New Book Demonstrates “Why Austerity Kills”, and Needlessly So

Deadly cuts have been imposed in social spending over the past years both in the European Union and the United States, in a futile effort to bail out the bankrupt trans-Atlantic banking system. Despite all the cuts, a newer, even worse blowout is expected very soon.

Contributed To HellasFrappe By
E.I.R. STRATEGIC ALERT
www.eir.de

Meanwhile, the people have already paid a terrible price for it, as documented in a new book by Oxford University sociology lecturer David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, to be released early May.

The authors report in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills that, in the aftermath of the 2007-08 crash, 10,000 additional suicides and a million additional cases of clinical depression occurred in North America and Europe.

For Greece, as reported by Reuters, they found that cuts in the HIV prevention budgets and in anti-drug abuse programs, etc., have led to a 200% increase in AIDS cases since 2011, which they attribute in part to an increase in drug abuse in the context of a youth unemployment rate of over 50%. In addition, budget cuts to mosquito-spraying programs have led to the first outbreak of malaria in decades.

Why Austerity Kills notes that more than 5 million Americans have lost access to healthcare in the last period -- 3 million of working age, and 2 million others -- and that in Great Britain, more than 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the government’s austerity budget.

     “Our politicians need to take into account the serious -- and in some cases profound -- health consequences of economic choices,” David Stuckler said, “Austerity is having a devastating effect.”

Interestingly, the authors show that in times of financial crisis, public health need not be sacrificed. Taking up an example our website has often used, they hark back to the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s Depression. At that time, they note, measures of public health actually improved despite the financial crash and economic prostration which followed.

They find that every $100 of New Deal spending for relief led to some 20 fewer deaths per 1,000 births, four fewer suicides per 100,000 people, and 18 fewer pneumonia deaths per 100,000 people.

“Ultimately what we show is that worsening health is not an inevitable consequence of economic recessions. It’s a political choice,” Basu said in the statement. Clearly, the EU political leaders have made the wrong choice, but are unlikely to change course unless the population forces them to.