Surprising public health benefit of unemployment? | Hacker News Reader

Surprising public health benefit of unemployment?

timharford.com

73 pointsRickJWagner58 comments

Yes, the climate wins with high unemployment.

People lose their homes, become homeless, that saves a lot of energy. A home needs to be cooled, warmed, light, tv etc all that regular stuff. If society is lucky, the person will not be able to own a car either. Also doesn't waste energy on cooking, doest shower much.

When a person is homeless, he contributes vastly less pollution.

The homeless may be the people contributing the best effort to limit pollution.

We could probably hit our targets for climate change by increasing the homeless population by several magnitudes.

This is bad faith, by that token dead people also don’t produce any more CO2. This is not what the article says at all though.

By that token, we can’t possibly do anything about climate change because surely that would mean living in caves and never taking a shower again. Or becoming homeless as you put it.

And if people cease to procreate, it's even more advantageous!

You know this wasn't the conclusion the article drew, right?

> The trope is that industrialising cities in Asia are smog-ridden

I had to stop reading here. This isn't a trope. This is undeniable fact. I've seen it, lived it, breathed it, have pictures to show.

The trope is the "but that" portion - that is, Western Europe and the US didn't have such concerns.

That's because even LA has nothing on Chinese cities. It's way worse than you could imagine.

LA today, or LA in the 80's, before CARB and all that kicked in?

... Do you think maybe it's worth reading the whole article?

> The air becomes cleaner in areas where the economy slumps. The researchers estimate that this cleaner air accounts for more than one-third of the mortality reduction. This may come as a surprise, because we are not accustomed to regarding air pollution as a problem for rich countries — the trope is that industrialising cities in Asia are smog-ridden, but that for America and Europe the only pollutant that need worry us is the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

There’s something oddly beautiful about someone saying they “had to stop reading” in the middle of the sentence that would have rendered their annoyance moot if they’d only had the patience to finish it.

Better to lead with good news because if you lead with bad there may not be a time for the good.

Depends where and when. China has largely fixed its air quality problems as of 2024.

I’m in China right now and I can unequivocally tell you that this is not true. I can hardly see the sun and it’s not due to overcast weather.

It depends where in China. Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Wuhan, Xi'an, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Dalian, are all doing well. There is more to the country than Beijing and Shanghai (even Shanghai is much improved).

They did so for the Olympics by stopping a lot of polluters from operating.

As soon as the games left town, the pollution came back.

beijing's air quality did not get worse after the olympics. (edited to clarify)

I decided just to google Beijing air quality and both results came back... Not so good.

"Dangerous Any exposure to the air, even for a few minutes, can lead to serious health effects on everybody. Avoid outdoor activities." https://www.accuweather.com/en/cn/beijing/101924/air-quality...

"Very Unhealthy Health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected." https://aqicn.org/city/beijing/

So not sure I fully believe that.

true, but it wasn't any better during the olympics and i think it was much worse before that. i only got there shortly before the olympics so all i can confirm is that it did not get any worse after.

according to this report air quality in beijing continuously improved for the last few decades:

https://www.unep.org/resources/report/review-20-years-air-po...

There is more to China than just Beijing.

yes, but the olympics were mainly in beijing, so when it comes to the question of what happened with the air quality after the olympics, beijing matters the most.

Source for this being categorically false [1].

[1] https://www.iqair.com/us/china/beijing

See the list of cities in China on the left for more...

It’s worth mentioning that each country develops its own AQI scale, so comparisons between countries are meaningless.

This link[1] takes you to the paper.

From "external influences": We explore three main potential sources of positive external health effects from recessions suggested by prior literature: reductions in the spread of infectious disease (Adda 2016), increases in the quality of healthcare (Stevens et al. 2015), and reductions in pollution (Chay and Greenstone 2003; Heutel and Ruhm 2016). We find little support for a role for the first two classes of external effects, but evidence consistent with a quantitatively important role for recession-induced reductions in air pollution in explaining about 40 percent of the recession-induced mortality declines.

They don't cover lower driving (fewer accidents), health care tied to employment (under reported health incidents), or work place accidents (deaths due to statistical risk in higher risk jobs like construction, mining, etc.)

So no, not a particularly insightful study in my opinion.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2024/program/paper/TEE9A8Q...

> By contrast, motor vehicle accidents and liver disease each account for less than 2 percent of 2006 mortality, and so their contributions to the total recession-induced mortality decline are only 6.9 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.

