In The Body Economic, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu do a great job showing the connection between bad economic conditions, government policies and public health. Besides for suicides rising in bad times, I would never think that public health would be so correlated with the economy. The graphs on page 9, one showing state income per capita from 1927 to 1937 and the other showing trends in death rates from 1927 to 1937, surprise me, as to how similar they are, more or less rising and falling in the same time periods. But what I found important was that the authors not only explained why a bad economy could lead to less-deaths, but also made it a point to address all the other variables that could have led to the death rates declining as well. Stuckler and Basu look to see if the falling death rate is consistent with previous trends. They even say, “During the Great Depression, most of the changes in death rates apparently weren’t being caused by the economic downturn itself.” However, due to the epidemiological transition, less people died from infectious diseases like pneumonia, but more from non-infectious ones. The depression also correlates with less road deaths because less people are driving, and it also hit around the time of prohibition. There are always so many different factors to account for in scientific research, and I’m glad the authors account for them. Additionally, as they do, it’s great to draw parallels between the Great Depression and more recent economic problems, because this will surely aid us in getting to the roots of the problems and fixing them.
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