As the economy sinks ever deeper into a rerun of the 1930s depression, it’s worth considering the effects of the crisis on our health. Are stockbrokers jumping out of windows on Wall Street? No - but they typically don’t, even in the worst of times. This enduring urban legend is apparently based on just two people who jumped to their deaths after the crash in 1929; there have been no confirmed cases since then.

Are suicides in general increasing as a result of unemployment? If past trends hold true, the answer is yes: people who are out of work are more likely to take their own lives.

Are any other causes of death likely to increase at the same time? Remarkably, the answer is no: suicides are the exception, not the rule. A substantial body of research in several countries, stretching back to the early twentieth century, finds that on the whole, unemployment is better for our health. With more people out of work, there is less work-related driving, and fewer traffic accidents. On average, unemployed people exercise more, drink less alcohol, take the time to prepare and eat healthier food, see their friends more, and enjoy lower levels of stress. Cardiovascular deaths reflect long-term risk factors, but have short-term triggers: among the working-age population, but not others, heart attacks are most frequent on Mondays. In Israel, heart attacks peak on Sunday, the first day of their work week. In the past, more people died of infectious diseases when they were at work and exposed to sick co-workers; now the death rate from such diseases is very low.

This is not just a happier way to reframe individual misfortune (”Aren’t you glad we finally escaped from that boring office-and-paycheck routine? I’ll see you on the bike path!”). It is also the refutation for one of the anti-environmental claims that became fashionable under the Bush administration. The free-market fundamentalists who came to power in 2001 argued at length that environmental regulations were disastrous for the economy. One of their most overwrought conclusions was that regulations were literally killing people: first they said that regulations were hurting the economy, leading to lower average incomes; then they observed that richer societies are healthier and have longer life expectancies. Put these two ideas together and voila - by making us poorer, environmental protection is a covert form of murder.

Both premises are dead wrong: there is no real evidence that environmental protection harms the economy; and if regulation somehow did slow down economic growth, throwing additional people out of work, it would lead to fewer, not more, deaths. (Maybe environmental protection is killing people by creating all those green jobs and increasing employment - but that’s too much to handle in this week’s comments.) For more on these topics, see my recent book, Poisoned for Pennies - especially Chapter 3, “The Unbearable Lightness of Regulatory Costs,” which includes references to the research on death rates and unemployment, and much more.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Frank Ackerman is an economist who has written extensively about the economics of climate change and other environmental problems. His new book is Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution.

It’s no surprise that financial disaster has pushed environmental problems out of the news of late. But it’s too bad that they can’t get together somehow; the two areas of crisis, and the needed solutions, have a lot in common. The common thread is that both involve risks of rare, catastrophic events. In both cases, the prudent response is to focus on insurance against worst-case risks, rather than cost-benefit analysis of the most likely outcomes.

The stock market and other financial markets are in the throes of the worst crisis since the 1930s. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently said, “We are going through a financial crisis more severe and unpredictable than any in our lifetimes… There is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced.” In fact, there used to be a playbook - a system of banking regulations, enacted in the wake of the Depression of the 1930s, which restricted the types and amounts of investments that banks could make. Deregulation of banking, a process that has been accelerating since the 1980s, allows banks to make riskier investments, which boost their profits as long as the good times keep rolling. Every once in a while, the good times stop, as they did this year - and the meaning of “risky” investments suddenly becomes all too clear.

Something similar applies to environmental crisis. It’s not that the worst possible outcomes of climate change are sure to happen any time soon; it’s just that this could happen. Like a financial meltdown, a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet is unlikely but possible (and it becomes more likely as the world warms). The IPCC projects that sea levels are likely to rise by about one meter by the end of this century; the loss of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels by seven meters (23 feet). Should we spend just enough to protect coastal communities from one meter of sea level rise? Or should we act as swiftly as possible to limit global warming and reduce the risk of a catastrophic seven meters of sea level rise?

Preparation for the worst case is why people buy insurance; your house is extremely unlikely to burn down next year. If you cancel your insurance and spend the premium on something more enjoyable, there’s a very good chance you’ll get away with it. But no one does. This insurance approach, sometimes called the precautionary principle, responds to the dangers that are most important. It’s why we should ignore cost-benefit analysis based on the most likely outcomes, and instead adopt environmental policies based on protection against worst cases. And it’s why it was such a bad idea to spend the last 30 years deregulating the banking system in order to boost short-run profits.

In my recent book, Poisoned for Pennies, I discuss the economic theory behind the precautionary principle, as well as its application to many specific issues involving toxic chemicals. With uncertain but ominous risks to our health at stake, why should we accept potentially dangerous chemicals in order to win small economic gains? That’s as dumb an idea as deregulating the banks.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Frank Ackerman is an economist who has written extensively about the economics of climate change and other environmental problems. His new book is Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution.

My favorite quote from the recent campaign was the statement in Obama’s acceptance speech at the convention in Denver. Speaking about the United States, he said, “We are better than these last eight years.”

Nowhere is this more accurate than in our anti-environmental policies of recent years. (Well, okay, it’s actually a tie between numerous strong contenders, including the shredding of civil liberties, destruction of countries that never harmed us, and too many others to name.) No one, of course, came out and said that they didn’t much care for public health and the natural environment, so they were going to roll back useful protective regulations. But in the guise of supposedly sound economic analysis, the Bush-Cheney administration achieved the same thing: again and again, cost-benefit analysis was used to bolster the claim that we couldn’t afford to, or shouldn’t, maintain sensible, effective regulations.

The results of such bogus economic calculations inspired the title of my recent Island Press book, Poisoned for Pennies. The amounts of money actually at stake in protecting ourselves, our children, and our surroundings are often trivial. Matching the Japanese testing requirements for mad cow disease, the international gold standard in that field, would add six or seven cents per pound to the price of beef. Atrazine, a potent herbicide used on most of the U.S. corn crop, is a known carcinogen and a suspected endocrine disrupter, turning frogs into hermaphrodites at incredibly low concentrations. One of the best substitutes, an apparently much safer and equally effective herbicide sold by the same company that makes atrazine, would add perhaps three cents per bushel to the price of corn - which has recently been around $6.00.

Again and again, objective calculations demonstrate why one of the chapters of the book is called “the unbearable lightness of regulatory costs.”  REACH, the new chemicals policy adopted by the European Union last year, is far more ambitious than anything under serious consideration in the U.S. It requires all manufacturers and importers of chemicals to carry out a range of toxicity tests in order to continue to sell their products in Europe. In a study for the Swedish government (included in Poisoned for Pennies), I demonstrated that REACH will raise the average cost of chemicals sold in Europe by one-sixteenth of one percent. Numerous estimates of the potential benefits of REACH are much, much larger than that. Why, exactly, isn’t the U.S. considering adopting such a cost-effective, inexpensive measure?

We are better than the last eight years, in environmental policy and in so much else. I look forward to an administration that may at last realize that it’s time to stop poisoning ourselves for pennies, to take a fresh look at the low cost of doing the right thing for health and the environment.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Frank Ackerman is an economist who has written extensively about the economics of climate change and other environmental problems. His new book is Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution.