the West also because it's quite grotesque in its symptoms, it's gotten a
lot of attention. And so there is enough solidarity in the world to bring some
actually now, some effective aid it looks like to the most affected countries.
It's interesting. I mean, you and I have often spoken about the way economists
pick things apart and look to the different theories. Should economists take
things like this and globalization, the effects of globalization when it comes
to disease and the way countries, rich countries and poor countries deal with
it? Should they take things like that more into account? Oh absolutely. One of
the problems with focusing on a single number like GDP is you don't get anything
of the quality of life and even a lot of the indexes that people try and give to
supplement GDP, the sort of standard of living, don't get at the kind of misery
that you get in poverty where you are so subject to these terrible diseases.
They don't come very often but when they come, you're almost helpless because
you don't have those resources that rich people, rich countries we have in
abundance. But a measure like this makes the disparity far, far greater. It
makes it look a lot starker than we currently think it is. That's right, that's
right. This scandal of world poverty is actually much greater than any single
little number is really generally can tell us. What are you- just out of
interest, these happiness indexes that we hear about, Cameron talked about it,
several countries have thrown this around. What do you think of those indexes?
Do they fit into this whole mishmash? Oh, they're nonsense really. I mean, if
you ask people how happy they are, it really depends on their social expectation
so what they mean by happiness and what they want. I would much rather focus on
hard things like susceptibility to epidemics. That's a real way of measuring how
farther they are. Yeah, ask people how healthy they are. Yes. Good. All right,
Edward, thank you very much indeed. Edward Hadas, Breakingviews. You can read
Edward's piece by the way on the Breakingviews website. The US show is at 1230
EST/1730 BST. I'm Axel Threlfall