Reading Elective

Tauhid Mahmud

Summary 1

The Body Economic begins in 2010 where global economies were still attempting to recover
from the 2008 recession, a period of financial uncertainty akin to the Great Depression. UK’s Prime
Minister David Cameron has begun a sweeping set of austerity measures. He claimed that hundreds of
thousands of Britons were abusing the government’s disability program, robbing the public of their hard
earn tax payer money. Therefore, Cameron cut billions of pounds of welfare while paying 400 million
euros to Atos, a private “systems integration” firm, to oversee the process. The conclusive findings made
by the Department of Work and Pensions was able to identify 2 millions pounds of disability fraud and
actually noted that greater harm, up to 70 million pounds each year, was due to accidental
underpayments for disability. Cameron and other fiscal conservatives believe that in times of economic
recession the government is burdened with so much debt that would make borrowing money in the
future impossible and therefore money must return to the government. The authors argue that this is a
fundamental misunderstanding of how debt works for nations; they argue that when the government
implements spending cuts, the public wages are cute and there is less money in the economy. And thus,
despite these spending cuts British debt continues to rise.

The lesson to take away from British austerity measures are not difficult to understand. In times
of economic distress, austerity equates to a dramatic reduction in public services and money being
siphoned into the private sector (e.g. Atos). The health consequences are obvious; people with
disabilities who then lose a necessary financial safety net will undoubtably have worse health outcomes.