tldr : economic collapse can lower pollution and lead to less deaths
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Surprise, not grinding people to death improves life expectancy!
From the article:
The answer was pollution. Counties that experienced the biggest job losses in the Great Recession, the economists found, also saw the largest declines in air pollution, as measured by levels of the fine particulate matter PM2.5.
Seems like a good case to promote work from home. WFH is such a win on so many fronts, yet there’s been a big push to get people back in offices. We are in the bad place.
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I’m not so sure your comparison between rape and a recession makes sense, or is even appropriate IMO.
The article just so happens to be covering a research paper analyzing the unusual correlation between a broken economy and improved life expectancy… that’s all.
The proposed reasons are (paraphrased): unemployment - people have more time for themselves, and pollution - you’re not surrounded by exhaust/manufacturing byproducts for ~2/4 of the day
The research is sure to be neoliberal think tank garbage not worth reporting on. But of course the whole point of those think tanks is to get published to push the neoliberal project.
What is the National Bureau of Economic Research?
After World War II, the NBER expanded its research scope. Arthur Burns succeeded Mitchell as research director. The 1950s and 1960s saw groundbreaking work by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz on monetary policy’s impact on business cycles. Research in labor economics also flourished during this period.
Milton Friedman, need more be said?
David Harvey: Neoliberalism Is a Political Project
The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time was that universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.
The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did — for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and infiltrate the universities.
This process took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.
I’m not sure what Harvey meant by these reports being “extremely good and thorough” when he’d be the first to tell you that neoclassical/neoliberal economics are nonsense.
