Essays on Strategy and Public Health (eBook)

This book is a collection of essays that explore commonalities and contrasts between strategy in armed conflict and strategy in public health. The first part uses the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to study strategy as an exchange of messages between adversaries, in the context of underlying power relations. The 'messages' to be exchanged are constructed from an 'alphabet' of tactics available to each contender, in a large sense. The second part of the book explores four case histories from this perspective, ranging across agribusiness-generated pandemics, through tuberculosis and COVID-19. The final chapter attempts a strategic synthesis applicable more specifically to public health than to the remarkably - and disturbingly -- close parallel of armed conflict. Taking a unique approach to public health tactics and strategy this volume will be of interest to social epidemiologists, public health economists, public policy scientists, as well as public health researchers and practitioners.

Rodrick Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry (US). He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in physics from Columbia, and completed postdoctoral training in the epidemiology of mental disorders at Rutgers. He worked as a public interest lobbyist, including two decades conducting empirical studies of fire service deployment, and subsequently received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to material on public health and public policy, he has published peer reviewed studies modeling evolutionary process and heterodox economics, as well as many quantitative analyses of institutional and machine cognition. He publishes in the military science literature, and in 2019 received one of the UK MoD RUSI Trench Gascoigne Essay Awards.