A major economic downturn, like the one we now face, devastates the lives of ordinary people. We lose our jobs, our homes and our futures. Yet, statistically, the recessions that shatter our dreams also improve health and increase longevity.
It sounds crazy but it’s true.
In the 1920s, economists William F Ogburn and Dorothy S Thomas first noted mortality rates decreased during recessions. In subsequent research, Thomas confirmed their initial findings, writing that “in both England and the USA, a high death rate is associated with periods of prosperity and a low death rate with periods of [economic] depression”.
This counterintuitive trend has been noted by researchers ever since.
In 1977, for instance, Joseph Eyer published a paper strikingly titled Prosperity as a Cause of Death.
“The general death rate rises during business booms,” he said flatly, “and falls during depressions.”
More recently, Veronica Toffolutti and Marc Suhrcke analysed data from 23 countries and concluded that “an increase in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession [or GFC] has had a beneficial health effect on average across EU countries”.
In an interview for the Brooklyn Rail, economist José Tapia explains that recessions change how we live. With overtime – and working hours as a whole – cut back, people can sleep more and take more exercise. They smoke and drink less; they relax more; they spend less time with dangerous industrial equipment.
The reduced numbers of people driving (either to work or for work) lowers the road toll and disperses carcinogenic fumes. Other researchers have argued that recessions might bring people together to support each other – creating strong social networks that foster better health.
But if booms tend to foster, as Toffolutti and Suhrcke say, “mostly adverse health consequences”, that doesn’t mean we should welcome economic crashes.
On the contrary, the equally robust relationship between unemployment and suicide illustrates just how traumatic recessions can be. If we can’t afford alcohol and tobacco we might live longer but poverty-induced restrictions do not bring happiness, any more than the prolonged lifespan of captive animals induces enthusiasm for cages.
Nevertheless, the link between recession and longevity should encourage us to think about our economy and its logic.
The pioneer sociologist Max Weber pointed out that, until very recently, even the most exploitative labour had been given meaning by complex webs of human relationships. It’s only with capitalism, Weber says, that:
Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.”
For instance, Indigenous people, who typically devoted no more than three or four hours each day to seeking food, found the European system of wage labour utterly incomprehensible.
It wasn’t simply the long hours of the British working day that appalled them but also the notion of work stripped of ceremony, meaning and purpose astonished Indigenous people. Henry Reynolds describes how “the historical record bristles with colonists’ complaints about their problems in trying to get Aborigines to behave as ‘voluntary labourers for wages’”.
“They do not court a life of labour,” explained a Victorian Justice of the Peace of the Indigenous people he knew in 1849. “[T]hat of our shepherds and hut-keepers – our splitters or bullock drivers – appears to them one of unmeaning toil, and they would by no means consent to exchange their free unhoused condition for the monotonous drudgery of such a dreary existence.”
That attitude was not a peculiar quirk of Indigenous society.
In Europe, too, the normalisation of the wage system depended on massive violence: in essence, the forcible dispossession of people from their traditional holdings, so that they had no choice but to seek an employer. Even then, the early industrialists complained (in a language very similar to that used by white settlers about Indigenous people) of how their new employees still yearned for the old customs that had once given their lives meaning.
The factory owner Samuel Greg Junior vented about the “restless and migratory spirit” of his workers; the entrepreneur Thomas Arkwright bemoaned the difficulty in training staff “to renounce their desultory habits of work and identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton”.
If Arkwright was indifferent to the human desires of his staff, he also didn’t care about those who bought his products – except insofar as they paid him. Where feudalism rests on rights and obligations, a capitalist factory relates to the world through money.
Furthermore, that money – or, at least, most of it – must get ploughed back into the business, since competition means companies that don’t reinvest fall behind their rivals.
With every business driven to expand or die, growth becomes the paramount imperative. It’s only under capitalism that indefinite economic increase becomes both conceivable (since money can always grow) and necessary (since without expansion the system begins to fall apart).
Experts say the recession associated with Covid-19 might mean the biggest drop in demand for fossil fuels on record, with lockdown conditions drastically slashing air and passenger transport.
Yet this significant decline in greenhouse gases does not constitute good environmental news, since the crisis will almost certainly derail what was, until recently, a burgeoning momentum for climate action.
Governments previously under pressure to respond to global warming will instead devote themselves single-mindedly to restarting their economies – and, once the wheels of industry begin spinning, emission levels will recommence their inexorable climb.
The degradation of labour and the degradation of the planet emerge from a similar source: an economic system that strips any control of production from ordinary people and instead operates according to a logic of relentless and destructive accumulation.
Without constant growth, capitalism descends into crisis. Yet the carcinogenic expansion on which our prosperity depends places more and more strain on our world – and, indeed, on us.
Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist