11 April 2012updated 26 Sep 2015 7:46pm

Every silver lining has a cloud

In economics, there's nothing fully good.

From the department of counterintuitive findings come two findings showing the downsides of good news.

First up, the Washington Post reports on a new explanation for why it is that people start to die when the economy gets better. For every percentage point decrease in the unemployment rate, there is a 0.004 per cent increase in the number of deaths (a low, but statistically significant amount), which corresponds to about 6,700 dead people.

Suzy Khimm writes:

In a new paper, researchers argue that economic boom times create a scarcity of caregivers in nursing homes, raising the mortality rate through a disproportionately high numbers of deaths among the elderly.

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The Center for Retirement Research explains that a strong job market creates “greater scarcity in front-line caregivers in nursing homes, which may cause more deaths among the elderly.” When the overall unemployment rate goes down, for instance, employment declines are particularly noticeable among certified aides and nurses in these facilities.

Meanwhile, in Investors Chronicle, Chris Dillow addresses the upside of a downside (so to speak).

Since 2007, labour productivity has fallen in the UK, meaning that the one hour of work now produces less output than it did five years ago – 3.4 per cent less, to be specific. This is pretty bad news. Historically, a lot of growth has come from population growth. A more populous country can make more stuff than a smaller one, after all. But now that much of the west appears to have a stable population, we need productivity to grow if we are to have any growth at all. If we can’t have more people making stuff, we need to have each person making more stuff.

But this prductivity slump isn’t entirely bad news:

If the relationship between GDP and employment in the last four years had been the same as it was in the previous 20, there would now (mathematically speaking) be 3.1 million fewer people in work. If all these had registered as unemployed, there’d be 5.8 million out of work – an unemployment rate of 18.2 per cent. Imagine the political effects of that.

On his personal blog, Dillow elaborates:

You might think that the very fact that workers are more productive in this alternative universe would cause firms to hire more of them. But things aren’t so simple. Firms only hire if they anticipate sufficient demand for the additional output. And where would this demand come from? The tendency for higher unemploymentwould depress consumer spending. On the other hand, it’s likely that business investment would be higher – not least because a world of growing productivity is a world in which there are more investment opportunities and easier access to finance. But as business investment is only 8.3% of GDP, it’s unlikely that it would be so much higher as to create three million jobs.

Sometimes, good news can be bad news, and bad news can be good.