 In recent years, a lot of literature has come out that sort of tries to understand the connection between health and wealth. And what do you think that might be? What do you think the connection between having extra resources and having good health might be? Well, traditionally a lot of economists look at it this way. They see health and wealth as being connected in sort of a circle. So at some point, a little bit of health can increase your wealth, or a little bit of wealth can increase your health. And it's sort of a self-feeding circle. So as you become more wealthy, you become more healthy, and as you become more healthy, you become more wealthy. And so this is kind of the traditional understanding of this. Now, economists have looked at this and said there has to be something else to it, but there hasn't been a lot of research that has really come up with any other sort of solution. So right now at the moment, this is how we understand the connection between health and wealth. It's sort of a self-affirming circle where health and wealth work together to increase each other's sort of influence in someone's life, or something like that. Now, what effect might that have on a person on the ground somewhere in the world? Well, let's take an example. Let's look at a family. And let's say that they are farmers, and maybe they are in Sub-Saharan Africa. And they have here fields that they tend together as a large family group. So let's say it's a big kind of extended family of farmers, like you see really anywhere in the world. People from the United States, through Asia, through Europe, through Africa. You find this all over the place that families have farms that they run together. So maybe this family has maybe a few brothers or uncles, people like that. Maybe their wives, and then maybe they have a few kids as well. And let's make some kids here. Alright, so there we go. We've got this big family here. And let's say from this crop, if everything goes well, so if the crop has a good year, it makes money. So they take their stuff to the market, they sell it as a group, and they divide the money out amongst themselves. And in the end, they maybe are able to make $2 a piece. So if you divide that out over the entire family, they're able to make each person, is able to make $2. That puts them sort of in the upper levels of poverty in many countries. So low poverty, like if you're a very poor person, is below $1 a day. So that is as very poor no matter how you cut it. $2 a day is still very poor, but it's definitely something that is somehow survivable. There's definitely a lot more that you can do with that $2 a day than you can do with $1 a day. But that's if everything goes well. Say one year you have a drought, and maybe all these crops don't work out for you. Maybe you only have a 50% yield for that year. Well now you've been reduced to this $1 a day. And let's say the next year you have the same thing, except this time it's even more. Maybe the drought is continuing and deepening. You've now dropped into the minus $1 a day range. And this puts you at really great risk. So imagine for one thing you're not able to eat very well. So let's just imagine then that all of these people are malnourished. So we're going to go through these little yellow dots, meaning that everyone is not eating enough food. Well being malnourished puts you at risk of getting lots of diseases. And so especially for children, it puts you at about a two-thirds risk, higher risk of getting very sick from something. So you've got out of these six children, four of them could potentially get very sick. And also for women especially malnourishment is a big problem. Malnutrition leads to anemia, which leads to higher death rates for pregnant mothers. So here you're putting the women especially in this group at higher risk. The men are also at risk, but not quite at the same kind of risk because men are traditionally physically a little bit more robust and able to survive these kind of things because they don't have as many things taxing on their bodies. Women have traditionally a lot more taxing sort of influences on their bodies worldwide. So here you're putting a lot of people in the family then at risk because of this lower income you're not as able to collect resources and survive as a family. Now let's say this continues and let's say maybe this guy here gets pneumonia and he is out and let's say we get two cases of anemia among the mothers that maybe also are connected with some other diseases. You have a few kids getting sick. Well now even if the crops are good, it's going to put a lot more strain on the other people and you could get things like exhaustion among the members of the family that are still healthy. So maybe you have these guys are now working a lot harder to keep things going so the blue could mean some sort of exhaustion and the exhaustion could also then put you at higher risk of being sick in some way. So you've got people who are again more likely to get sick from something and eventually all of these things could lead to members of the family dying. You know this disease here could turn into something very critical. A person could die from some sort of pneumonia or something related to their exhaustion and malnourishment. These women could give birth or get HIV or something along those lines and that could increase their risk of death as well. And children in the developing world, especially children under 5, have also a much higher risk of death especially when mixed with things like malnutrition and other diseases. So these people are all at high risk once they've dropped below this $2 area into the $1 range. It's really putting them at very high risk of becoming very sick because they just don't have that many resources at hand to fight off these sort of things. If you get sick and you don't have the money to get medication for it or you get sick and you don't have enough money to even feed yourself, then you have a major problem. That is where really a lot of scientists and social scientists and development thinkers are trying to get in and think about, okay, how can we improve health in a way that will improve wealth? And how can we improve wealth in a way that will improve health? And these are the big questions that we're thinking about now in the development world. We've been thinking about them for a long time. But luckily in the last couple of years, people have stopped thinking about development just as people having things. But really in terms of people being able to reach their full potential and empowering them to have their own resources in order to solve this problem on their own. So that is kind of an introduction to the health wealth connection and why wealth and health are so tightly connected. You can learn more about development and health at alversity.org.