Why We Need to Invest in Public Health Capital
Michael Grossman's influential health capital model conceptualizes health as a form of capital that individuals build through their choices (Grossman 1972) . Like financial capital, health capital accumulates through investment and depreciates over time. Maintaining health requires people to sacrifice time and money to choose activities that build healthy bodies. Published in the early 1970s, this influential theory has been cited over 11,000 times. The model emphasizes the way our bodies and minds retain the scars of past choices for decades. It predicts addiction cycles and explains why education is a critical determinant of the desire to be healthy. According to Grossman's model, individuals act as though they can observe their body's lifetime accumulated health capital stock. They choose behaviors and commodities that either enlarge this stock or allow it to depreciate. Each person’s choices are the fundamental explanation of how healthy they are. A Neoliberal Bl...