The Body Economic (26 page)

3
. Niki Kitsantonis, “Pensioner's Suicide Continues to Shake Greece,”
New York Times
, April 5, 2012. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/world/europe/pensioners-suicide-continues-to-shake-greece.html?_r=1&

4
. Makis Papasimakopoulos, “Note Found on Syntagma Suicide Victim,”
Athens News
, April 5, 2012.
http://www.athensnews.gr/portal/1/54580

5
. A. Kentikelenis, M. Karanikolos, I. Papanicolas, S. Basu, M. McKee, D. Stuckler. 2011. “Health Effects of Financial Crisis: Omens of a Greek Tragedy,” The
Lancet
378(9801): 1457–58.

6
. M. Suhrcke and D. Stuckler. 2012. “Will the Recession Be Bad for Our Health? It Depends,”
Social Science & Medicine
v74(5): 647–53; C. Ruhm. 2008. “A Healthy Economy Can Break Your Heart,”
Demography
v44(4): 829–48; D. Stuckler, C. Meissner, P. Fishback, S. Basu, M. McKee. 2012. “Was the Great Depression a Cause or Correlate of Significant Mortality Declines? An Epidemiological Response to Granados,”
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
; K. Smolina, et al. 2012. “Determinants of the Decline in Mortality from Acute Myocardial Infarction in England Between 2002 and 2010: Linked National Database Study,”
British Medical Journal
v344:d8059.

7
. International Monetary Fund. Oct 2012. “World Economic Outlook, Coping with High Debt and Sluggish Growth.” Available at:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2012/02/pdf/text.pdf

PART I: HISTORY

Chapter 1: Tempering the Great Depression

1
. J. Burns, “Atos Benefit Bullies Killed My Sick Dad, Says Devastated Kieran, 13,”
Daily Record,
Nov 1, 2012. Available at:
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/atos-killed-my-dad-says-boy-1411100

2
. “Public Sector, Welfare Faces budget Axe—Cameron,” Reuters UK, June 18, 2010. Available at:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2010/06/18/uk-britain-budget-cameron-idUKTRE65H5TC20100618
; “Conservative Conference: Cameron in Benefit Cuts Warning,” BBC, Oct 7, 2012. Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19864056
. See Table 2: “Estimates for Fraud and Error by Client Group and Error Type and Error Reason—Overpayments (2011/2012).” Less than 0.1 percent of total fraud, totaling £2 million, were estimated to have arisen from fraud surrounding conditions of entitlement. In Department for Work & Pensions. Fraud and Error in the Benefit System. Available at:
http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/index.php?page=fraud_error
;
M. D'Arcy, “Protests Against Paralympics Partner Get Senior Support,” 2012,
Public Service UK
. Available at:
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=20757

3
. Atos newsroom website: “The Department for Work and Pensions Awards Two of the PIP Assessment Contracts to Atos.” Available at:
http://atos.net/en-us/Newsroom/en-us/Press_Releases/2012/2012_08_02_01.htm
and
http://uk.atos.net/en-uk/careers/career_directions/systems_integration/default.htm
; R. Ramesh, “Atos Wins £400m Deals to Carry Out Disability Benefit Tests,” The
Guardian,
Aug 2, 2012. Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/02/atos-disability-benefit-tests

4
. “Work Test Centres ‘Lack Disabled Access',” BBC, Nov 21, 2012. Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20423701
; Burns, “Atos Benefit Bullies.”

5
. See also J. Ball, “Welfare Fraud Is a Drop in the Ocean Compared to Tax Avoidance,” The
Guardian,
Feb 3, 2013. Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/01/welfare-fraud-tax-avoidance
; Atos's official response was that “We do not make decisions on people's benefit entitlement or on welfare policy but we will continue to make sure that service that we provide is as highly professional and compassionate as it can be.” Cited in M. D'Arcy, “Protests Against Paralympics Partner Get Senior Support,”
Public service UK,
2012. Available at:
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=20757

6
. Just as the writings of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith came back into popularity, so too did other histories of the Depression—such as that of Milton Friedman, a conservative free-market economist. Whereas Keynes had been a proponent of government spending to stimulate demand in the economy, Friedman emphasized the role of monetary policy—to lower interest rates and increase the money supply, so that people would resume borrowing and the market would start moving again. Friedman's school of thought emphasized the importance of the market. For the market to work, it would be necessary for those who made bad decisions to suffer the consequences.