The paper did briefly cover accidents. Didn't check the rest.

I didn't read the entire paper, but I don't see lowered stress and lack of sleep mentioned anywhere. These would be the most obvious answers and should be addressed.

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Lives-vs...

How dare you ruin a good headline and "think piece" with critical thinking!

I think the positives of remote work vastly outweigh the negatives, particularly in orgs with established culture and a not-insane amount of turnover. This just adds another positive to the pile, though I think this particular benefit is unique to North America and its extremely car-centric transportation setup.

This has been known for some time now - the health benefits alone of decarbonization would pay for the cost: https://www.who.int/news/item/05-12-2018-health-benefits-far...

The public health benefits of clean air not well known. Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...

COVID killed approximately 6.5M+ over 3 years. Air pollution has more impact on public health.

EVs can help a lot with air pollution: https://electrek.co/2023/02/10/surprise-electric-cars-are-al...

Even ICE cars now days are so efficient that most of their pollution comes from the tires not the tail pipe. This is doubly true for EVs.

I fully support a transition to EVs, but if we really wish to cut down on air pollution why not strongly encourage remote work and cut out the commute entirely?

Or do what many urban areas do efficiently: make it easy to commute by train. Even a bus commute cuts down the tire pollution per commuter significantly. Building more housing near job centers can help both shorten commutes and make mass transit more desirable.

That’s what kills me about all the companies that trot out these green initiatives and turn around and mandate RTO or hybrid arrangements.

The commute forced upon the workers cancels out most if not all the good that the green initiatives do.

That's because it's mostly virtue signalling rather than actually wanting to help the environment

Just toss in “obesity”. Greatest health crisis in the last 50 years is undeniably rising obesity levels…

https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...

You know what a good way is to keep people honest without keeping them unemployed?

Remote work.

What do you mean by "keep people honest", and how does remote work achieve it?

Possibly they meant "healthy"? Ducking autocorrect.

Remote work requires a lot of trust. That's my read, but also independent of gp comment.

I'm not sure how to interpret "keep people honest", but you should know that most crime statistics show downturns during economic slowdowns, for similar reasons as the article. People stay home more. Most crime seems to be crimes of convenience, and if you don't see the thing to steal/murder, then you don't steal/murder. I strongly suspect this is partly why premeditated crime tends to be dealt with more harshly.

Source: good friends with a public defender.

In fact what first comes to mind: no work, no commute, less car accidents. Are those accounted for in the study?

Also, smokers who get unemployed, will smoke more, out of boredom.

Just to say, I find the result of the study quite hard to believe.

> Also, smokers who get unemployed, will smoke more, out of boredom.

Unemployed smokers will have less disposable income, and may not be able to afford to smoke more.

How likely is it that smokers will smoke so much more during a recession, vs during a non-recession, that the effect shows up in nationwide mortality rates?

You might want to tell The Big Short scriptwriters that.

If houses were made easy to move the back door could go straight to the place of work.

You don't want to live in a mobile home. Trust me.

"Easily moved" and "Not a death trap in a storm" are strongly negatively correlated.

I didn't want to be specific since many solutions could be worth exploring and I have no idea which standardized form factor would be best. Something like a drawer or set of drawers. Only the front and the floor would have to be strong. The rest is a concrete shell that stays behind. Not all rooms need to be personalized. The employer can provide some extras as a perk. The drawer doesn't need to be full length. If there is a room between home and work shouldn't bother anyone.

Marketing content to sell unscientific books.

Ehh... I suspect that the cleaner air is more a correlation than a causation. It seems like fewer accidents due to fewer drivers would be a more direct cause. The cleaner air is just a side effect. I didn't see any mention of accident rates in the article.

TLDR: The health benefits are caused by a lack of air pollution, likely by less car traffic. Study only examined the United States, and was from the 2008 recession so the WFH wave hasn't happened yet.

I'm sure the the 2020+ data is messy (people dying of coronavirus, people not getting treatment for chronic diseases because hospitals are scary, etc.), but I'd be curious to see this same hypothesis tested there.

tldr: "The air becomes cleaner in areas where the economy slumps. The researchers estimate that this cleaner air accounts for more than one-third of the mortality reduction."

From the paper: "Recession-induced mortality declines are driven primarily by external effects of reduced aggregate economic activity on mortality, and recession-induced reductions in air pollution appear to be a quantitatively important mechanism" [1]

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4717244

tl;dr - less work = less pollution = less likely old people dying

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