The issue is that what is best for public health, and what is most profitable, are often completely at odds with each other.
And then since almost our entire society is oriented around maximizing profits, with absolutely no regards for the negative impacts on public health…
Almost everyone ends up stressed out, tired, trying to manage chronic issues, anxiety, burnout, depression, addictions, obesity, and so on.
When the profit motives get involved, and doctors are in it for the money, and drug lobbyists are in it for the money, and pharmaceutical companies are run to maximize the profits of a few, and not the health of the many…
Well then you end up with doctors overprescribing opioids, and enriching the Purdue family while a public health crisis is made even worse.
And it’s not just medicine that ends up sick and twisted in that way by the profit motive.
The transportation industry pushes for a car centric society and not walkable cities and bike lanes.
Pollution overall is quite profitable, plastic is cheap and competitive, so almost every company sells plastic stuff, and the public health issues with microplastic pollution being everywhere, including our blood, are kind of brushed aside.
Food is kind of important if you want to stay in good health.
Fresh fruit and vegetables are good for your health, we know that.
But also, perishable fresh fruit are a nightmare for the food industry. It’s not just much harder to store fresh produce, and to deal with logistics, when you switch over to processed junk food, it’s also less satiating so you can sell more, people are willing to pay more, it’s more addictive, it makes more people come back, it’s less work, you can piggyback off the ads from the junk food companies and display their logos to lure people in, and so on.
Making a restaurant that sells some kind of fresh fruit and vegetables based stuff is overall very low profits. Replace the veggies with something like fries from the freezer and oil and salt that store a long time, and you can increase profits. Replace the fruit with sugary artificial fruit flavored ice cream from a big brand, advertise it with one of their signs, and you can increase profits.
Push people to drink a cocktail, some alcohol, or a soda, instead of tap water, and again, profits increase while public health outcomes decrease.
After the salty junk food, you can offer a dose of caffeine, and push people to eat a big dose of sugar, and again, that’s where the profits come from.
You could start off in the restaurant industry, full of hopes and dreams, imagining that you’ll make people slightly less sick than the rest of the junk food places. But when every other place is using all the tricks they can to maximize profits, and rents and costs are increasing, and many customers are more attracted by junk food than by veggies… Well, either you end up kicked out of the industry by market forces, or you end up broken, having to make concession after concession, inevitably driven towards being a provider of addictions, considering whether adding a tobacco machine might help drive traffic, wondering if you are allowed to install a one armed bandit, or sell some kind of gambling addiction or something, just trying to find some way to make ends meet.
When adding extra sugar and salt to everything increases revenue by a lot, then in a profit-maximizing economy, if you want to be part of the food industry, you end up forced to do it.
When there is a guy selling drugs, and another selling salad, the guy who is selling addictions can increase prices much more, and get repeat customers much more easily than the one selling salads. There is more money to be made cooking meth or making coffee and serving alcohol, than you can make from cooking a healthy vegetable soup.
What is the education budget spent on teaching people healthy eating habits, vs the budget spent on ads and marketing for junk food that makes people sick?
One is much less profitable than the other.
How is your job organized?
It’s probably a for-profit corporation.
So your breaks are kept to a minimum regardless of the impacts on your health, you might have to pee in bottles, or go through “crunch time”, and both your mental and physical health are likely going to be sacrificed at every opportunity in order to maximize profits. You’ll be treated as a human resources, to be strained to the maximum, and then discarded if broken. Schedules and deadlines will be set without regard to how much stress it causes you, just based on what is presumed to maximize profits. You might get something like free access to caffeine in order to boost your productivity, and you might get stuff like emails or phone calls during your free time, weekends, and holidays.
Sometimes some efforts might be made to keep some people from burning out too quickly, but it’s a purely profit based thing, based on how much it would cost to train a replacement or automate the job. If a pizza party here and there helps cut down on turnover costs a bit, it can happen.
But overall, straining people, and then discarding them and trying to replace them with someone fresh, young and dynamic if they ever stumble and can’t keep up, is just the normal way of doing business, of maximizing profits.
High inequality and poverty leads to more health issues, diseases, addictions, lower life expectancy and so on.
It’s very well studied, if instead of ensuring that everyone can have a decent standard of living, you give all the money to a couple of wealthy people, and have everyone else live in poverty, public health declines.
But it’s also just the way that the profit motive distorts every industry.
