Austerity Kills

The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills and What We Can Do About It, written by David Stuckler, a political economist at the University of Oxford, and Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, examines how the daily lives of people affected by financial crises, including previous ones such as the Great Depression.

Stuckler and Basu conclude that the economic conditions alone are not a predictor of deteriorating health conditions. They target government austerity measures, which usually take the form of cutting support for vital health and social programs, as a contributing cause of a decline in the population’s overall state of well being.