Sustainable Development for the Health-Care Industry: Setting the Stage

Abstract

Health has been a topic of paramount importance and an integral part of fighting for one’s subsistence along with an overlapping with the search for food and shelter, and interestingly it has progressively superseded wealth as a topic of interest. Evidence to that is the Google Ngram chart of the number of books addressing health versus wealth as a core topic; one can only notice that since the 1800s, health-focused books have always outnumbered those related to wealth by anywhere between 10 and 20 % up until the 1920s. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of books focused on health skyrocketed (with an acceleration since the 1970s) and the lead of health over wealth as a literature topic is now close to fivefold as expressed in total number of books.