Quote from: Elwar on Today at 03:15:33 PM

Quote from: nutildah on Today at 02:47:17 PM

Quote from: Elwar on Today at 02:28:02 PM

Are you new to economic downturns? First time?

Oh right, how could I forget the thousands of bodies stacked high in 2009, dead from unemployment. Roll Eyes

"a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate will be associated with 37,000 deaths [including 20,000 heart attacks], 920 suicides, 650 homicides, 4,000 state mental hospital admissions and 3,300 state prison admissions."

The unemployment rate currently sits at 15% and growing.

There was an increase in suicides in 2009 due to the recession.

Re: the NY Post article

Quote

The actual figure in academic research is a 37,000 increase for each percentage-point rise in the unemployment rate. It comes from a book called “Corporate Flight: The Causes and Consequences of Economic Dislocation” by Barry Bluestone, Bennett Harrison and Lawrence Baker.

“Corporate Flight” was published in 1982 and mainly had to do with companies moving operations overseas. I couldn’t reach Bluestone, Harrison or Baker, but last week I was able to contact Wade Thomas, who teaches economics and business at SUNY Oneonta and who quoted those figures in his own co-written 2005 book called “Economic Issues Today: Alternative Approaches.”
...
“I would hesitate to extrapolate from the old estimates of corporate flight as a means of quantifying present circumstances,” Thomas wrote to me in an email, adding that “there are too many variables involved now to assert definitive cause and effect between unemployment and the litany of health consequences cited in the 1981 study.”

But, Thomas said, “it informs our thinking about some of the potential problems that may accompany this wave of joblessness.”

Two things are definitely different today. One, Washington acted quickly to help the unemployed. It didn’t when companies were moving overseas.

With the suicide rate: sure, I can see there being more suicides than normal due to a sustained period of high unemployment rates. I'm not totally unreasonable.

However, all you are really saying is that you know for sure the outcome would have been better, and there would have been less deaths overall if... if what? What would you have done differently?

With the exception of South Korea, Taiwan and a handful of other places, I don't think world governments are doing a good job of handling the problem. But I do think they are trying to help people and not kill them. This isn't some grand conspiracy to beat people into submission for the New World Order. It's just people responding to a unique problem for the first time, trying to figure out what works, what doesn't.

Nobody really knows the solution. Some people just pretend to know harder than others.