7
. M. Thoma, “Too Much Too Big to Fail,”
Economist's View
, Sept 2, 2010. Available at:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/09/too-much-too-big-to-fail.html

8
. S. Fleming, “UK Hit Hardest by Banking Bailout, with £1 Trillion Spent to Save the City,”
Daily Mail,
Dec 17, 2009. Available at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1236800/UK-hit-hardest-banking-bailout-1trillion-spent-save-City.html
; see also
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/economy/the-true-cost-of-the-bank-bailout/3309/
. Government bailouts saved many corporations, and by 2013, many had paid back the loans, with interest. L. Vo and J. Goldstein, “Where the Bailouts Stand, in 1 Graphic,”
NPR Planet Money
, Oct 9, 2010. Available at:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/09/10/160886823/where-the-bailouts-stand-in-1-graphic
; “AIG Subsidiary Parties in Style in OC, Two Weeks after Bailout,”
Orange County Register
, Oct 2, 2008. Available at:
http://taxdollars.ocregister.com/2008/10/02/after-federal-bailout-aig-fetes-in-style-in-oc/
; M. Wolfe, “Keynes Offers Us the Best Way to Think About
the Financial Crisis,”
Financial Times,
Dec 23, 2008. Available at:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/be2dbf2c-d113-11dd-8cc3-000077b07658.html#axzz2IArd1Y5r

9
. P. Krugman, “Inflation Lessons,”
New York Times
, Aug 25, 2012. Available at:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/inflation-lessons/

10
. P. Krugman, “Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression,”
New York Times
, Nov 3, 2012. Available at:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/soup-kitchens-caused-the-great-depression/

11
. D. Stuckler, S. Basu, M. McKee, M. Suhrcke. 2010. “Responding to the Economic Crisis: A Primer for Public Health Professionals,”
Journal of Public Health
v32(3): 298–306. Available at:
http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/3/298.short
; T. Pettinger, “UK National Debt,”
Economics: UK Economy Statistics
, Jan 23, 2013. Available at:
http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/334/uk-economy/uk-national-debt/

12
. J. Hardman, “The Great Depression and the New Deal. Poverty & Prejudice: Social Security at the Crossroads.” Available at:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/soc_sec/hgreat.htm
; D. Stuckler, S. Basu, C. Meissner, P. Fishback, M. McKee. 2012. “Banking Crises and Mortality During the Great Depression: Evidence from US Urban Populations, 1927–1939,”
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
v66:410–19.

13
. Increasing investments, typically by the wealthiest, caused the average stock to quadruple in price between 1921 and 1929. The super-rich, including the Rockefellers, Fords, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts, helped drive a real estate bubble. Sellers would reap small profits quickly by turning over properties to the next buyer in a high-demand marketplace; John Kenneth Galbraith, The
Great Crash: 1929
(Boston, 1988); see also E. N. White, “Lessons from the Great American Real Estate Boom and Bust,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009, Working Paper 15573. Available at:
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/seminars/2010/white.pdf
. Most people who bought land never set foot in the state they were buying in. Instead, real estate speculators hired young, attractive men and women to advertise the land and accept down payments on an ad hoc basis.

14
. Hardman, “The Great Depression and the New Deal. Poverty & Prejudice”; T. H. Watkins, The
Great Depression: America in the 1930s
(Boston, 1993).

15
. Racial tensions also escalated: in 1933 alone, twenty-four lynchings of black Americans were officially reported—likely to be an underestimate as few lynchings were ever addressed by the police at the time. Centers for Disease Control, “CDC Study Finds Suicide Rates Rise and Fall with Economy,” April 14, 2011. Available at:
http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2011/p0414_suiciderates.html
. See also “Did Investors Really Jump out of Windows?” Available at:
http://news.kontentkonsult.com/2008/10/did-investors-really-jump-out-of.html
; George H. Douglas,
Skyscrapers: A Social History of the Very Tall Building in America
(London, 2004).

