<\/p>\n
\nIf suicides were an unavoidable consequence of economic downturns, this would just be another story about the human toll of the Great Recession. But it isn\u2019t so. Countries that slashed health and social protection budgets, like Greece<\/a>, Italy and Spain, have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations like Germany, Iceland<\/a> and Sweden, which maintained their social safety nets and opted for stimulus over austerity. (Germany preaches the virtues of austerity \u2014 for others.) <\/p>\n
As scholars of public health and political economy, we have watched aghast as politicians endlessly debate debts and deficits with little regard for the human costs of their decisions. Over the past decade, we mined huge data sets from across the globe to understand how economic shocks \u2014 from the Great Depression<\/a> to the end of the Soviet Union to the Asian financial crisis to the Great Recession \u2014 affect our health. What we\u2019ve found is that people do not inevitably get sick or die because the economy has faltered. Fiscal policy, it turns out, can be a matter of life or death.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
How Austerity Kills – NYTimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"