The example of the Marshall Islands illuminates how the social conditions that can make people healthy or sick do not arise “naturally,” but rather are driven by political decisions and economic arrangements that influence the allocation of resources within society.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) consists of hundreds of small coral islands, or atolls, located almost exactly halfway between the U.S. and Australia. The inhabitants of these islands were once known as the “Navigators of the Pacific” because of their innovative use of astronomy and stick charts to travel by ocean canoe among islands spread across 750,000 square miles of ocean. Today, many of their seafaring skills and other cultural and economic traditions have been destroyed, and Ebeye, the nation’s second most populated island, is sometimes known by a less flattering moniker, “The Slum of the Pacific.”