Future matters

Global and planetary health: teaching as if the future matters.

If nursing, along with other health professions, is to be able to critique national and international health policy and be equipped to address the global and planetary dimensions of health, the conceptual horizons of our educational and research enterprises will need to be expanded. Not only are nursing curricula needed that address such concepts as "health for all" and "environmental sustainab...

Philosophy matters in brain matters

PURPOSE Although most neuroscientists and physicians would argue against Cartesian dualism, Descartes's version of the psyche/soma divide, which has been controversial since he proposed it in the seventeenth century, continues to haunt contemporary neurological diagnoses through terms such as functional, organic, and psychogenic. Drawing on my own experiences as a person with medically unexplai...

Matters of sex: sex matters.

Despite the popular concept that heart disease preferentially affects the male population, in every year for the past 16 years, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men.1 Unfortunately, a disparity still exists between men and women in the diagnosis and aggressive treatment of heart disease. The perception that women are relatively protected is reflected by the fact that women are ...

Politics Matters: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Climate Policy when the Distant Future Matters: Catastrophic events with hyperbolic discounting

We study climate change policy with hyperbolic discounting under the risk of catastrophic events. Using a binary action model, we compare the set of Markov Perfect Equilibria (MPE) to the optimal policy under (time consistent) commitment. For some initial conditions there are multiple MPE that may involve either excessive or insufficient stabilization efforts relative to the policy under commit...