16
. “Death Rate Drops in North America: Mortality Figures for This Year Show Lowest Level for the United States and Canada,”
New York Times
, Oct 26, 1930. As the
New York Times
further reported that year, “the country was in the grip of the most serious industrial depression in a generation. No large area was exempt from its effects. Town and country, farmer and mechanic, East and West, North and South all were affected. Everywhere poverty was accentuated. Family budgets had to be sharply reduced. Men and women skimped their own rations to provide for their children. The demands on charitable organizations were without parallel, coming often from families who never before knew the meaning of want. By all the signs and all the precedents, hard times so seriously prolonged should have brought in their train disease and death. Actually, 1931 was one of the healthiest years in the history of the country. The evidence is overwhelming.” Cited in “No Slump in Health,”
New York Times
, Jan 5, 1932. For further contemporary analysis see “Sees Public Health Unhurt by Slump,”
New York Times,
Oct 30, 1931.

17
. “It is indubitable evidence,” Sydenstricker concluded, “that up to this time unemployment, diminished purchasing power, altered standards of living, even privation, have not killed very many of the population. Just what caused this gratifying showing is difficult to say.” See E. Sydenstricker. 1933. “Health and the Depression,”
Milbank Mem Q
v11:273–80.

18
. Another physician agreed, speculating that the “the weather may have been a contributing factor,” preventing outbreaks of pneumonias. Yet another doctor suggested that “the medical profession is becoming more and more skilled in the diagnosis and treatment of disease.” Another group of thinkers held that it was perhaps the Depression itself, leading to “a more normal mode of living than in boom times” and lower stress levels. All of these explanations, however, seemed unlikely. Most of the changes in death rates didn't correspond to winter-time diseases, and the winter was not actually particularly mild—especially for those living in shantytowns. There had not been any new discoveries of drugs or new techniques in surgery. Sulfonamide antibiotics would not be invented until the late 1930s, and penicillin until the 1940s. It was also unclear how the Depression might improve health through less stress. All of the historical evidence suggests that people faced enormous stress during the Depression—much more so than in the boom years of the roaring 20s. Cited in D. Stuckler, S. Basu, et al., “Banking Crises and Mortality During the Great Depression”; see also US Climate at a Glance,
National Climatic Data Center
. Available at:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
; R. Pearl, The
Rate of Living
(New York, 1928).

19
. For more details about our study see Stuckler, et al., “Banking Crises and Mortality During the Great Depression.” We are grateful to our colleague Professor Price Fishback for making these data available. Mortality data came from the Center for Disease Control, US Historical Mortality Database, 1929–1937 (Atlanta, 1929). Banking crisis data were taken from Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Bank Data and Statistics, 2010.

20
. Source for Figure 1.1: Adapted from Stuckler, et al. “Banking Crises and Mortality During the Great Depression.”

21
. Source for Figure 1.2: Ibid.

22
. A. R. Omran. 1971. “The Epidemiologic Transition: A Theory of the Epidemiology of Population Change,”
Milbank Mem Fund Q
v49:509–38. Available at:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3349375

23
. Other commentators have suggested that the Great Depression was the direct cause of very large health improvements. See, for example, J. Tapia-Granados and A. Diez-Roux. 2009. “Life and Death During the Great Depression,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
v106(41): 17290–95. Their analysis used 20 data points from aggregated US data. One sign of a lack of validity in their analysis is in attributing the Great Depression as a cause of short-term improvements in cancer. Yet, at the time, no effective cancer treatments existed, and changes in cancer would require decades to occur. When we revisited their analysis using state-level data, and disentangled short-and long-term trends, we demonstrated how such implausible findings were spurious. See D. Stuckler, S. Basu, et al. 2012. “Was the Great Depression a Cause or Correlate of Significant Mortality Declines? An Epidemiological Response to Granados,”
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.