How many people in the US starved to death during the Great Depression?
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According to my quick reading of the Life and death during the Great Depression by José A. Tapia Granadosa and Ana V. Diez Roux, the only noticeable increase of mortality was suicide, with a noticeable decline of mortality in every other category.
It's interesting that this paper was written in 2009, before the (shall we say) sensationalist Russian claim of 7 million deaths.
According also to Michael Mosley, life expectancy actually rose through the Great Depression. In his Horizon programme Eat, Fast and Live Longer he claims
From 1929 to 1933, in the darkest years of the great depression when people were eating far less, life expectancy increased by 6 years.
Upvote:0
I'm afraid you have to understand that at the time period we are talking about it was especially hard to get independent information and government- backed information is almost guaranteed to be doctored for political, social and other reasons. This would apply not only to the US, but to Germany and the Soviet Union as well. If you remember a phrase from 'Doctor Zhivago' movie: '...this is another disease we don't have in Moscow - starvation...'. It's natural for the governments to deny and hide any information about any adverse events. In addition, it may be easily claimed that no one died of starvation because unless somebody is locked up and deprived ANY food he can easily die of pneumonia, for example, which his body won't be able to handle because it's too weak because of poor nutrition and which otherwise it could handle. In that sense, unless the statistics were properly doctored, it could be very interesting to compare it with the statistics for the previous and later 5-10 years.
Upvote:27
Health researchers collected data on causes of death in 114 U.S. cities during the Great Depression. Their findings confirm the impressions of many observers in the 1930s, mortality did not increase during the Great Depression:
They include a table that shows trends in death rates per 100,000 population. Starvation does not appear on the list, nor does it rate a mention in the article. The researchers do acknowledge that malnutrition led to decreased health during the Depression, but not to increased mortality. Malnutrition was a widespread problem, starvation was not.
A few comments about the table. First, death due to disease generally did not increase during the period, so the researchers are not misclassifying "death due to malnutrition" to "death due to disease." Second, note that in the table they even break out diseases like Smallpox, responsible for death rates under 1 in 100,000. This generally implies that starvation would have been responsible for deaths at an equivalent or lower rate.
This study confirms other studies that find, for example, that the infant mortality rate consistently declined across the 1930s:
The caveat is that this study is based on urban populations, and certain rural populations may have experienced more severe poverty. But the overall message is that deaths due to starvation would have been rare throughout this period. My admittedly very ballpark extrapolation from these data is that we might find a rate in the thousands per year before the New Deal agencies got up and running:
Importantly, this study shows that economic crisis does not guarantee a mortality crisis, but instead reinforces the notion that what crucially matters is how governments respond and whether protective social and public health policies are in place both during and in advance of economic shocks
Sources: David Stuckler, Christopher Meissner, Price Fishback, Sanjay Basu, Martin McKee. 2011. "Banking crises and mortality during the Great Depression: evidence from US urban populations, 1929-1937." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. (link)
Price Fishback, Michael Haines, and Shawn Kantor. 2005. "Births, Deaths, and New Deal Relief During the Great Depression."
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