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  • NEWS FEATURE

How the next recession could save lives

Death rates have dropped during past economic downturns, even as many health trends have worsened. Researchers are scrambling to decipher lessons before the next big recession.
  1. Lynne Peeples

    1. Lynne Peeples is a science journalist in Seattle, Washington.

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Notorious gangster Al Capone attempts to help unemployed men with his soup kitchen in 1930.

Soup kitchens sprang up around the United States at the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, including this one in Chicago, Illinois, run by notorious gangster Al Capone. Credit: Bettmann/Getty

In 1922, a pair of sociologists at New York’s Columbia University were poring over 50 years of US economic and mortality data, when they noticed a surprising result. Lean times in the country’s history didn’t correspond with more deaths, as they expected. In fact, the opposite was true. More people — babies included — died when the economy prospered1.

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Nature 565, 412-415 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00210-0

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