After finishing The Body Economic, I am rather convinced that the authors Stuckler and Basu are right. In each part- in each chapter even- we are given more and more examples of how austerity and budget cuts are harmful to societies while actually helping the people is not. In the third part of the book, we see Sweden’s social protection plan, the Active Labor Market Program, which actively helped the unemployed get back on track. It’s no wonder that programs like this would be beneficial. We have already seen how unemployment/ not making much money can negatively affect people mentally and emotionally, leading to depression and in some cases, suicide. And with people who are already feeling down in the dumps, having someone to hold their hand and help them up can sometimes be the only option. It’s amazing to see that social protection programs were the reason why “unemployment spikes had no correlation with increased suicides in Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, but unemployment was strongly correlated to suicide in Spain, the US, Greece, Italy and Russia”(118). It almost seems too perfect for the authors’ arguments that the economic situation in so many different countries prove their points, especially since for each one, the authors bring lots of statistics, as well as personal stories.
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