“How the next Recession Could save Lives: Death Rates Have Dropped during past Economic Downturns, Even As Many Health Trends Have Worsened. Researchers Are Scrambling to Decipher Lessons Before the next Big Recession”, 2019-01-23 (; backlinks; similar):
In 1922, a pair of sociologists at New York’s Columbia University were poring over 50 years of US economic and mortality data, when they noticed a surprising result. Lean times in the country’s history didn’t correspond with more deaths, as they expected. In fact, the opposite was true. More people—babies included—died when the economy prospered1…About a decade later, data from the Great Depression, which hobbled the US economy for much of the 1930s, pointed to a similar conclusion2. “After several years of severe economic stress, the gross death rate has attained the lowest level on record”, wrote Edgar Sydenstricker, a social epidemiologist with the US Public Health Service, in 1933. Even numbers from the global financial crisis of the late 2000s follow suit. José Tapia Granados, a health economist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has calculated that death rates in Europe dropped faster during this downturn, known as the Great Recession, than before the crisis hit3. The trend held even in his birth country of Spain4, where unemployment topped 20%…Christopher Ruhm has spent the past two decades investigating the links between downturns and health. When he started his research, he wasn’t aware of the early-20th-century literature. That work had been generally forgotten, he says, because it “didn’t fit the obvious narrative”. He began by plugging data from more than a century of US history into a complex statistical model. Then, like his pre-Depression counterparts, he thought he had made an error. “So, I started looking at the raw data”, says Ruhm, an economist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “But it wasn’t some programming mistake; it was real.” In fact, he and others replicated the finding—in different situations, in different time periods, in different countries. In every case, Ruhm notes, the health of a majority of people improved, while the health of a minority declined.
…People also tend to drive less, which translates to fewer traffic accidents6. And fewer vehicles on the road might also help to explain why air quality is better7. “When employment pops up, so do things related to pollution—commerce, industry, trucks on the road”, says Mary Davis, an environmental-policy specialist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. The air-quality connection might also help explain why studies have also linked recessions to reduced cardiovascular and respiratory problems, as well as infant mortality…Researchers have suggested other explanations. In addition to dirty air, cardiovascular issues are known to be exacerbated by stress, a poor diet, lack of exercise, drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco. Working less and having less money to spend could translate into more sleep, exercise and home-cooked meals, as well as less job-related stress and less money for pints of beer and cigarettes. There is some evidence that this logic plays out. Based on data 1987–13200024ya, Ruhm found that smoking and excess weight declined during economic downturns, whereas leisure-time physical activity increased8. When Iceland’s economy crashed in 2008, and the price of imported goods such as tobacco and alcohol rose, citizens consumed fewer of those products9. And US data 1977–31200816ya showed that a husband’s unemployment reduced how much alcohol his wife drank, on average, irrespective of her own employment status10. Even people who fear job loss, but remain fully employed, Catalano’s research suggests, might still cut back on alcohol to seem a more indispensable employee11.
…And yet, no one is quite ready to toast economic crises as a boon to public health. “If that were really true, then why don’t we just recommend recessions?” says Ralph Catalano, a public-health researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He and other scholars point to data showing clear negative consequences for individuals facing financial hardships, from stress-induced chronic diseases to mental-health problems…The meeting had brought them together to share initial outlines for their chapters. But a divide soon appeared. As fellow participants proposed disparate takes on how a failing economy helps or harms health, some people grew “red and heated”, Burgard recalls.
…Such insights might also hint at ways to improve health in economic boom times, by reducing dangers associated with over-consumption, traffic accidents or pollution. The ultimate goal, notes Stuckler, is to identify and prevent avoidable suffering.