Could Recessions Actually Help Save Lives?
The Great Recession created untold hardship, but new research suggests that it also helped prolong the lives of many Americans.
A scene from the Great Recession, October 2009.
Photographer: Robyn Beck/AFP
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.”
That’s easily hundreds of thousands of Americans. 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.