Posing Problems Without Catching Up: China's Rise and Challenges for U.S. Security Policy

“Stop, You’re Killing us!” An Alternative Take on Populism and Public Health; Comment on “The Rise of Post-truth Populism in Pluralist Liberal Democracies: Challenges for Health Policy”

Ewen Speed and Russell Mannion correctly identify several contours of the challenges for health policy in what it is useful to think of as a post-democratic era. I argue that the problem for public health is not populism per se, but rather the distinctive populism of the right coupled with the failure of the left to develop compelling counternarratives. Further, defences of ‘science’ must be te...

The Rise of Post-truth Populism in Pluralist Liberal Democracies: Challenges for Health Policy

Recent years have witnessed the rise of populism and populist leaders, movements and policies in many pluralist liberal democracies, with Brexit and the election of Trump the two most recent high profile examples of this backlash against established political elites and the institutions that support them. This new populism is underpinned by a post-truth politics which is using social media as a...

Recent dynamics suggest selected countries catching up to US obesity.

BACKGROUND The United States has been the country with the highest body mass indexes (BMIs; in kg/m(2)) at higher centiles, but research that compares the United States with other nations is lacking. OBJECTIVE To present a picture of global obesity and examine the shifts in BMI in children, I examined BMI data for men and women at the upper ends of the BMI distributions in Australia, China, t...

Innovation and catching-up

The Far Right Challenge; Comment on “The Rise of Post-truth Populism in Pluralist Liberal Democracies: Challenges for Health Policy”

Speed and Mannion make a good case that the rise of populism poses significant challenges for health policy. This commentary suggests that the link between populism and health policy should be further nuanced in four ways. First, a deconstruction of the term populism itself and a focus on the far right dimension of populist politics; second, a focus on the supply side and more specifically the ...