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Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

This is looking 2001-dot-com-crash bad, but much, much faster.

It's worth remembering there are plenty of companies not laying people off, and "normal" will return eventually.

That said, I was watching The Big Short yesterday, and a line that I had noted before haunted me even more: "For every 1% unemployment goes up [in the USA], 40,000 people die".

Stay safe, stay positive.

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> Assessing the short term health impact of the Great Recession in the European Union: a cross-country panel analysis

> Results

> Overall, during the recent recession, an increase of one percentage point in the standardised unemployment rate has been associated with a statistically significant decrease in the following mortality rates: all-cause-mortality (3.4%), cardiovascular diseases (3.7%), cirrhosis- and chronic liver disease-related mortality (9.2%), motor vehicle accident-related mortality (11.5%), parasitic infection-related mortality (4.1%), but an increase in the suicide rate (34.1%). In general, the effects were more marked in countries with lower levels of social protection, compared to those with higher levels. Conclusions

> An increase in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession has had a beneficial health effect on average across EU countries, except for suicide mortality. Social protection expenditures appear to help countries “smooth” the health response to a recession, limiting health damage but also forgoing potential health gains that could otherwise result.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009174351...

> An increase in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession has had a beneficial health effect on average across EU countries.

Many animals live longer in captivity than in the wild.

Restricting your caloric intake as much as possible will prolong your lifespan.

There's more to health than just how long you live.

That seems pretty disingenuous given that the Great Depression was the lynchpin for World War 2 which directly resulted in the deaths of 75 million people.

That's a cherry picking fallacy and unrelated to the effects of the Great Recession.

We do not live in a 1930s world of belligerent alliances itching for a chance to bloody someone up.

Wars between the big powers are now economic and political. Nobody wants nuclear annihilation.

Things might be different now in ways that now have a different impact, but if you want to feel better, there's evidence that the Great Depression did not cause an increase in people dying[1].

> Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites.

(Although, significantly, it does note that suicides increased, and another study found no increase in life expectancy, but no real change outside of suicides and car accidents.[2])

1: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290 2: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110324202055.h...

and the thing about suicides is, that the rates are really low compared to everything else... (even the flu... - at least in non-gun countries).

I think this is mainly fearmongering by the upper 0.1% seeing that now they might have to bear the "risk" they are always claiming to shoulder when taking in enormous returns on their capital... (e.g. in Germany currently most car-companies (BMW and VW are both largely family-owned) still pay their dividends, while their employees are getting unemployment benefits from the state...).

In the end history tells us, that people generally seem to prefer to stay alive however low the odds are. If this has significantly changed in the last 50 years, maybe we should think about what has changed that – I seriously doubt that a "let's go back to business" is the right approach in that case.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28772108

> Did the Great Recession affect mortality rates in the metropolitan United States? Effects on mortality by age, gender and cause of death.

> Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies.

And yes some specific mortality like cancer did increase because of the broken -- profit based -- health care system. But otherwise, no.

Of course ironically prosperity can be more dangerous dirtectly as risky "vices" like extreme sports and fast cars are expensive. The Kennedies tend to die doing activities restricted to or done far more often by the privledged.

Extreme sports may technically have a long term boost on life expextancy (from fitness) but short term would make a spike in accident deaths. I guess money is sort of the same way - better outcomes from affording healthcare but the temptation to take risks results in more immediate deaths.

> "For every 1% unemployment goes up [in the USA], 40,000 people die".

I have seen that line too, but I wonder how substantiated this is? Is there any data to support it?

There is the coping hypothesis, that coping with unemployment causes unhealthy behavior and death [1] and the latent sickness hypothesis [2], that unhealthy behavior is a cause of both unemployment and death. Anecdotally it makes sense - if you are an alcoholic or drug addict you are likely to lose your job as well as die as a result of your behavior - but the actual number of people who die is ostensibly hard to measure.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/#R41

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/#R65

I'm guessing there'll be a lesser need to cope this time around since a lot of people will know a lot of other people who are unemployed. All of a sudden being unemployed might be the new normal and we'll all help each other cope

I don't think this is dot-com-crash bad yet, if you mean that tech workers specifically are in dire straits. The major Bay Area employers like Google, FB, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc haven't had layoffs; it's mostly small startups. Some of the large companies are even outperforming currently (Amazon and Netflix are at all-time highs).

But if you mean dot-com-crash bad in terms of the economy in general crashing, oh man are you right. This is an economic free-fall for most of America.

Given that peopled art forced to stay at home with families, I am a little worried that other negative statistics are going to rise. I expect we will see an increase in divorces and abuses of various types. A lot of people need, but are not getting personal space.

Mortality declined not just during the Great Recession, but also during the Great Depression.

https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290

Meanwhile the Nasdaq is roaring back from a bottom...Someone is making a lot of money on the crash and the government printing press. It ain't me.

It's pretty common, i heard realvision say traders make most of their money when crashes happen.

You may be interested in the short-squeeze hypothesis, which suggests the current rally was triggered by technical factors and will soon peak and evaporate.

Although I enjoyed the film I found this article more interesting as a story, and more useful as a soource of information too:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-...

> This is looking 2001-dot-com-crash bad, but much, much faster.

Also probably much more transient, no?

Is there a reason to think this trend would continue beyond say... six months? (or whenever quarantine measures are mostly relaxed).

That depends how many companies survive the six months. The good thing is it should reset things to a boom time in 5 to 10 years.

Even if it's transient, I think you'll see a lot of companies use this situation as an excuse to clear the decks of what they perceive to be bad hires or underperforming employees that they'd otherwise let limp on in good times.

The Netherlands tested for antibodies in blood donor serum last week, preliminary result is that 3% of people have them. And not all of them show full immunity.

If we relax quarantine measures, the virus just comes back immediately. This is going to stay with us for years.

> And not all of them show full immunity.

Where did you get that number? This seems more like propaganda than scientific claim.

> This is looking 2001-dot-com-crash bad, but much, much faster.

"fail fast; fail often" seems ominously dark for the circumstance.

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