Do recessions benefit our health?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The human and economic costs of recessions are deep and well-documented. They can also have real health benefits, however, and seldom are they expressed so starkly as in this sentence in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research: “The Great Recession provided one in twenty-five 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.”
…Overall, the paper notes, age-adjusted mortality in the US fell by 2.3% during the Great Recession. The finding, from professors at MIT, the University of Chicago and McMasters University, broadly tracks previous research showing that that mortality rates rise in good times and fall in hard times.
And:
One answer is related to air pollution, which is lower in recessions, typically because of reduced economic activity. The benefits of lower pollution levels persist long after the recession — at least 10 years, according to the researchers’ estimates. Air pollution reduction accounts for more than one-third of the mortality benefits from the Great Recession.
And all of this:
The data do provide some additional clues. Except for cancer, for example, all major causes of mortality fell during the Great Recession. Decreases in cardiovascular-related deaths accounted for about half the mortality gains during that time. Furthermore, the mortality benefits were concentrated among Americans without college degrees. You might think that some of these improved health outcomes were due to people losing their stressful, low-paying jobs, but unemployment can be pretty stressful too.
For a 55-year-old, according to the paper’s estimates, about one-quarter of the economic costs of the Great Recession were countered by these mortality gains. So the Great Recession was still a very bad event — just less bad than we used to think. That is especially true for less educated Americans, who were hit harder by unemployment but also reaped the mortality gains.
At the top end of the age distribution, Americans aged 65 and older didn’t lose much from the Great Recession, in part because so many were already retired or working only part-time (in some cases, they were ensconced in jobs they were not going to lose). The researchers estimate that those over age 60 were also better off, on net, from the Great Recession.
Worth a ponder. Here is the original paper by