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Originally Posted by donsutherland1  For those who have not read the article, Ruhm documents an inverse relationship between macroeconomic conditions and health. He finds that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate relative to its historic average, mortality declined by about 0.5% to 0.6%. |
He's also written a more up-to-date paper (A Healthy Economy Can Break Your Economy, 2007, Demography, Vol 44, pp 829-848) which finds that a 1% reduction in unemployment is estimated to increase coronary heart disease mortality by 0.75%. A right proper cheery fellow!
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Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that Ruhm is comparing health outcomes between recessions and short-lived expansions (the business cycle not the secular or long-term trend for growth). He is not arguing that sustained long-term growth, which provides improved technologies, expanded scientific and medical knowledge, enhanced working conditions, among other benefits, does not enhance health outcomes.
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But could we argue that the consequences of economic growth for health are changing? Consider, for example, Tapia and Ionides (2008, The reversal of the relation between economic growth and health progress: Sweden in the 19th and 20th centuries, Journal of Health Economics, Vol 27, pp 544-563) who conclude:
”Therefore, this investigation shows that, year to year, economic growth was strongly associated with health progress in Sweden in the first half of the 19th century, with the association becoming weaker and weaker in the next hundred years, to be substituted by a negative lagged association in the second half of the 20th century, in which economic growth has a negative effect on health progress with a short lag of about 1 or 2 years. There is no evidence of effects of economic growth on health at longer lags in any of the periods of the two centuries included in the study.
What might be the reasons that the decline in mortality, strongly stimulated by economic growth in 19th-century Sweden, becomes negatively affected by economic growth in the last half of the 20th century? A brief answer may be that economic growth and affluence strongly reduce mortality at the population level when most deaths are due to infectious disease (as in largely agricultural 19th-century Sweden), but that increased business and industrial activity induce higher death rates when most fatalities are due to such causes as cardiovascular disease, cancer, traffic injuries, diabetes, liver cirrhosis, and other pathologic processes related to work, consumption, or the environment.”