Sports is supposed to be good for your health. Moving a bit, doing soe exercise, great idea, no?
But then you add in the profit motive…
And then instead of sports being a kind of physical exercise that you do in order to remain healthy, it morphs into something that you watch on TV while sitting on a couch and consuming junk food, a way to sell you merch, and get you to drink more beer, something to gamble on, something that warps the entire college and education system, something where even the athletes who manage to resist doping themselves too much end up strained so hard that it becomes unhealthy.
And once broken, they too are discarded, and replaced by young and dynamic fresh blood.
When sports isn’t just something you consume on TV, but participate in, that’s the ideal that is sold: Sacrificing your health trying to make some millions, before being discarded once you break.
Getting famous so you can turn around and push some products onto people who watch you.
Some old guy who is doing regular exercise via sports, and keeping in good physical shape until late in life? It’s not what maximizes profits.
When some exercise is done, then with the for-profit motive, that too becomes distorted.
There isn’t really much money to be made in telling someone that they can exercise topless, but selling them some fancy specialized sportswear, and all sorts of weird gadgets and machines and shakes and supplements and powders and so on, subscriptions to treadmills, that is more profitable than a walk in the park.
Instead of getting bike lanes, you end up taking the car to go pay a subscription to use an indoor bike, and a bunch of people trying to convince you that it will all be for nothing if you drink a glass of water without any added supplements.
It’s a whole for-profit industry, it’s not for public health.
You as an individual, when you make choices, maximizing your long term health outcomes, or minimizing your short term costs, are going to be at odds with each other almost all of the time.
For any company that has employees and customers, same thing, public health and short term gains in the next quarterly report are at odds.
For any government too, investing in infrastructure that improves long term mental and physical health outcomes is directly at odds with doing austerity politics, and/or trying to maximize tax revenue.
If people take the bike lane to the public park, and then do some exercise there… It means you pay basically nothing for that trip. There isn’t really any profit being made, or much money changing hands, buying the bike would be the biggest investment, but it’s not much.
But then some of the people drilling for oil are not needed anymore, profits drop there, the gas station is less profitable if you use the bike, the fitness industry is not getting a subscription from you, no tax is being paid there either, no profits, no employment.
You can drink some water from a public fountain at the park, and again, if you are not drinking some soda, or gigantic coffee, or some exercise drink, or energy drink, or something like that, it’s entire industries that vanish, tax revenue that crumbles away as the addictions to sugar disappear.
If you are less sick and obese, then that’s again at odds with the healthcare industry, and the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.
If you are privileged enough to be in a place where you can still buy seasonal fruits and vegetables from some local market, and you do that, well that’s horrible for the junk food industry, and the fast food places, and the supermarkets and other retailers, and the shipping industry, and the factories who manufacture the high fructose treats, and so on.
Every addiction that you abandon is an industry that suffers, and a lost opportunity to profit.
Today, society is sick, and we, the people in it, are sick too.
Because the whole thing and almost all of our behaviors are oriented for selfish monetary profits, and not maximizing public health, meaning our own health.
Maximizing profits means that people always trend towards scams, selling addictions, subscriptions, ineffective band-aid solutions, and even creating problems, manufacturing needs, insecurities and so on.
We sell addictions and junk food and debt to each other, we all end up poor and sick, with only a couple of people sitting on big piles of money.
But if anyone suggests changing anything… Well, it threatens our jobs, our income sources!
It threatens our lifestyles as isolated fattening people who are collecting addictions and subscriptions and chronic health issues of all kind.
It threatens profits, passive incomes, tax revenue and power for politicians, it threatens the financial system, and the profits of every industry.
It threatens the status quo.
Most people just don’t really want to envision a world where we do anything else than selling each other addictions, and creating problems so we can sell solutions and subscriptions, and where people are not constantly threatened by violence and expulsions and foreclosures and getting fired, and strained and pushed 40+ hours per week.
Everyone trumpets around about the value of “hard work”, as if having some time off and spending it with friends and family and taking care of your health was some kind of a crime, people are accused of the sin of laziness if they suggest we could all work less and be better off.
You must work hard to create addictions and sell junk, so that you can then afford to buy your own health problems, consuming as much stuff as possible, until it makes you sick, and leaves you broke, and/or broken.
It’s declared to be the one and only way of life, the very best use and distribution of resources, and making us all very wealthy.
