An Economic Trolly Problem

Originally published May 18, 2020

I was recently rewatching the movie “The Big Short” about the 2008 financial crisis. At one point, Brad Pitt’s character Ben Rickert says, “Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.” I did a bit of digging around to fact check that statement, and it turns out that it holds water. It’s based on a number of studies by Dr. Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University back in the mid-1970s.

This got me thinking about the state of our economy. In the past three months, our unemployment rate has gone from 3.5% in February…