1
0The surprising public health benefit of unemployment
Financial Times| By Roula Khalaf | 658 words | ★★★☆☆
A new study suggests cleaner air during recessions may save lives, revealing the hidden health costs of everyday pollution.
Here’s a discovery to bring you up short: unemployment is good for you. Really? Well, no, not really. But a new research paper has found a correlation that points in that direction: more unemployment, fewer deaths. Underneath lies something real, shocking and yet somehow inspiring.
First, let’s unpack the research, conducted by economists Amy Finkelstein, Matthew Notowidigdo, Frank Schilbach and Jonathan Zhang. They examine the impact of the Great Recession of 2007-09 on death rates in different parts of the US, some of which suffered sharper increases in unemployment than others. They discover this striking correlation: when the unemployment rate rises by one percentage point in one of the US’s 741 city regions or “commuting zones”, the mortality rate in that area falls by 0.5 per cent. This benefit persists for at least a decade and is spread evenly across the age distribution, although the elderly enjoyed the largest benefit in absolute terms.
Given that the Great Recession pushed unemployment rates up by nearly five percentage points, that suggests that mortality rates were reduced by more than 2 per cent as a result of the downturn. As the researchers put it, “these estimates imply that The Great Recession provided one in twenty-five 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.”
These are huge effects. What might explain them? There is no shortage of theories: recessions take people from low-quality, high-stress jobs; people who lose their jobs tend to smoke less, eat less fast food and have more time to exercise; recessions may reduce the spread of transmissible diseases.
But Finkelstein and her co-authors find scant evidence for most of these explanations. Instead, they point to air pollution. The air becomes cleaner in areas where the economy slumps. The researchers estimate that this cleaner air accounts for more than one-third of the mortality reduction.
This may come as a surprise, because we are not accustomed to regarding air pollution as a problem for rich countries. Yet air pollution increases the risk of both respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and the global number of deaths caused by air pollution is estimated by both the World Health Organization and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to be around seven million people a year, nearly as much as the death toll from smoking. In the US, the death toll from air pollution is often estimated to be about 100,000 people a year.
What makes the study so shocking is that the researchers were not examining the effect of a dramatic shutdown caused by a lockdown or natural disaster. This was merely a recession, albeit a severe one. Most people kept their jobs, and everyday life seemed largely unchanged. And yet pollution from sources such as traffic fell enough to produce a substantial and lasting drop in the death rate.
One response to this discovery is to join the “degrowth” movement calling for curbs on economic activity. But this would be both politically unrealistic and unwise. We know that rich countries enjoy cleaner air than middle-income countries, and other research suggests that recessions can do lasting harm to young people who graduate during economic downturns.
Above all, we know there are easier ways to reduce air pollution than enduring a severe recession. Start by replacing diesel cars with electric vehicles, gas stoves with induction hobs, and gas boilers with heat pumps. These technologies move combustion—and thus pollution—away from where people live.
Generate the electricity for these new appliances from nuclear or renewable sources, and the pollution is largely eliminated. Better technology and smarter regulations can do more for air quality than the worst recession imaginable, and at relatively low cost.
As Chris Goodall explains in his book Possible: Ways to Net Zero, removing fossil fuels from our energy system is technologically feasible, though challenging. We should take heart from the fact that these efforts to fight climate change will also deliver large and immediate improvements in our everyday health. No Great Recession is required.
